Homily
for November 19, 2006
Liturgical Year B - Cycle II
33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Fr. John Carney Topic:
Having One Year to Live
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Reading
1 Dn
12:1-3
In those days, I Daniel, heard this word of the Lord:"At that time there shall arise Michael,
the great prince, guardian of your people; it shall be a time
unsurpassed in
distress since nations began until that time.At that time your people shall escape, everyone who is found
written in
the book.
“Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake; some
shall live
forever, others shall be an everlasting horror and disgrace.
“But the wise shall shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament,
and
those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever." Gospel Mk 13:24-32
Jesus said to his disciples: "In those days after that tribulation the
sun
will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars
will be
falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
"And then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in the clouds' with
great
power and glory, and then he will send out the angels and gather his
elect from
the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.
"Learn a lesson from the fig tree. When its branch becomes tender and
sprouts leaves, you know that summer is near. In
the same way, when you see these things
happening, know that he is near, at the gates.Amen, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all
these
things have taken place.Heaven and
earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away."But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither
the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The altar servers and I were talking before mass and they always
ask, “What color?” For the last Sunday of the liturgical year, we wear
green. Next week is Christ the King and we wear white, then we begin
the new church year, the first Sunday of Advent on the 3rd of December.
This year is ending and you can hear that in the readings, the end is
coming. During the week that is especially true but today, these
readings reflect that as well from Daniel and from Mark.
Daniel is a type of literature that is like Revelations in
that it is apocalyptic. As you read the book of Daniel, it sounds like
the writer is prophesying something that is going to happen, but really
what this type of literature does is it explains what is happening now.
Daniel was written in about the year 167 before Christ. This was the
time the Greeks had conquered the Jews and were forcing the Jews to
Hellenize. They were forbidding circumcision; they were forbidding
worship; they were introducing foods that the Jews could not eat. They
were even worshiping their gods in the Temple. Talk about desecration.
There was a revolution in progress in Israel and Daniel is really
describing what the people are enduring because they are in chaos, they
are in danger. “It shall be a time of unsurpassed distress. Many of
those whom sleep will arise and many of them will be sent to
everlasting horror and disgrace.” The prophet there is talking about
those who have apotheosized and gone over to Hellenist ways.
In the Gospel of Mark, which was written about 69 AD, some
35 after Christ ascended into heaven, we see Mark quoting Jesus as
explaining similar circumstances, days of great danger. At this time of
course, the Greeks had gone and the Romans had come. The Romans
occupied Israel. They were demanding that the Roman gods be worshiped
and that the Roman ways be kept, and that the Jews be good obedient
servants of the Roman Empire. If you know anything about Jewish
history, the Jews are never good obedient servants to anyone except
themselves. “Never again,” as they say, and God bless them. As a matter
of fact, just three years or so after Mark’s Gospel was written, give
or take a few years, the Temple was destroyed by the Romans and many
people were taken as slaves into Italy, or what is today Italy, and to
Rome. In fact, the Coliseum was built to some degree by slave labor,
the slaves coming from Jerusalem after their culture was destroyed in
Jerusalem.
The message of both Daniel and Jesus in Mark is the same, be
faithful. Stay faithful and it will be okay. Somehow, God will sort
this mess out and you will be close to God if you stay faithful to his
ways. The world may appear to be out of control, but God’s in charge
ultimately and if you are on His side, you are safe.
Daniel may not have been prophetic for the people of his
time, but he is for us. I was just thinking this morning, I didn’t
mention this last night. These are very dangerous times. If you do not
know that you are not reading anything. Seriously, these are very
dangerous times. I read an article in Newsweek, U.S. News and World
Report or Time about the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, whose
leader says, “I will destroy Israel.” That is his stated intention
unless they all leave, 5 ½ million Jews in Israel, as long as
they all leave and go back to Europe where they should be. I don’t
think that’s going to happen. These are dangerous times. You throw in
North Korea, you throw in the Middle East, you throw in Iraq and they
affect all of us and our civilization. The message for us today is
don’t worry about it. Do the best you can to bring about peace, but
stay with God. Be on his side, and it will work out okay for you, for
us.
