Homily for 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for
the 28th Sunday of Ordinary TimeOct. 10, 2010
2 Tim 2: 8-13
BSA Adult Leaders
Camp Alpine, N.J.

“Beloved: Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David: such is my gospel, for which I am suffering, even to the point of chains, like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained” (2 Tim 2: 8).

The 1st and 3d readings speak to us of God’s salvation being offered to everyone, regardless of nation or condition. They speak of our gratitude for what God does for us in his goodness. The 1st reading also suggests the cleansing power of Baptism.

All 3 readings this evening allude to faith. The leper Naaman from Syria is healed when he accepts the word of the prophet Elisha and does as he was instructed. The 10 lepers are healed when they come to Jesus begging his help, and do as he instructs them. Paul is chained in prison on account of his preaching the word of God, his being faithful to Christ Jesus, who will keep faith with us and bring us to life.

You may be aware that last Sunday was Respect Life Sunday, and this whole month of October is Respect Life Month. The Gospel is a message of life: “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead. If we have died with him, we shall also live with him” (2:8,11).

The Gospel message is countercultural—not only in America or Western Europe but, in different fashions, pretty much everywhere, almost as much in our time as it was in the 1st century, when Christians were officially regarded as criminals and subject to arrest, confiscation of their property, imprisonment, exile, sentencing to labor camps, or execution by torture, wild beasts, fire, beheading. “If we persevere with him, we shall also reign with him. But if we deny him, he will deny us” (2:12) meant something for Paul and the 1st Christians.

When Pope Benedict was in Great Britain last month, he gave a major address to the political and cultural leaders of the U.K. in Westminster Hall. That magnificent old site was a significant choice for an address on the role of religion in public life, delivered to such an audience. It was there that Bp. John Fisher and Sir Thomas More were tried, convicted, and condemned as traitors in 1535 for refusing to yield their religious convictions to the will of the King. Later the Pope visited Tyburn, where hundreds of Catholics were hanged, drawn, and quartered under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I for the same reason.

While Christians are no longer arrested and convicted as traitors in Western society, they are openly persecuted in Muslim and Hindu countries—anti-Christian riots in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, for example, and laws against any form of public non-Muslim worship in most Arab countries. About a week ago, 12 Filipinos and a Catholic priest “were arrested and charged with ‘proselytizing’ after attending a Catholic Mass at a hotel in Saudi Arabia. They were among 150 expatriate Filipinos reported to have attended a Mass raided by members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Arab News says. The 13 were arrested for allegedly organizing and leading the group. The others were released because they could not all be accommodated at the police station.”[1] In China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba believers are subject to harassment, arrest, torture, and long prison sentences.

In the West, instead, Christians face what Pope Benedict calls “the increasing marginal-ization of religion.” Some academic, cultural, and political powers, the Pope says, openly advocate that “the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere.” In some countries in Europe and in Canada, a priest or minister, or a religious newspaper, can be prosecuted or sued for preaching or writing that homosexual behavior is immoral.

Abp. Dolan and Abp. Charles Chaput of Denver have spoken out against a powerful bias in the mass media against traditional Christian beliefs. Abp. Chaput said last month: The “new American orthodoxy” favored by prominent and powerful academic, cultural, and political elites

seems to frame which opinions are appropriate [the ones we call "politically correct"] and which ones won’t be heard. And it seems to guide the historical narrative that media present to their audiences. This new thinking seems to presume a society much more secular and much less religious than anything in America’s past or [anything] warranted by present facts, a society where people are free to worship and believe whatever they want, so long as they don’t intrude their religious idiosyncrasies on government, the economy, or culture.”[2]

When the Nobel Prize for Medicine was announced the other morning, someone being interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition made the point—if I heard correctly at that early hour—that in vitro fertilization’s opponents, chiefly the Catholic Church, had already lost that battle and would just as surely lose their battles against other scientific “advances” like embryonic stem cell research.

Which brings us back to the central Gospel message of life. You may remember that a few years ago John Paul II drew a figurative line in the sand between the culture of life and the culture of death, and said that was the main moral issue of our time. Both he and B16 have been following Paul’s advice to Timothy, to “proclaim the word…whether it is in season or out of season” (2 Tim 4:2), in favor or out of favor, convenient or inconvenient, popular or unpopular. (That’s in next Sunday’s 2d reading.) People may not like the message, or they may not like us for preaching it, but “the word of God is not chained,” and in fact the word of God is the word of life, the word that saves us—and not only in terms of eternal salvation, but in terms of building a better society, a society where people are treated decently, with respect.

The culture of life is about more than abortion. The culture of death is making a strong run at society’s general acceptance of euthanasia, which is already legal and practiced in a few countries in Western Europe and in Oregon and Washington State. While one can argue that capital punishment is appropriate in a limited number of cases—even that argument runs against the grain of the Church’s teaching since JPII—the huge number of death sentences imposed in our country should make us ask whether vengeance is more at work than public safety. (This is not even to mention how the death penalty is used in the few other countries that still have it, like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.)

Both JPII and B16 have linked environmentalism, globalization, and the world economy to the culture of life. Seeing that the world’s poor have food, shelter, and education is part of our care for life. Seeing that the earth’s air, water, and other resources can sustain everyone, including future generations, is part of our care for life. Racism, sexism, and ageism are sins against human dignity, ultimately against human life.

