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4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Added Jan 30, 2018 •

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Fr. Tom Wilson, Pastor January 28, 2018

Show Transcript

When I was in college one of the organizations that I belonged to had a little ritual every Tuesday after our practice session we would go to a little pub on the west bank of the University of Minnesota and just blow off a little steam and have some conversation and get some relief from the daily grind and we would also have a lot of conversations among the troop that gathered there and frankly most of them were shallow and meaningless. They just were, they were good diversion, but they were very inconsequential. But every once in awhile, every once in awhile we would break from the, we would break from the silliness and something deep and profound would happen.

We also discovered that when you are trying to solve the worlds problems you probably want to know something about the people you are solving those problems with. And one of the guys in our group, he was relatively new. I knew that he had come from a pretty difficult home life, but when he found out that I was a believing, practicing and church going Catholic he opened up and said that in his childhood, which was very difficult. His father had left the family when he was very young.  He lived in like six or seven different cities while he was growing up, but he said that in all of that experience the one place, he said the one place, in his childhood that he felt welcomed, that he felt like people really cared about him and the life around him was when he attended a little Catholic school in South Carolina. He was there for some pretty early years of his grade school life, 2 or 3 years.

He said the sisters that taught there, the other teachers that were there and the other kids were just always very, very kind to him. He did not experience that in any of the other places that he lived. When I heard that 2 things went through me simultaneously, one was a sense of deep sadness that this young man had gone through such a difficult life as a kid. The other thing though was a spirit of gratitude that at least he had experienced in one place, in one place a spirit of being loved and welcomed. And that had come from people in the church in the institutional life of the church in the form of those sisters, teachers, in that school community. And essentially what happened, what happened it is important to note this guys’ background. He was born in New York and he was Jewish, he wasn’t Catholic. He was in a Catholic school as a Jewish kid, very different culturally, very different religiously and yet he was still welcomed with kindness and warmth in that community. 
And whether those sisters or those other students or that community understood it or not what they were doing was paving the way for him to give authority, for him to give authority to people who represented Jesus Christ. We have talked a lot about power and authority over the last several months within these walls and the culture in which we live. It’s important for us to always to remind ourselves and understand the distinction between power and authority which are often equated as the same thing. They are not.

Power is there. Power is acquired and most of us have very, very little if any influence over the people who actually have power in our lives. In terms of our work places and the civil society that we live in and the whole bit. Authority is very different though authority can only be given, we give authority to people in our lives. That is a fact. People have no authority unless we give it to them. 
And as we read on the front end of Jesus’ public ministry we have this scene of Jesus demonstrating his power by casting out the demons. But it is not the power immediately that attracts them, they see the power of casting out demons, but the people who are seeing it also recognize authority. They recognize the authority of Jesus Christ, and Mark says very specifically, Not like the scribes. The scribes had power, their status and their education gave them power within the community. It did not necessarily give them authority and the people understood that.  The people understood that – there was a dichotomy between the way they lived their lives and the status and the education that they had and thus they had little to no authority in the lives of the people. But when they see Jesus and not just the power that comes out of him through casting out demons but also the presence and the credibility of God the Father within that, they say this man has authority. This man has authority. The truth is that as disciples of Jesus Christ our first duty, our first responsibility our first act is to give the authority from our hearts that we can only give to the person of Jesus Christ, that is what we do. Jesus has the authority.

Jesus has the authority in our hearts that we have given him.  The second thing after we have done that for ourselves is to invite others to do the same. To invite others to do the same. And we have these conversations an awful lot we have especially in the last few years about the necessity of us as Catholics and being disciples and evangelists and giving people the opportunity, giving people the opportunity and the pathway to give that authority to Jesus Christ in their lives.
But too often we trip over our own feet in doing it and we skip many, many important steps and go to places of sometimes difficult and confusing theological and sometimes difficult moral conversation without doing the front-end work first, without doing the front-end work first. And whether those sisters in that school community in South Carolina understood it they were doing important front-end work, by simply being kind and welcoming to this outsider. This kid who wasn’t even catholic, this kid who came from outside of their community. And they did that important front-end work by welcoming him and making him feel loved and accepted within that community even though he was very, very different, Even though he was very different from them. And last year about this time we had a conversation not just within the leadership, but in the walls of this church about the opportunities and the challenges that we have as a Catholic community as a Catholic parish in the area we are particularly. We are in a place that is growing by leaps and bounds you see it when you drive up in all the new housing, all the developments, all the people moving in.

