Homiletic
Series: The Lord is King and There is No Other.
Homily
III: Hope Does Not Disappoint.
Scriptures: Wisdom 3:1-9; Romans 5:5-11; John 6:37-40
Can you feel it! Autumn is here! For true Floridians winter is here.
As many of you know Judy and I
recently returned from our vacation. At
least every two years we make an October drive up the East coast to visit
friends and family. The highlight of our
trip is the hope of catching the peak fall colors and prime apple picking season.
This year was the best fall
colors we had seen in many years. Our
stop in Stockbridge, MA was absolutely spectacular and educational! I relearned something about trees and the coloring
of leaves. Did you know that the
beautiful colors we see in the fall are always there? We just cannot see the color until the proper
season.
Leaves are nature's food
factories. Plants take water from the
ground through their roots, take a gas called carbon dioxide from the air, and use
sunlight to turn water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and glucose. Oxygen is a gas in the air that we need to
breathe and plants use glucose as food for energy and as a building block for
growing.
The way plants turn water and
carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugar is called photosynthesis, which means "putting
together with light." A chemical
called chlorophyll helps make photosynthesis happen. Chlorophyll is what gives plants their green
color.
As summer ends and autumn
comes, the days get shorter and shorter. The trees "know" to begin getting
ready for winter. With less light the
trees begin to shut down their food-making factories. The green chlorophyll disappears from the
leaves. As the bright green fades away,
we begin to see the true colors that always existed.
Shorter days signify something
else for us as Christians, the coming of a new season, Advent. The darkest day of the year is approaching,
we’ll hear of death more frequently in scriptures and yet there is something more
that exists yet not seen, something the “foolish” those that lack faith, cannot
seem to see.
For those of us who live our
faith with conviction of heart trusting in the grace, mercy and love of our God,
our “…hope [is] full of immortality.” (Wis 3:4) What gives us the audacity to hope such hope? Because we believe “…God proves his love for
us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” (Rom 5:8) Paul says, in sending the greatest gift of
all, his Son who would die for us, God set no conditions. God’s love is given freely—all we need to do
is accept it.
I found it interesting how this
year’s most popular Halloween costume was characters from the “Night of the
Living Dead”. How ironic, the church has
been talking about the “culture of death” for a very long time. The culture of death is very selfish. Where living for self is resulting in broken
marriages, because “I’m not happy” or the partner isn’t meeting “my
expectations”; abortion is becoming the acceptable norm, because “it is my body”
and I should have the right to choose; and a greater acceptance of assisted
suicide, where it should be my choice to end my suffering. What happened to the Christian value of
offering our self to complete the other, joined as one with each other and the
Lord til death do us part, or respect for and acknowledgement of the miracle of
life, being co-creators with our God; or uniting our earthly sufferings to our
Lords own suffering and living as a Christian witness as we bear our cross of
suffering?
All Souls’ Day celebrates a message
of hope. Each of these candles you see
represents a loved one of our community, whose earthly body experienced death
this year. As part of the 12:15 Mass
each candle will be lit, to remind us of the hope that our loved ones have been
raised to meet Jesus face-to-faced and they remain full of life. We believe the human heart does not surrender
to death, and has not, through all the fog and blinding obstacles that keep our
true colors from view in this world. That we would be mindful that when Jesus
emerged from his tomb and walked on the earth at the dawn of the day: Easter, the greatest day in human history,
gives All Souls’ Day its awesome core of truth against all the odds and ends of
reality.
The great Jesuit priest, Karl
Rahner, who was acknowledged as the greatest theologian of the last century,
has this to say about the dead: “Though
invisible to us, our dead are not absent.
They are living near us, transfigured into light and power and love.”[1]
With God’s promise, we the
faithful know “…hope does not disappoint…” (Rom 5:5), because our God will raise us
up to shine in our true colors forever.
[1] Naked, and You Clothed Me.
Edited by Deacon Jim Knipper © 2013.
Clear Faith Publishing LLC. The souls of the just are in the hand of God
by Michael Doyle.
No comments:
Post a Comment