This is the time of the year when the Church talks about
those last four things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Not to scare
us, but to alert us to their inevitability. Even if the world does not
end in some catastrophe in the next 10 or 20 years, eventually, each
person here is going to die and the world will end for him and for her.
I think the unpardonable sin is to ignore the reality of this.
Today, we reflect on that moment that we will die, that you
will die, and that I will die, to ask the question, “What do I need to
do to be ready.” We want to be ready for that. In her book, Death and
Dying, Kubla-Ross, who worked her life with the terminally ill, wrote,
“The dying saw in the final analysis that only two things matter, the
service you render others and love. All those things that you think are
important, fame, money, prestige and power, are insignificant.”
There was a book that was out several years ago, I think
around Christmas. Many of you know it, Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch
Albom. He wanted to write a book about people in his life who
influenced him, who were great people but not historical figures, but
great men and women. He thought of his old professor Morrie Schwartz. I
assume this is in New York with these guys. He calls Morrie and says,
“I’m writing a book. Can I meet with you and talk about your life?”
Morrie says, “You’d better hurry, I’m dying.” They set up this series
of meetings on Tuesdays, and they talked about a number of subjects. Of
course, the subject of death came around and Morrie had been dealing
with this, his imminent demise for several months. Morrie said this.
Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live. I am going
to say it again. Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.
Everyone knows they are going to die, but no one believes it. Most of
us walk around as if we are sleepwalking. We really don’t experience
the world fully, because we are half asleep. Doing things, we
automatically think we have to do. Facing death changes all of that.
You strip away all of that stuff and focus on the essentials. When you
realize you are going to die, you see everything differently.
Doesn’t that make sense? We walk around doing things that we
have to do not even thinking.
Here is what I propose today, that you and I imagine that
our lives will end one year from today, the 19th of November, 2007.
Even as I say that, I say how did we get to 2007? Didn’t we have that
Millennium thing about two years ago? Amazing. You are going to die 19
November 2007. That is the premise. The question is, what changes are
you going to make this coming year? What would you do more of? Less of?
How would you spend your time and your money? That last church
collection would be great, but there would be no one to count it.
That’s like a hole in one on Sunday when you’re a Priest, you can’t
even count it. I think the question is, "What is really important to
you and to your relationship with God."
I am not concerned with getting right with God. We’d all be
in a state of grace with God. I’d be the busiest guy in the world these
next 365 days. We’d have to dig up dead priests from Santa Fe National
Cemetery to get them to go back to work. The confession lines would be
very long!! We would all be there, wouldn’t we? The question is how
would we live? How would we treat each other? How would we spend our
time? What would be important to us? I think we know the answer. We
certainly would not be involved in any petty fights, would we? We
certainly would have hearts filled with forgiveness. We would not be
stuck on the trivialness that life gives us. My goodness, we would be
cut off in traffic and say, “God bless you. I love you, I really do.”
We would be different. I submit to you that this would be the best year
of our lives. It really would. You know we have it in our power to do
this. We can each do this. We need to take a lesson from Morrie. Morrie
only had a few months to live his lesson. We have the rest of our
lives, be that a day, or 50 or 80 years. I think if we really think
about this, we will not be afraid of death and therefore we will begin
to really live.
St. Francis, the Patron Saint of the Archdiocese, called
death his sister. He said,
“All praise
be yours my Lord, through sister death from whose embrace no mortal can
escape. Happy are those she finds doing your will. A second death can
do no harm to them.”
I’m going to leave with a last quote from a book of poems
called God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. James Weldon
Johnson, an African American poet and writer, writes this during the
time of Reconstruction just after the Civil War. In this series of
reflections, he talks about an old woman who is dying, no doubt an old
woman who had been a slave.
And now, O
Lord -- When
I've done drunk my last cup of sorrow -- When
I've been called everything but a child of God -- When
I'm done traveling up the rough side of the mountain -- O
-- Mary's Baby --
When I
start down the steep and slippery steps of death -- When
this old world begins to rock beneath my feet -- Lower
me to my dusty grave in peace To
wait for that great gittin' up morning -- Amen.
She
saw what we couldn’t see.She saw old
death.She saw old death coming like a
shining star,
but old death didn’t frighten Sister Caroline.She looked at him like a welcomed friend and she whispered to
us, “I’m
going home.”She smiled and closed her
eyes