Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Here is my homily from this past weekend

Have you ever stayed up late with a friend talking about what to do with your life, what to major in, or, for the seniors present, what you are going to do after college? If so you’ve struggled with your calling, and tonight’s readings are for you.

To better understand what is happening in our readings tonight we can use the resource of the Latin language. Our understandings of the words ‘call’ and also of ‘vocation’ derive from the same Latin word, which is “vocare.” Unfortunately something has been lost in translation, because when we look at “vocare” we learn that it means both ‘to call’ and ‘to challenge.’ This is important to us, because so often we want a calling but not a challenge.

I’m here to tell you the truth tonight, and that is you can’t have one without the other. I believe we each are called, so we each are challenged as well. So tonight we need to answer three questions: What’s our call, what’s our challenge, and what do we do about it?

One: What is our call? In our reading God heard the cry of the suffering Hebrew people, and called Moses to lead them from slavery and oppression into a land of milk and honey- a land of true liberty. Though we each have a specific call share a collective call is to justice.

I first realized this call my senior year of college. Like many here tonight I had served the poor before, but it was the nine months I spent in Milwaukee that changed my life. And like Moses I was attracted to something without knowing fully what I was getting myself into – for him it was a burning bush, for me it was the Central-City.

I went to work for two parishes in Milwaukee because I cared about the concept of justice, but in the lives of people named Ray, Carma, and Loraina I found out that justice is not about a concept but about changing the lives of real people.

It seems to me it is fashionable today to care about the concept justice – to say that people deserve a fair wage; that immigrants are being treated wrongly; and the situation in Darfur is horrible. It is far less fashionable, I believe, to enter into the lives of the oppressed and help bring justice to their situations. Moses wasn’t called to simply preach a concept, but to take action that would change the peoples’ situation and so are we.

Two: What is the challenge? Left out of our reading tonight, but a part of the story is Moses’ first response to God’s call. He said, “Who am I to go to Pharaoh?” Moses’ challenge and ours is, in one word, individualism. Sometimes individualism is brought on by plain selfish choice, but more often by circumstances. One such circumstance which will face you as a student is debt. In 2004 the average college student graduated with nearly $20,000 in debt, one quarter will graduated with $25,000, and ten percent with graduated with $34,000. When my wife, Andrea, and I were married we had a combined $40,000 in debt, so I can speak to this challenge from personal experience.

The temptation that comes with debt is to put off justice for another day. We say to ourselves that we can’t go to work in a needy area because the job doesn’t pay enough, and we can’t donate to a church or charity because we need to send that money for bills. In the end the education you have earned at Lewis will out weigh the debt, but this cannot be an excuse to put off justice for another day.

Three: What do we do about it? We need to take action in all aspects of our lives. Few of us will have jobs working with the poor full time, but we can take small, meaningful and consistent actions on behalf of suffering people.

God’s name is our witness to this. God said, “I AM WHO I AM.” God’s name implies unceasing action – in a sense God is saying ‘I WAS, I AM, AND I ALWAYS WILL BE.’ In all situations God will be God, and, likewise, in all situations we need to be people of justice.

You might ask, what does this mean practically? Well I’ll give you one example from personal experience. When Andrea and I went looking for a small yet meaningful action to take we decided that one dinner a week we would only eat rice and water, this is the standard daily meal for the majority of the world’s population, and we donate the money we would have spent to a local food. It’s not much, and hopefully someday it’ll be more than just one meal, but it is meaningful and in conjunction with other actions it will make a difference.

Finally: The gospel reading tonight offers us all hope. Not everyone, and no offense but probably not anyone, in this room is the perfect example of living a life of justice. Like the fig tree we have not bared fruit, but by grace we are given a second chance to become people of justice.

Listen, I understand figuring out our calling and how to respond is difficult. We don’t have a burning bush and God’s great voice coming forth, but we do have these readings of good news… And we have that cross, the purest example of justice lived out for the lives of real people – it is calling us to face the challenge and rise a