Homily for 5th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
5th Sunday of Ordinary Time           

Feb. 9, 1986

Isaiah 6: 1-8
Luke 5: 1-11
Assumption, San Leandro, Calif.

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!” (Is 6: 1-8).

Today’s Scriptures could lead us to reflect upon a number of topics: holiness, sin, redemption, the resurrection, faith, vocation.  Since we don’t want to be here for 3 hours, let’s consider just holiness and sin.

Isaiah sees in the temple a vision of YWHW enthroned, surrounded by seraphim who worship and proclaim, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!  All the earth is filled with his glory!”  Simon Peter experiences God’s presence in a different way, in a miraculous haul of fish that totally amazes the professional fishermen.

Holiness is a characteristic of God, of his not being like us.  He’s beyond us in his power, his goodness, his mercy, his purity. All that we are not, he is.  He’s completely apart from and above us.  He’s the absolutely incorruptible judge who sees not only what we do but why.  He directs history while we can only respond to it.   

If we think for an instant of how we might feel in the presence of nature’s awesome power, as in a volcanic eruption or a hurricane; or how we might feel if the President suddenly walked into our living room—then we just begin to grasp the idea of otherness, of transcendence, of overwhelming majesty that belongs to God.

When we read the Bible, we see that people usually come into God’s presence with feelings of awe and fear, those feelings that Isaiah and Peter have today.  The revelation of divinity leaves the apostles frightened and speechless on that occasion when Jesus is transfigured and they get a glimpse of his divine nature; it strikes Saul to the ground on the road to Damascus and forces him to reassess his life.

Nevertheless, in God’s presence we do need a sense of reverence.  God’s holiness, and these persons, places, and things associated with him, don’t allow is to react in our ordinary everyday manner.

Take people’s behavior in church as an obvious example.  Churches are holy places because they belong to God in a special way that stores, theaters, and even our homes don’t—above all when the Most Blessed Sacrament is reserved in the tabernacle.  God is specially present here.

Therefore a church is a place of reverence.  We come here to enter into communion with God, not to continue our profane everyday manners and conversion.  We behave in certain ritual ways that bespeak reverence:  by blessing ourselves with holy water, by walking more slowly, by genuflections, by fasting before communion, by silence sometimes, and by common liturgical acclamations and songs at other times, including Isaiah’s “holy, holy, holy.”

When people violate this atmosphere of reverence, e.g., by talking, chewing gum, or coming to Communion with their hands in their pockets, we’re offended; our sense of the holy, our sense of God’s presence and his majesty, has been attacked.  Our privileged communion with him in our public or private prayer is assaulted.

When we sense God’s power, majesty, immeasurable goodness, we do so largely by comparison with ourselves.  God is holy; we are not.

This is certainly the immediate reaction of Isaiah and Peter.  They protest that they’re sinners, unworthy to stand in God’s presence, doomed if God really looks on them.

Unfortunately, we moderns have largely lost our sense of sin.  Perhaps some of you remember Dr. Karl Menninger’s best selling book of 15 years ago, Whatever Became of Sin?, and he’s a psychiatrist, not a theologian.  Well, if we protest something like racism or a rigged election as a violation of human rights, we usually make no connection between those human rights and mankind’s dignity as the centerpiece of God’s creation.  But failure to make that connection is not only theological and logical nonsense; it also pulls the political and philosophical rug out from under the United States of America.  For our Revolution was founded on the premise that our rights and liberties are the inalienable endowments of our Creator.

We must realize that our offenses against one another aren’t indifferent matters.  If you come from the hand of God, you have a holy dignity that arises from that divine connection—independent of any constitution, law, court, or custom—and anything I might do that violates your human dignity or your standing as a child of God also violates God’s holiness.  This is rebellion against the Creator.  This is sin.

And it goes without saying that we can and do sometimes violate God’s holiness directly, e.g., by using his name in vain or by failing to honor him.  And we can and do sometimes violate God’s holiness by offending against our own human dignity, e.g., by failing to protect our health or by abusing alcohol or other drugs.  You may have seen two 60 Minutes segments last month on active euthanasia—suicide by the elderly or terminally ill, in other words.  What’s wrong with that?  It tells God to shove off:  our dignity’s in our own hands and not his; the life he has bestowed upon us has no meaning except in pleasure or usefulness; his own Son’s passion and death were wasted!  (Please note that I said “active” euthanasia, i.e., deliberately causing death, which is distinct from passively allowing death to come, e.g., by not using extraordinary means such as expensive or high-risk surgery or mechanical life-support systems.)

If we’ve lost our sense of sin, if we casually float thru life without thinking about God’s holiness and our own relationship to him—then we’re in sorry shape.  Until we can look at ourselves and admit sinfulness, like Isaiah, Peter, and so many other people in the Bible; until we can confess our real and specific failings, like King David and St. Paul, we can’t share in Christ’s redemption.  Paul wrote to the Corinthians “that Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor 15:3).  If we don’t admit our sin, then we can’t claim Christ.  We can’t be forgiven if we refuse his forgiveness.

But when we do come to Christ to say, I’m a sinful man (Luke 5:8) or woman, then he gladly says to us, as he did the woman caught in adultery, to sin no more (John 8:11) and gives us his holy grace to help us in that direction.  He proclaims to us, “Your faith has saved you!” (Luke 7:50).

One of the beauties of the sacrament of Penance is that it allows us to confess our sinfulness to Christ out loud, to hear ourselves say it, to get our sins into the open, so to say, by speaking them.  Penance allows us to hear Christ purge our sins away as his minister proclaims, “I absolve you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  Psychologically and sacramentally, it’s important for us to hear that.

Confession also offers us a chance for some all-too-rare advice, consolation, and encouragement for our Christian lives.  And, we have to admit, confession is an act of trust in God’s holiness, a holiness so great that it can annihilate our own sinfulness and make us whole again, just as we came from his heart on the day we were baptized.

May we reverence God and know the power of his mercy!