August 14, 2023
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for the 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year A) on August 13, 2023 at the Paulist Center in Boston, MA. The homily is based on the day’s readings: 1 Kings 19:9a, 11-13a; Psalm 85; Romans 9:1-5; and Matthew 14:22-33.
We have spent many Sundays this year focusing on what Jesus teaches in the Gospel of Matthew. But now we’re in a period of several weeks in which Matthew focuses on how Jesus puts what he has taught into action.
Today, all of our readings present people of faith in times of distress. Jesus’ disciples panic during a storm at sea. St. Paul wrestles to explain how the Jewish people are still considered God’s chosen ones, even though many of them have rejected Jesus Christ. Fleeing for his life after Queen Jezebel has threatened to kill him, the prophet Elijah leaves behind his servant, travels for forty days and forty nights on just the energy of two hearth cakes and two jugs of water, climbs Mount Horeb, and cries out to God that he is all alone.
But Elijah is mistaken: God is always with us. God continually showers us with love and mercy. Let us pause to celebrate that!
In his book titled Creative Ministry, Henri Nouwen challenges us to acknowledge the entire range of emotions we feel in the course of a human event. For example, the baptism of an infant is a time to celebrate the birth of a baby, but the water also represents drowning. In having a child baptized, parents are affirming to raise the child for a life of discipleship, teaching them to die to themselves and to rise up to a new way of life.
The waters of life are often choppy and stormy, so we continue to die and to rise in multiple ways throughout our lives. A friend of mine who served in the navy taught me to imagine how hard it must be to walk on choppy water. If you run in place on a treadmill on a ship during a rough storm, the pitching of the waves will cause you to go airborne!
And Peter did not completely fail in his attempt to walk on water. The boat was pitching up and down, yet he crossed several crests and troughs of the waves, getting close enough to Jesus that he could reach out and touch him. And since Peter was able to shout several words as he sank, he clearly descended in the sea slower than what we would have expected from the force of gravity!
In the previous chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus compared God’s reign to a tiny mustard seed that grew into a great tree and to a bit of yeast that leavened nearly 9 gallons of flour. So far in this chapter, Jesus has demonstrated the astounding abundance of God’s reign: he has empowered the disciples to feed roughly 20,000 people with only five loaves and two fish, and he has helped Peter to walk on the water.
The Paulist Center has been a place that has created vibrant, abundant ministries from tiny ideas. This weekend, even as we observe the completion of two great ministries founded here more than three decades ago, we celebrate that they were born from tiny seeds of faith, bearing fruit more than 30-, 60-, and 100-fold.
Nearly 38 years ago, members of our community began providing a free breakfast to people in need on the third Saturday of each month. The pandemic forced us to pause this ministry. Sadly, earlier this year, even as we were considering “sunsetting” the Third Saturday Breakfast, Peggy LaVoie, the community member who founded that ministry, died.
And this weekend, the Paulist Center Community completes our 35-year relationship with our Sister Community, Hacienda Vieja in El Salvador. The entire village of 500 people was forced into exile in Honduras during the Salvadoran civil war. Since they returned to rebuild their village in 1992, we have raised more than $60,000 to help them secure farmland, build a reliable water source, provide literacy training, and build a new church roof. Members of the Paulist Center have visited Hacienda Vieja, and vice versa. Recently, we made our final tuition payment for two women in the village completing their 4-year college degrees.
The completion of these ministries is painful. Don’t the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast instruct us that with just a little bit more faith, we could stay in the boat and continue these ministries? I don’t think so. These ministries have produced acres of mustard plants and thousands of loaves over two generations.
And those plants and loaves have provided the energy necessary for us to continue to grow, to evolve, to best meet the needs of the current moment. The Paulist Center has always been a dynamic place where passionate members create new ministries. The energy that used to be directed towards Third Saturday Breakfast and Sister Community has spread to newer social justice initiatives at the Paulist Center, including our Immigration Advocacy, Creation Care, and Racial Justice Advocacy Ministries.
Which brings us back to our readings today and our gospels in the previous month. When the winds of change are blowing, the best course of action might not be to stay rooted in some historical moment of the past. Isaac Hecker described the Paulist Fathers in a way that applies to all members of the Paulist Center Community: we are each “alive to the pressing needs of the Church at the present time,… called to labor specially with the means fitted to supply them.” Maybe the mustard seed of faith is not for us to keep feeding the hungry as we did in 1985 or for us to work for justice as we did in 1992. Several other organizations in Boston now provide breakfast every Saturday. The situation in Hacienda Vieja has stabilized in the past few years. Instead, maybe that seed of faith allows the Holy Spirit to work through us to find new ways to renew the face of the earth!
As George Weigel once wrote: “In the Catholic view of things, walking on water is an entirely sensible thing to do. It’s staying in the boat, hanging tightly to our own sad little securities, that’s rather mad.”
When Jezebel banished Elijah from Israel, he found God in the still small voice. When Paul realized the error of his ways as a Pharisee, he still found God present among his Jewish brothers and sisters who did not acknowledge Jesus as the Christ. When Peter tentatively stepped out of the boat, he did not sink to the bottom of the sea. The Holy Spirit is always inviting us into a new and exciting future. May we have that smidgen of faith necessary to step out in faith!