12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Previous Years: 2020 || 2017
Preached at the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Recording
I did a mid-weekend revision, and ended up preaching two homilies.
Meeting Jesus after Death (preferred version): https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/meeting-jesus-after-death/
Jesus, Our Champion in Toil (less preferred version): https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/jesus-our-champion-in-toil/
Transcripts
Meeting Jesus after Death
Two stories to start us off this morning. First, I only ever lied to my parents once. I was in second grade. I got ear infections all the time, so I had to take a medicine called Augmentin. Couldn’t swallow pills, so I had two options. There was the liquid option, which had like chunks of powder in it, which was so gross. And then there was the chewable option, which was even so much more gross. And I just couldn’t, couldn’t stand these pills. So, once I decided I’d be smart and I’d pretend to take them, and then I would throw them away, which obviously did nothing for my ear infection. And about a week and a half later, my mother found them in the bottom of the trash as she was emptying it, and we had a nice long conversation. Since then, I never lied to my parents. So, when I was in seventh or eighth grade, I was at a friend’s house and there was a construction project going on at a school near his house. So, we were playing around and the company had this big, like, shippable container that we thought it was really fun to, like, sneak around the construction site and hide in. Well, one of the construction guys saw us, caught us, and I mean, he was probably dealing with his own stuff. He locked us in the container and started banging on it to really get us to be scared. And I was so scared. It was dark, I couldn’t get out, and I knew if anybody found out I was in so much trouble. So, we ran home and we swore we wouldn’t tell anybody. I got about 20 hours into not telling anybody, and then I was so wracked with guilt for not telling my mother that I just broke down and told her everything. And in her mind, it wasn’t that big a deal. Like, it’s a little dangerous to be around a construction site, but like, for me, it was the biggest deal in the world that I had kept that secret from her.
Story number two. And I will tie these together later. Story number two. Saint Vincent de Paul, a saint in Paris, France, known for taking care of the poor. That’s his big thing. He was just such an advocate for the poor and for seminaries. Well, he came from a very poor family. And this was a time where the family really had to help contribute to seminary. So, Saint Vincent de Paul really wanted to be a priest. His family was poor. They were poor farmers. They scraped together barely enough money to send this guy to seminary. So, he’s in seminary in Paris, a very prestigious seminary. And his dad comes up from the French countryside to visit him. And Saint Vincent de Paul is ashamed of where he came from. He’s ashamed of being poor. So, his dad knocks on the seminary door, asks to see Vincent. Vincent doesn’t acknowledge him, doesn’t recognize him, and says, I don’t know that man. His dad essentially kind of waits outside for a little bit. Vincent never comes and he has to go home.
A horrible kind of betrayal of parents and a horrible betrayal of the things that’s given to us by our parents. Of course, the only reason we know this is Saint Vincent de Paul is a saint. He wrote, you know, diaries or letters of things. And we know this is a great regret of his life. He did penance for it later, of course.
Well, think about what it’s going to be like for us when we die. We’re Christians, memento mori is part of our tradition, this is not a macabre thing. This is something that we just talk about. We will die. Think about it. So, think about what happens when you die. When you die, you will be face to face with the Lord Jesus. Face to face with the Lord Jesus. If you know Him and love Him and follow Him, that shouldn’t be a scary prospect for us, but it will be like me in front of my mother where I couldn’t hold anything back. We will be so overwhelmed with the presence of the Lord. We will be so in awe and majesty, and again, God is described as our father. Jesus is our brother. These are family words. We are so overwhelmed also by the love of God, the family love of God, that we are just going to pour everything out. It’s not like Jesus stands there with His arms crossed and says, confess your sins. That’s not how it goes. We are so overwhelmed by His presence that we will just, everything will come pouring out of us, the good and the bad. We will tell Him all of the things we’ve done that we’re sorry for, all of the ways in which we wish we’d done better, all of the ways in which we feel like we’ve walked away from Him or ignored Him. But we’re also going to bless Him and thank Him for all the blessings that He’s given us in the course of our lives, all of the wonderful things that He’s done. We’re going to praise Him for giving us the grace to follow Him, to live good and moral lives. The successes that we’ve had, we will praise Him for.
This is what the Lord means when He says “nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, no secret that will not be known. What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light. What you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops.”