Moral issues like in vitro fertilization (IVF), stem cell research, and gay marriage are part of the culture of life vs. the culture of death debate. Since Abp. Dolan has called for a new Catholic apologetics—which doesn’t mean saying “we’re sorry” for what we believe but explaining just what it is that we believe, and why. That’s what St. Justin the Martyr did in mid-2d century for the educated elite of Rome his 1st and 2d Apologies (a wonderful source for us about Christian belief and practice in that period). That’s what Blessed John Henry Newman did in his Apologia pro Vita Sua in mid-19th century, explaining his conversion from the Anglican Church. That’s what that excellent teacher B16 continually advocates when he calls for the use of reason as part of our discussions of faith and life.

So what’s the Church teaching about stem cell research? 1st, there’s no problem at all with using stem cells derived from adult cells: from bone marrow, from placentas, from all sorts of sources. Some terrific research is taking place in these fields, and some of them have been in use with varying degrees of success for a long time, e.g. bone marrow transplants. 2d, research that destroys human life is immoral. That’s the problem with embryonic stem cell research: it destroys human embryos, human beings. They may be the tiniest imaginable human beings, but they’re human.

One of the propaganda tricks of the Nazis was to define the Jews, Gypsies, the mentally retarded, and even the Slavic nations generally, as “subhuman” and therefore of no moral concern. For that matter, many of the defenders of slavery in our own country used the argument that Negroes were not fully human. In the 19th century, nativists held that the Irish immigrants were subhuman and discriminated against them. Just look at Thomas Nast’s political cartoons from the latter part of the century. Once you start to depersonalize people, there are no limits to what you can do to them, and in terms of logic, there’s no limit to whom you can depersonalize.

There’s a powerful editorial in this week’s Catholic New York,[3] following on the aforementioned Nobel Prize in medicine. The editorial’s title is “A Pandora’s Box,” and it says that IVF, the creation of “test-tube babies,” is a “Pandora’s box of ethical and moral issues.”

Thanks to IVF, the market for human eggs is robust, with buyers and sellers making deals for human beings. There are freezers full of embryos that will likely end up used in research as experimental animals destined for destruction, or abandoned and left to die. The prospect of couples ordering up “designer babies” has been introduced…. And the high incidence of multiple pregnancies—triplets, quadruplets and more—from the implantation of multiple embryos in the hope that one will “take” has led to abortions, as mothers seek to reduce the number of babies they’re carrying.
The entire field of embryonic stem-cell research has sprung up as a result of IVF technology, and with it the frightening discipline of human cloning.
Embryos, in other words, have become commodities rather than the sacred human beings that they are.
That’s just the first 3d of the editorial. It also mentions church documents on bioethics that defend the right of every human being to be conceived thru a human act of love and not by an impersonal laboratory procedure. Conception is an aspect of respect for human dignity. It may be counter-intuitive that IVF, which creates human beings, is fundamentally an anti-life procedure: but at root it’s a commodification of human beings. It turns people into market goods, just as slavery did centuries ago. The Catholic Church may be the last hold-out against IVF’s public acceptability, may have “lost” the PR campaign (who reads church documents?), but it will continue to proclaim the dignity of every human being “whether convenient or inconvenient,” as it seeks to be faithful to “Jesus Christ raised from the dead.”

And gay marriage? How’s that a life issue? By nature’s design, homosexual relations are sterile. They ignore one of the 2 vital, necessary, essential characteristics of marriage. Marriage is an exclusive relationship of mutual love, commitment, fidelity, and support. But it is also a relationship ordered toward fertility, toward new life. To exclude deliberately either of these essentials—the mutual love, etc., or openness to new life—is to speak of something other than marriage.

You can have mutual love, commitment, fidelity, and support in many kinds of relationships: parent-child, brother-sister, threesomes (and more), you and your dog. If openness to new life, if sexual complementarity, aren’t considered, why not allow that any sexual relationship—polygamy, polyandry, incest, bestiality—be sanctioned as a loving and committed relationship, and called “marriage”? There’s no logical reason to say no.

Someone will always say, “But what about elderly couples who marry, or a man or woman who is naturally sterile?” There’s no deliberate exclusion of fertility there. Their male-female sexual relationship is open to life, even if, practically speaking, a new life’s unlikely or “impossible.” The relationship itself is life-affirming and not intentionally life-denying.

Gay relationships—and relationships that deliberately exclude the possibility of children, either permanently (marriages that are childless by choice) or temporarily—are inherently life-denying. In other words, relationships involving contraception are life-denying. We can also see now, with hindsight, that the acceptance of contraception in marriage has been the camel’s nose inside the tent, changing our understanding of marriage from one that was always open to the possibility of new life to one in which the couple became the focus of the relationship. If they’re what the relationship is all about—their love, their feelings, their mutual support—then of course any relationship, regardless of gender, can be called “marriage,” and as noted already, you can’t logically confine it to a relationship of 2 only, or of 2 unrelated people.

We can call all of this Church teaching “the Gospel of life,” which is in fact what JPII titled one of his major encyclicals. But if you look at the issues and the reasoning closely, you’ll see that the Church’s teaching doesn’t depend only upon a reading of the Bible or upon a papal encyclical. It depends on science, on reason, on the laws of human nature—what philosophers have for ages called natural law. But we associate it with the teaching of Christ because it’s centered on human beings, people created, we believe, in the image of God and redeemed by Jesus Christ, raised from the dead; people destined for “salvation in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.” If we hope to attain that eternal glory in Christ Jesus, then we must hold fast to him and to his teaching, even at the risk of being countercultural, of being stigmatized if not criminalized. Better yet, we have to unchain the word of God, to try to change the culture, to Christianize it by making it more life-affirming.
[1] EWTN News, Oct. 8, 2010: http://ewtnnews.com/new.php?id=1873
[2] CNS news brief, Sept. 28, 2010.
[3] Oct. 7, 2010, p. 9.