23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
Preached at Assumption Parish in Bellingham, WA
Previous Years: 2019
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/renunciations-also-slavery/
Transcript
I am not the one who teaches the marriage prep classes here at the parish, and that is probably a good thing. I had somebody in my office this month in a serious relationship ask me, “Father, what does it look like to discern marriage? How can we begin to decide whether we’re supposed to get engaged and get married? What does it look like to have good discernment before marriage?” Well, one of the standard answers to that question, the answer that I started out giving was, “You need to make sure you talk about some difficult things before you get married.” There is, of course, the growing together. There is the learning who each other is. There is the emotional unity and the spiritual unity and the intellectual unity and all of these things that are part of marriage. But when marriages break apart, they often break apart over fights about money, fights about time, fights about kids. And so, when somebody is preparing for marriage, we really try to tell them, “Have those fights before you get married because you want to make sure you’re on the same page about the really big things before you actually make lifelong vows.” I should have included religion in that question, too. Not everybody is marrying another Catholic. You have to have a conversation about religion as well.
But then I got a little dark – and I do this when discerning couples ask me this question, and again, probably best that I don’t teach the marriage prep classes. But I said, “In addition to those things, you really need to ask yourself, what happens if your marriage suffers a catastrophe?” Because the Church and the Lord do not believe that marriage is temporary. It is lifelong, it is forever. There’s no getting out of it. There’s no divorce. And so you have to ask yourself, what happens if my future spouse cheats on me? What will I do then? What happens if it turns out my future spouse is an alcoholic and it really gets out of hand? What happens if my future spouse abandons me, walks away from me for a time, and maybe even asks to come back after a couple of years? None of these are divorcable offences in the Catholic Church because there are no divorcable offences in the Catholic Church. And so a couple preparing for marriage, I will tell them they need to have even those hard conversations before they get married because what they need to do is make sure they are ready to give their entire life to the other person, make sure they are ready to live up to the vows that they are about to make. That’s what discernment for marriage looks like.
I tell you this because it’s a relatable example to what Jesus is talking about here. He tells us to count the cost before we make the choice. He tells us to ask what we’re getting into before we jump in with both feet. Marriage is something that many of us have experienced. We know what it’s like to ask those questions ahead of time. Some of us also know what it’s like to not ask those questions ahead of time and to be surprised in the middle and then to have to make a decision in kind of an urgency or a panic. But this is what the Lord is telling us, not just about marriage, one of the sacraments of our faith. He’s telling us that about Christianity itself. Christianity is the most fulfilling thing you can ever do because it brings you close to your creator. It brings you salvation. It gives you immunity to the sins and corruptions of this world. But just as marriage is an incredibly fulfilling thing to do, marriage has its ups and downs. Christianity has its ups and downs. And it is possible that as a Christian, something will be demanded of you that you do not expect. It’s possible that as a Christian you will have to face something that you weren’t ready for. And the Lord is telling his followers in this gospel, there are going to be very difficult times in Christianity, in your faith, in your time following him. And he says, make sure you’re ready for those before you commit to them.
Consider our second reading. This is the only time you hear from Saint Paul’s letter to Philemon. It’s a very interesting letter. Saint Paul is in prison, and somehow, for whatever reason, a slave comes to him and converts to Christianity. Slavery was very common in the Roman Empire. Most of the great Roman sites that we like to visit were built by slaves. It is similar to and different from the slavery we experienced in this country. Slavery in Roman times had nothing to do with race. They didn’t have a concept of race. That’s actually a post-Enlightenment idea that we would somehow be divided into races. They did have loyalties. So if they conquered you in war, you got to be a slave because you opposed their nation or their gods. And so that’s often how slavery came about. Slavery was not generational. It wasn’t like once you’re in the slave class, you’re always in the slave class. Slaves were regularly freed, either as a favor or because they were able to pay off their debt (because there were debt slaves at the time).
We don’t know what sort of slave Onesimus was. But Onesimus comes to Saint Paul. He converts to Christianity. Onesimus had run away from his slave master, Philemon, who was also a Christian. And when Onesimus converts to Christianity, Saint Paul knows that if Onesimus is reconciled to the church, he can’t be reconciled to part of the church and not another part of the church. So he has to reconcile with Philemon, the man he ran away from. It’s a horrifying idea because in the Roman Empire, like in the United States, there was the death penalty for escaping your slavery. And so this letter is the letter Onesimus is carrying to Philemon at the direction of Saint Paul, hoping and praying that Philemon receives the message of Saint Paul and doesn’t send Onesimus to death. Onesimus is living out what our gospel has asked of him. Saint Paul asked Onesimus to take up his cross and follow Jesus. Saint Paul was convinced that this reconciliation was necessary for the flourishing of the Christianity of Onesimus, for him to follow through on his commitment to Christ. And St. Paul asked Onesimus to do the hardest thing that he could possibly be asked to do, to take his life literally into his hands in that letter and return to Philemon.
Now, there are a lot of commentaries we can make about slavery. Sometimes people will read this letter and say, Oh, Christianity isn’t as high morally as it claims to be because Saint Paul sent a slave back to his master. But those people only think in terms of politics. Christianity is brilliant because it can survive apart from politics. It can survive in any regime, under any government, under any system. Christianity is not oriented toward political change. It’s oriented toward personal change. And so Christians always opposed slavery in general, but they also knew that their highest priority was not trying to have a revolution and overturn the Roman emperor and his system of government. They knew that they had to live within whatever system they found themselves. And Saint Paul realized that inside this system, for Onesimus to find reconciliation with the Lord, he had to find reconciliation with Philemon. And so Saint Paul wrote a letter which, if you read it, is actually basically begging Philemon to ignore all the rules of slavery and to receive Onesimus not as a slave, but as a brother in Christ. Saint Paul is trying to break down the underlying philosophy that gave us slavery. Christians for centuries, when they didn’t have political power, did the same thing. They paid for slaves to be freed. They brought slaves into the church as equals, not as second-class citizens. Our church is anti-slavery, even if we don’t see fit to overturn every political structure that’s unjust.
But back to the Gospel: Onesimus took into his hands his life. Because Jesus says whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. All of us have to consider, would we be willing to do that? Would we be willing to do the hardest thing the Lord has ever asked us to do? That’s what He means when he says, “in the same way, any one of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.” You don’t have to give away all your possessions, but you have to renounce them so that if the Lord did ask you to give them away, you would do so. Are we willing to make that renunciation? Are we willing to claim Jesus is above all other things, including our own life? That’s the demand of the Gospel. That’s the preparation he wants us to make. It’s the calculus that we have to do before we can say that we’ve committed ourselves to Christ, before we can say that we’re truly a Christian.
Some of us had the grace of being a convert to the faith. So some of us have already had to confront that decision sometimes in the face of family opposition. This is what Jesus means when he says, “You must hate your father and mother, brothers and sisters, wife and children.” If converting to Christ meant that your family would disown you, would you do it? That’s the calculus that we have to do, which some converts have already done. Some of us also have the grace of being Catholic from birth, which is a great gift. Catholic from baptism, if I’m canonically correct, it’s a great gift to experience the grace of the faith since your earliest memories. But at some point you also have to make a deliberate decision and to say, I’m not here because of inertia. I’m not here only to the extent that if my father or mother or wife or children or brothers and sisters pulled me away from Christ, I would follow them rather than Christ. At some point, we all have to make the decision to say, I am taking up my cross, I am renouncing my possessions. I am saying that Christ is the most important person in my life. We have to do that calculus and decide if it’s worth it. Brothers and sisters in Christ, it’s always worth it.
Fr. Moore 