We believe in two judgments. The particular judgment happens immediately when you die, and then the general judgment. The general judgment is this same thing, confessing everything to the Lord, in the presence of every human being who has ever lived. So, when we say that nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, we mean that in the most extreme way possible. After death, there is no such thing as a secret. Everything will be made known to every single other human person who has ever lived. But in the presence of God, if we know Him to be a loving Savior, if we give ourselves over to Him, then we do not have anything to fear in that. It will be a joy and a blessing for us that everything is now revealed and given to us. Because a lot of times in this life when we work for justice we don’t see the fruits, and we see those who are unjust getting ahead. Those who abandon morality saying, “oh yeah, this is great. I’m much happier and much better.”
And we’re like, “oh, it’s a slog to try to be good. It’s a slog to try to be just.”
But at the end of time, we will be recognized for our efforts. Everybody ever will know. And, in that moment, it won’t matter to us that everybody knows that we’ve done well, it only matters to us how we are in the eyes of God.
At the end of the gospel, we hear “Everyone who acknowledges me before others. I will acknowledge before my Heavenly Father. But whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my Heavenly Father.”
Imagine Saint Vincent de Paul turning his father away, not even acknowledging his presence at the doors of the seminary. His father was his great benefactor. He gave him life and he gave him the means to go to seminary. And Vincent de Paul denied him. Imagine how much more extreme that dynamic is with God. God gave you life. He gave you every good thing in your life, every blessing. And if we live this life failing to acknowledge Him, how much of a betrayal is that? But the consolation for the Christian, for those who remain faithful, the consolation is “everyone who acknowledges me before others. I will acknowledge before my Heavenly Father.”
Well, how beautiful and wonderful. Because when we get to heaven, I kind of imagine, like, I know it’s not going to be this way, but I can’t get over my own problems, my own insecurities. I kind of imagine it to be the first day of middle school. Like looking around, you don’t know anybody. You’re like, “oh, this is really awkward. Who do I sit with?”
Well, you want Jesus to be the one to come up, put His arm around you and be like, “I know you. You’re part of my family.”
And then He brings us, arm around us, to His Heavenly Father. And He says, “Father, I want to introduce you to this person who was faithful to me in their life, who knew me, who prayed to me, who walked with me, who acknowledged me before others. Father, I commend them into your eternal rest.”
What incredible consolation! What a blessing to have the Lord be our advocate, our champion.
In the first reading, Jeremiah is overwhelmed by his enemies. They are whispering about him. They’re looking for him to mess up. They want to tear him down because they don’t like what he’s saying. And he says, “but the Lord is with me like a mighty champion.”
If we acknowledge the Lord before others, if we are faithful to the Lord, if we make sure that He is part of our life, and if we try to live our lives in such a way that we don’t have to hide anything from Him, well then what an incredible champion we have. In fact, Saint Paul tells us, he’s talking about Adam and he’s talking about Christ, he says “the gift is not like the transgression.”
Adam sinned, and because of his sin we toil in this life. We have sin, we have death. Adam sinned, but the gift, Christ, the conqueror of sin and death, is not like the transgression, because He is infinitely greater. Saint Paul says, “For if by the transgression of the one the many died, how much more did the grace of God?” — How much more did the grace of God! – “and the gracious gift of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow for the many?”
Christ is your advocate not just as one advocate against another, equally matched with sin, death, and Satan. Christ is infinitely greater than those things. He is fighting for you in this life, if you’re faithful, and in the next if you acknowledge Him before others. The Lord is taking care of you now and will take care of you in the next life. All we have to do, all we have to do, is acknowledge Him. We don’t have to earn it. We don’t have to pay for it. We don’t have to be a perfect person before He fights for us. All He asks is that we acknowledge the grace that He’s given us. That we acknowledge before others the fact that Jesus is our Savior, that He is the one fighting for me. That’s all we have to do. And then we have the greatest champion we can imagine.
