September 19, 2021
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B) on September 5, 2021, at St. Austin Catholic Parish in Austin, TX. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Isaiah 35:4-7a; Psalm 146; James 2:1-5; and Mark 7:31-37.
Today is our second of five Sundays with the Letter of James. James is perhaps the closest equivalent in the New Testament to the wisdom literature in the Old Testament. Old Testament wisdom literature gives prudent advice about how Jewish people are to live lives of virtue. While these books are filled with profound ideas, some of them are difficult to read straight through because they lack any story. Together, they cover 187 pages in my Bible. James, however, feels remarkably relevant to contemporary life, perhaps because it was written to a community with more cultural diversity. And it’s only three pages long, so read it some time! James challenges us to consider how deeply our Christian faith has permeated our daily actions.
Our gospel is Jesus’ cure of a deaf and mute man. This is seen as a fulfillment of the promises first articulated in our Isaiah passage. How are we each called to be more open to incorporating the gospel into our own lives? Let us ask God for grace and mercy.
Lord Jesus, you are our way, our truth, and our life. Lord have mercy.
Christ Jesus, you are our light, our feast, and our strength. Christ, have mercy.
Lord Jesus, you are our joy, our love, and our heart. Lord, have mercy.
Ephphetha! Open our eyes and our ears, Lord, before it is too late!
This week, in the wake of Hurricane Ida, we saw and heard a lot of things that were extremely disturbing. On Thursday morning, I listened to a podcast featuring reporter Richard Fausset, who had surveyed the damage in New Orleans. He shared his interviews with elderly, mobility-impaired people without cars who are facing potentially weeks, if not months, of no electricity, no clean tap water, and limited food supplies. While we may have seen and heard about this devastation, we probably didn’t see or hear what Fausset called “the sound of privilege.” He describes it as “the low-power hum of a gas generator that’s keeping the A/C blowing in some of [the homes in nicer neighborhoods] and is allowing people to live through this thing with cold beer and to cook gumbo.” We know that 40% of Americans don’t have even $400 in a savings account. That means that 40% of American families can’t afford to stay in a cheap hotel for five days in an emergency.
And this one hurricane has caused great damage throughout the nation. Dozens of people in the northeast drowned in their basement apartments during flash floods. Why were they living in basement apartments? Because it was the only place that they could afford to live. Think of all the natural and manmade devastation that’s happened throughout the world in the past year and a half – the wildfires in Australia and the American West; locust storms in Africa; the explosion in Beirut; refugees from Syria, Myanmar, and now, Afghanistan; the floods in Germany; countless hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones in Asia, the Carribbean, and the U.S.; the winter storm in Texas. If we have forgotten about some of these events, it might be a sign of our economic privilege.
Until recently, it was relatively easy to think that these events were simply “acts of God” beyond our control. We can’t think that way anymore. In each of the above catastrophes mentioned above, the scientific community has reached a consensus that human beings played a significant role in causing the tragedy. Human development affects the world’s weather patterns. Now, it’s comforting to tell ourselves that we’ll just have to spend lots of money to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. But there simply isn’t enough money to do that. The billions of dollars we spent on levees in New Orleans since Katrina protected the people there from storm surge last weekend, but it didn’t protect them from wind damage and the loss of electricity… and it didn’t protect people in other Louisiana parishes from the devastating floods – or people in parts of Mississippi, Tennessee, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, or Connecticut.
Pope Francis was prescient when he wrote his encyclical on the environment six years ago. He said, “We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental” (#139). People with even modest levels of income are causing the degradation of the environment, but it is the poor who will bear the brunt of the consequences. As Francis wrote, “Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature” (#139). We’re being called to something much more drastic than carpooling a little more and washing our clothes in cold water. God is calling us to radical, sacrificial love.
The Old Testament prophets railed against the aristocrats of ancient Israel: the test of whether one follows God is how one treats orphans, widows, and aliens. And the prophets said that if they did not change their ways, their way of life would be destroyed. And it came to pass.
James challenges us in a similar way today: do we treat rich and poor people alike? I think most of us instinctively say why yes, we do. But do we? Throughout this country, our neighborhoods have become more and more economically homogenous, so that most of our interactions are with people of similar financial means as ourselves.
If we don’t want to incur the wrath that God waged on the aristocrats of ancient Israel, we have to prioritize protecting the poor of today and the children of the future. Can we comfortably bear the title of “Christian” while we – to paraphrase James – become “judges with evil designs,” making distinctions among ourselves on who is worthy to be protected from environmental devastation and who is not?
Isaiah exhorted the frightened people to have faith that God would come to save them. “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf be cleared.” Perhaps God is now opening our eyes and ears to the devastation caused by our negligence, while there is still a chance to avoid the worst of climate change. And maybe it is through our efforts that “the burning sands will become pools, and the thirsty ground, springs of water.”
Ephphetha! Open our eyes and our ears, Lord, before it is too late!