And that brings out great opportunities, great opportunities for us to introduce people to Jesus Christ. We also looked at and understood the realities of the challenges that we face in a world that is very, very different that what a lot of us may have grown up and been formed in.  A place where oftentimes people might not give faith and faith communities even a second thought. And the importance of us a community making conscious decisions, conscious decision to say – you know what we want people to come in here and give Jesus Christ a chance.

Give them an opportunity to give authority to Him and the fact that we needed to do some things differently. We have done some research, we have also done some local observations over the last year, we have also taken on some very concrete activities in the last year to address that. One of the things we have found, one of the things we have found is that for an awful lot of people for an awful lot of people that sense of kindness and warmth is a huge, huge piece of them coming and becoming part of a place to pray and to worship. To get them in the doors we have to be kind. We have also discovered that people, even in their own worship and prayer experience here at all saints when they experience that welcoming a very basic thing is coming inside the door they like it – they like it, whether long time in the parish or brand new. They like it and we have tried to establish greeting teams we aren’t quite there yet. We don’t have them at every week at every mass but we are on the way and it helps,  it helps people to experience that first step, that first step of having hearts being open to the person of  Jesus Christ. We need to continue to do those things.
We also talked about the importance frankly of us being willing to sacrifice be willing to sacrifice things that maybe we like as a personal preference but are certainly not essential in our lives of faith in order to make that happen. Things as simple and basic as maybe giving up our treasured favorite seat and pew at Mass for someone else. Maybe being patient with people who are scrambling with young children to get to church on time that might sometimes be a few minutes late. Maybe sitting back and saying, you know what I will let someone else have the preference.

Maybe I will endure and be patient with a lousy homily once in awhile that someone else might get something out of. All these things, all these things require a little bit of sacrifice. The point is we need to do things in order to welcome people in. 
One of the things we have discovered is that people will make decisions
 very, very quickly. They’ll come in and they may not have talked to a single person and they will decide based on how they were interacted with and what happened on one morning and they might not ever come back. And we have to be prepared to deal with that – we need a lot more people that are willing and have the gifts to do the welcoming and greeting ministry. If that is not your thing, if that is not your thing to put yourself right out in front of somebody you never seen before – that is fine. Not everyone has that particular gift or charism but we can all be part, we can all be part of the warm and welcoming.

By sacrificing ourselves one little test, one little test of just where we might be on this spectrum is how do we react when we see an extra-large crowd at church. Is our first reaction, this is inconvenient for me because there is a big crowd. Or this is great because more people want to hear the word of God and be part of our community. Depending on how we react it will tell us where we are on the particular scales.

It’s a beautiful thing, it is a beautiful – we have experienced a lot of growth and when the Archbishop was here in November for our anniversary he mentioned that – He said this is the most welcoming place I’ve ever been. I didn’t have the courage to tell him we had all the big guns out for that particular day.

But he noticed, he noticed something we are trying to do as a community and it is a wonderful thing . we need, we need to be able to create paths and opportunities for everyone to give authority to Jesus Christ. That little school community in South Carolina did it in the middle 1970’s when they opened the gates for this kid 20 years later to be asking questions and being open to the Catholic faith and open to the person of Jesus Christ, just by being kind warm and welcoming.

I can tell over the 10 years that I have been here, when I first came here people would often say, Father All Saints can be difficult because it’s so large and sometimes feels cold. I don’t get that nearly as often as I used to, in fact it is almost the reverse. People who are new will come up and say one of the reasons that I chose this place and we did our research and went to other places was that people are kind, warm and welcoming. Some people are noticing, it’s not perfect, it’s never going to be perfect, we don’t’ have to have perfection as the goal. But the goal has to be to create an environment that is warm and welcoming and takes that first step towards inviting people to give authority in their lives to Jesus Christ.

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