What we do this morning in these baptisms is we bring children into the family of God. God is our father, Jesus is our brother, the Holy Spirit is the bond of unity amongst this family. And so, when a new person is born into the natural world, into a natural family, our greatest desire is that as soon as possible, immediately they will be brought into the supernatural family of God. That they would have Jesus, their brother, advocating for them at the right hand of the Father. That they would have the Holy Spirit uniting them to the rest of the Christian family. Today, we bring them into that family. They are adopted by God the Father, and Jesus is made their champion. The Lord fights for them. Their parents, from this day forward, will teach them the Christian faith. Their parents will teach these children to acknowledge Jesus before others, and as they acknowledge Jesus, through their whole life, as their source of blessing, as their champion, they will grow closer and closer to Him. So that at the end of their lives, they will arrive before the Lord, confessing all things, but more than anything else, confessing their faith and love for Him. And Jesus will put His arm around them, His brothers and sisters claimed this day, in this font. Jesus will put His arm around them and bring them to the Father, just as He will bring all of us who acknowledge Him to His Father for all eternity.
Jesus, Our Champion in Toil
So, I find being human to be exhausting. When people deny the existence of God, I’ll often talk about free will in our discussion, and they have to deny free will in order to get to a place where we’re just materialistic. And I say, look, I know I have free will because of how much I do not want to get out of bed in the morning. I am aware of my will and how much I am choosing the warmth of my covers. So, I find being human to be exhausting, because there’s always something else that I’m fighting against, just the need to get out of bed, the need to get ready in the morning, all of the tasks that I have to do, all of the things that I’ve left undone, just trying to get through a day, let alone a week, let alone a month, let alone a year. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who fantasizes about having somebody to fight these battles for me. It would be so nice if I didn’t have to do all of these things. It would be so nice if it just happened. Well, that’s a way in which to hear our first reading today. Jeremiah says, “I hear the whisperings of many, terror on every side. Denounce, let us denounce him. All those who are my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine. Perhaps he will be trapped. Then we can prevail and take our vengeance on him.”
Now, Jeremiah is talking about an external threat. It was Jeremiah’s unenviable task to tell the Jews that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed. As Father Mike puts it, in Bible in a Year, Jeremiah was not telling them to change. At that point, it was too late. He was telling them to brace for impact. Jerusalem was going to be destroyed, and so nobody wants to listen to Jeremiah. Nobody likes what he has to say, and they are constantly condemning him and ostracizing him and exiling him and threatening him with violence and imprisonment and death. So, he’s bemoaning “terror on every side. Denounce. Let us denounce him.”
Well, for some of us, we have external enemies that are denouncing us. For some of us, it’s absolutely what Jeremiah is doing. We have people who are constantly threatening us with ostracization and exile and sometimes violence. But for me and for many people, I denounce myself. The denouncement and the people that are my enemies are my own unrealistic standards. Or all of these things that I feel are weighing on me all the time. And so, I feel what Jeremiah is talking about internally. I feel the overwhelming nature of all of the forces that are arrayed against me. We’ll get to Adam in a second, but you can think, this comes from the book of Genesis when God announces the curses due to sin. The curse that Adam undertakes is that he now has to toil for his food. Before, the earth just produced what he needed to eat. But now it’s only produced in toil. The human being toils, and we feel that toil.
Well, Jeremiah talks about all of these pressures, all of these things that he’s struggling against, all of the things that are overwhelming him. And he says, “but the Lord is with me like a mighty champion.” This is what we all desire and pray for, that the Lord would be with us like a mighty champion, that He would be the one to cut through all of the difficulties, all of the terrors, all of the condemnations, all of the toil, that He would pick us up and carry us through the difficulties of this life. And Jeremiah is announcing in the midst of a very difficult life that the Lord is his mighty champion, that the Lord is going to fight his battle. Oh, that we would all have that same faith, that we would really believe that the Lord will sustain us, that He will get us through it. In His great love and mercy, He knows that it is somehow better for us to get through the toil. The toil doesn’t seem to go away, but instead He gives us the strength to endure it in Him. The ability to have a beautiful and full and fulfilling life if we live the toil with and through Him. That, with Him, He somehow becomes our champion in all of it.
Now, Saint Paul describes this reality a little differently and I think more profoundly. He talks about how sin, and again toil comes from sin, but all of our struggles come from sin. Sin comes from one man. Through Adam, death and sin were entered into the world, but through Christ those things are removed of their power. They no longer have power over us. And Saint Paul is very clear. He says, “but the gift is not like the transgression.”
