Homily
for June 24, 2007
Liturgical Year C - Cycle I
The Nativity of John the Baptist
By Dcn. Ray Alcouffe Topic:
God Speaks to Us.
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“He will be filled with
the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb.”
Of all the things we
need
to know about God and at every moment of our lives, the one thing we
need to
remember is that God communicates with us.Every love relationship depends crucially upon communication.Our relationship with God is indeed a love
relationship.However, here is the
remarkable thing: humans are created in God’s image and we have in our
very
makeup the capacity to receive God’s communications and to speak truly
of
God.That means that when God
communicates, we can understand God and can articulate that to
ourselves and to
others - it is this two-way link that is so essential in a love
relationship. What are the ways of
God’s
communications?There are many and let
me arrange them in this way.First, God
communicates through our contemplation of creation.We have a natural wonder and need to
understand all that we perceive around us.In our striving for understanding, God is revealed as to the
scope and
variety that is in God. Secondly, God is
revealed
through our history - the events and happenings of the past and the
direction
our society has taken.The Bible is the
premiere example of a documentation of God acting in and shaping the
consciousness of a whole people.Our
past and the things that have happened to us also reveal God to us
individually. Thirdly, God is
revealed
through the contemplation of ourselves - how we are made and our
capacities for
thought and love and actions.This shows
us to be spiritual beings and since God does communicate with us as
persons,
God is a person and is spiritual.Again,this applies to us as
individuals and as a community. This type of contemplation leads to
prayer (a
reaching out to God) and thus to faith; Blessed Mother Teresa tells us
the
fruit of silence is prayer and the fruit of prayer is faith.Therefore, it is in this communication that
God gives us the gift of faith. Then there is a
fourth and
more stunning way that God communicates to us.God does this directly and explicitly, not just implicitly as
outlined
above.God speaks through the
prophets.By this, we mean that God
discloses His Word or will or self in the speech of humans - not just
in the
words but also in the actions and the lives of those we know as
prophets.How remarkable is that?This utterly unapproachable God approaches us
where we are, on terms that we are able to understand, and reveals
Himself
directly to us. This culminates in
the
greatest revelation of God, which is Jesus Christ.In this light, Jesus is the most explicit and
most perfect communication of God to us which releases in us our most
perfect
communication of ourselves to God.(This
is the fifth way.) One common thread
that runs
through God’s communication to us is that it is spiritual; thus we
identify the
communicator as the person we name the Holy Spirit.We communicate with God spirit to spirit and
this communication continues until the end of time since the Holy
Spirit has
now come to us in the special way we call the church. (6th way) To understand this a
bit
more, we need to clarify our notion of prophets and prophesy.There is a wide spectrum, and hence a
confusion, in what we call prophesy. The first thing that comes to mind
is
foretelling the future - that prophets are a kind of seer or soothsayer
or even
fortune teller.In this realm prophets
are frequently associated with deceiving and unsavory people. Here, I need to
digress a
little.Our son Mike really enriches our
lives at times by the things he gets himself into.Just this past month he somehow got hooked up
with a man who calls himself Prophet Pete.Prophet Pete has been sending Michael legal sized letters, kind
of
personalized, that promise to make him a millionaire and thus take away
all his
troubles. Quote: “O, praise God, Michael, God just spoke to me ...
Michael
Alcouffe is living the life of a millionaire.Michael Alcouffe is in touch with God in a new way.” The letters
go on
and on in an emotional exhortation and of course get around to a
request to
send in money - Prophet Pete calls it seed money - as a sign of
commitment to
the Word of God as outlined by Prophet Pete.I suspect the only one to surely profit from this is Pete in the
days to
come! However, that’s not
what
God calls prophets to do.Prophets speak
to other human beings for God and from God’s perspective.Thus, they are given a gift from God and they
become people who can see patterns of deeper meaning in the events and
actions
that everyone can see but can’t interpret.We see an example of this gift of prophesy in the development of
John
the Baptist who was filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s
womb.So, who was John the Baptist?Well, Jesus calls him Elijah, who is to
precede the Messiah - and that he is more than a prophet.His father said of him: “you, child, will be
called Prophet of the Most High, and you will go before the Lord to
prepare his
ways, to give his people knowledge of their sins, because of the tender
mercy
of our God by which the daybreak from on high will visit us to shine on
those
who sit in darkness and death’s shadow to guide our feet into the path
of
peace.” With John the
Baptist, the
cycle of old testament prophets from Elijah to John is ended - this
type of
communication from God has come to an end because it is not needed.God has set up a new way for us - the way of
Jesus. Thus the Holy Spirit comes directly to all of us, to all
humankind, in
the form of the church.This is the way
of communication that God desires and it is the church’s duty to call
forth
holy people to speak to us in the present, addressing the present day
situations that we live in. Even with the
existence of
the church, the gift of prophesy has not been withheld by God but is
manifested
in a different way.It is the duty of
the church to discern in the lives, actions and works of its people
called out
by God and hold them up to us to emulate.That is the most practical reason for naming saints publicly. Finally,
as we live in our
communities and families, we need to hear from God through the personal
things
like that from Henri Nouwen where God calls each of us to be his
prophets in
our realm: “God says to you, ‘I love you, I am with you, I want to see
you come
closer to me and experience the joy and peace of my presence. I want to
give
you a new heart and a new spirit. I want
you to speak with my mouth, see with my eyes, hear with my ears, touch
with my
hands. All that is mine is yours. Just
trust me and let me be your God.’”