First,
a couple of questions. ¿Are you a good
person? Well, here you are in
church - on Super Bowl Sunday - so presumably, yes. But, ¿Are you a saint?
The questions
are different, and not just in degree.
The first one, about being a good person, asks us how we see ourselves
compared to other people. But the second
question, "are you a saint?" asks us how God sees us, and introduces
the idea of holiness.
Holiness is a
tricky thing. In 742 BC - a long time
ago - the priest Isaiah went to the temple in Jerusalem for worship (our first
reading today), much as you have come to church today. But Isaiah had a vision, an experience, an
encounter with God. And Isaiah’s
reaction is not, “Oh wow! This is
wonderful. I got a neat vision of
God. God and I are BFF!!!” No, Isaiah’s reaction is almost one of terror:
"Woe is me, I am doomed! For I
am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes
have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!" Isaiah is frightened. He is scarred. He is overwhelmed.
Fast forward
now almost 800 years to 37 A.D. While on
the road to Damascus, Saul of Tarsus also has a vision, an experience, an
encounter with God in Jesus Christ.
Again, it is terrifying, unsettling.
Paul, as he becomes known, is struck blind. Just a week ago we celebrated the Conversion
of St. Paul. It was a terrifying
experience for Paul to meet the Risen Lord.
And Paul’s reaction, which we hear in the second reading today, is:
"I am the least of the apostles; in fact, because I persecuted the
church of God, I do not even deserve the name."
Around 30 A.D.
Simon Peter met Jesus. And on his boat
while fishing Peter had an experience, an encounter with God in Jesus
Christ. Again it is unnerving,
unsettling. Peter’s reaction is to fall
at the knees of Jesus and cry, "Leave me, Lord. I am a sinful man."
What’s going
on? Three guys suffering from low self
esteem? I
don’t think so. That was certainly not
St. Paul’s problem.
Obviously,
the experience of God is unsettling. The
experience of the Holy is over-whelming.
The three men in our Scriptures today meet God, but God doesn’t make
them feel comfortable and cozy and at peace.
Their encounter with God is too much, too true, too real, and very
uncomfortable. The encounter with God
is not an "I’m OK, you’re OK" experience, but rather a "You are
Holy, and I’m NOT OK" experience.
The experience
of the Holy One sharply and painfully and frighteningly reveals my own lack of
holiness, my sinfulness. And yet, this
is a moment of tremendous growth and change for these three individuals. Indeed, it is an experience of creativity and
liberation. For this is the moment that
Isaiah becomes a great Prophet, that Saul
becomes the great missionary preacher Paul, and Simon becomes
Peter, the head of the Apostles. All
three are radically transformed.
It is only in
recognizing their own unholiness, their own "defectiveness" before
God, their puny creaturehood, that they were opened - indeed, violently torn
open - to The Holy working through them.
Guess
what? The same is true for us. The Scriptures are teaching us a paradigm of
the spiritual life. We must be shaken
out of our little securities, our comfortable but constricting complacencies,
to be loose enough to serve as God’s instrument, to be sufficiently open for
God to work in us. We need to be broken
open in order to be transformed.
This is not
comfortable. None of us wants to loose
control. But there can be no illusion of
being in control when you are in the presence of the All Holy. None of us wants to face the darkness and
crud of our sinfulness; our laziness, our fear, our anger, our pettiness, our
cowardice, our weaknesses that beset us.
They go far deeper than we are willing to admit.
Therefore,
most of us, I think, try to avoid The Holy.
It is too unsettling. It reveals
our un-holiness and challenges us. The
awe that God’s presence inspires does not make us feel self-sufficient, but
rather forces us to recognize our dependence on God, our utter neediness.
So to avoid this unsettling realization, we fill our lives
with noise, and activity and diversions, and practically entertain ourselves
into an oblivious state. No need to face
the Living God if you can obsess on Super Bowl 50 or on Donald Trump.
That is too
bad. Because we need God. The encounter with the Holy, according to one
Catholic theologian, "is awesome and beatifying. .... It is only in contact with the holy that I am
blissfully and intimately liberated from the ambiguity and vacuity of my
self." In other words, only God can fulfill that
gnawing we experience in our souls, the craving for truth, for beauty, for
love. If we become self-sufficient, then
we are doomed to endless frustration.
God’s presence
does not admit of complacency. To be in
the presence of God is to be in a highly precarious place, a dangerous
place. In the Gospel today Jesus tells
Simon to put out into deep water. Deep
water is dangerous. You can’t stand
safely on the bottom; you are in over your head. Jesus calls us out to deep water.
God is not to
be found in the shallows of life, where we can stand on our own two feet, but
rather in the deep waters where we have to give over control to the Grace of
God.
And yet, that
is the way to the fullness of life. Pope
Francis keeps encouraging us to encounter Christ, to encounter Jesus
daily! But this encounter always has an
element of threat and scariness.
Isaiah, St
Paul and St Peter were all called by God to serve God’s people. Today we have a great need in the Catholic
Church in our country for generous young men and women to respond to God’s call
to serve God’s people as religious and as priests. That great need is quickly becoming a crisis. I have just come back from a Paulist General
Council meeting where we looked at the numbers of how many Paulists there will
be to staff parishes and campus ministries in 2025, and it is not looking at
all good. And every diocese and religious
order in this country is facing the same reality. It is a real crisis. Continue to pray for vocations. If you know someone who would make a good
priest or religious sister, tell them so. You could be God’s way of calling
that person. It is really important for
our future.
Jesus’ word to
Simon Peter is simple but profound: “Do not be afraid.” We all need to move out of our comfort zone,
from where we erroneously think we have some control, some security, out into
the deep water of God’s grace, relying instead on God’s love for us, which is
the only true security.
You are a good
person. But the more important question
is: are you willing to risk letting God transform you into a saint?
The Good News
in today’s readings? “Do not be
afraid.”
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