So, if we thought of Christ as the champion against an equally matched foe, we do not understand Christ. Saint Paul is saying that the gift is not like the transgression. The transgression was bad. But Christ is so much better. The toils and the struggles that we have in this life are hard. But Christ is so much more powerful because the gift, the salvation through the one man of Jesus is so much greater than the transgression through the one man of Adam. Can we believe it? Can we believe that God is our mighty champion and that He is not just a champion, equally matched, but a champion who is so much more powerful, a champion who not just fights the battle but wins the battle?
As Saint Paul says, “for if by the transgression of the one the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow for the many?”
The toil is necessary because it requires the grace of God, and in that we can see that grace overflowing when He fights as our champion through whatever we’re facing in this life He does it in such an extreme way that we gain from having gone through the struggle. There are a lot of ways in which He does this. Obviously, the most powerful is the Cross, His power over sin and death. But look at our gospel. Jesus said to the 12, “Fear no one. Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known. What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light. What you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops.”
There are a couple of things we struggle against in this life, but one of them is the injustice of the world that we live in. We try our best, or hopefully we’re trying our best, and yet it seems that those who have abandoned moral standards are winning. That those who have decided, “I don’t want to try my best. I want to do it for me. I want to act unjustly toward my employees, or toward the people on the street, or whatever else. Like, I want to act for my own interest.”
That they seem to win. They seem to do well. They seem to have more things than we do. The selfish seem to do better than the selfless. That injustice weighs on us, and we’re constantly tempted to abandon the high standards of our faith because we don’t think that it’s working and it would be better if we just lived like everybody else. But the Lord is our champion in this because He tells us that at the end of time, all things will be revealed, and if we lived justly, our justice will be made known. And those who lived unjustly, even if they seem like they’re getting ahead today, their injustice will be made known and the Lord will make all things right.
I vacillate about the end of my life. At times I fear it. It’s terrifying to think about closing my eyes for the last time. It’s like going down a roller coaster, but infinitely worse, where I just don’t know what’s coming and I’m falling into an abyss. But at other times I take incredible consolation of standing before the Lord Jesus. I know that I will have to answer for every act of my life. I know that I will have to tell Him everything that I’ve done wrong. It’ll just flow out of me. But I also know that if I live my life in accordance with the law of the Lord, if I do what I’m told is just by Him, that having everything pour out of me in His presence will be a consolation rather than a condemnation.
If we Christians live our life right, then this gospel is incredibly consoling. The idea that everything will be brought into the light? Praise God. The idea that the darkness is no longer hidden, but that all reality is proclaimed from the housetops? Praise God, because in that moment the just will be rewarded for their justice. Those who tried their best will be rewarded for their efforts. Praise God!
And Jesus tells us He is our champion not because we’ve earned it, not because we’ve convinced Him. He’s not a mercenary. We don’t pay him.
“Are not two sparrows sold for one small coin? And yet not one of them falls to the ground without your father’s knowledge. So do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.”
The Lord is your champion, whether you’ve earned it or not. The Lord wants to fight for you against whatever you’re facing, whatever is condemning you, whatever’s holding you down. His desire is to be there for you and to be more powerful than that thing. And you don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to buy it. He just wants to do it. You have the greatest champion you can imagine, the one who wins every battle, fighting for you. And all you have to do is acknowledge Him. That’s all you have to do. You just have to ask, “Lord, please be my champion. Lord, I am announcing that I am on your team.”
The gospel ends, “Everyone who acknowledges me before others. I will acknowledge before my Heavenly Father. But whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my Heavenly Father.”
All you have to do is claim Team Jesus. All you have to do is say, “I’m on the side of the Lord. He fights for me, and I recognize and acknowledge that He fights for me.”
That’s it. And how beautiful if you do so. How wonderful if you claim the Lord. Because then at the end of your life, not only will all be revealed, not only will your efforts and your justice be shown before all of humanity and all of creation, but the Lord will acknowledge you before His Father. He will present you to His Father. He will say, “Father, this is the one who acknowledged me in their life. This is the one who said, ‘I claim the Lord Jesus.’ Father, I am giving you this person for all eternity.”
How incredibly consoling. What can we possibly fear if we claim the Lord? What can we possibly fear if the Lord is fighting for us? If He is our mighty champion? What can we possibly fear if the gift is so much greater than the transgression?
“Lord, I want you in my life. Lord, I claim you as my own.” And then He will fight for you. He will acknowledge you. He will be your mighty champion.
Fr. Moore 