All Edmond Parishes Eucharistic Procession

All Edmond Eucharistic Procession
Stephenson Park Temporary Altar
Sermon: Mark 15:16-20
27 October 2024

 This day – the Lord’s Day – is about Jesus Christ!  This incredible blessing uniting all Catholics from the three parishes in Edmond is about Jesus Christ!  He is the one God who made the universe, all it contains, and who made us, giving us life in His image and likeness.  He is the one God who had a plan to restore the original blessing that He generously bestowed, after man’s original sin brought about the fall.  He is the God who loves you, who loves each of us, such that He comes to save us from our inclination to sin, to save us from the personal sins for which we each bear guilt.  In His divine love, He comes in our very flesh to pay the price for the sin that risks our eternal separation from Him in the condemnation of Hell.  As He approached the horror of the Cross for our salvation, He promised, as the Scriptures record, that he would not leave us orphans (cf. Jn. 14:18).  As the apostles and the first Christians came to accept his promise that he is the bread of life, the bread come down from heaven (cf. Jn. 6), they came to accept that precisely in the Breaking of the Bread, precisely in the smallness of the Sacred Host, our Blessed Lord fulfills his promise to not abandon us and to remain with us to the end of the age (cf. Mt. 28:20).

 As Jesus said, so the Scriptures record, and so we believe these words of our Blessed Lord, “For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.  He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (Jn. 6:55-56).  In this we are filled with hope and we are not alone!  For most of us here we have come to participate today already making an act of faith that with us and before us in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is Jesus Christ our Savior, just as he said.  But no doubt, that are many doing their own things today, surprised to find themselves caught up with this procession of Catholics, and maybe having no idea what they are witnessing here.  To any other bystanders who are willing to listen: If you believe that Jesus is God and if you believe that the Bible is God’s Word to us then you are already on this procession with us, on this journey that is a call to deeper communion with the Lord in his Church, a journey that leads to salvation in Heaven.  Other bystanders may not yet be Christian or not even a believer, this gathering is a reminder that you are invited to join with us, men and women of good will, to consider the journey you are on, to consider where you are going, and to consider whether you are, and where you are, with God on that journey.  Today, we give witness that we believe that God is actually present with us, in the midst of this world He made to be good.  He is really here!

 Why would we believe such a thing?  Why believe that God is with us and has anything to do, or any care, for this world in which we find ourselves?  First of all, God is involved with this world because He has created it and it is destined to return to Him.  The great event of the Incarnation shows us the nearness of God to this world.  The Son of God so unites Himself to His creation, that He takes on human flesh and takes up residence in this realm, Jesus the Christ.  And, the Gospel gives us a further reason for God’s nearness to the world because it shows us an encounter between the divine and the profane in a civic setting.  In the Gospel, the Lord and the world meet.  In the passage we heard, Jesus is not in a religious setting or location.  He is in the praetorium, which is the headquarters of the Roman authorities, the location of Pilate and the cohort of soldiers who mock Jesus and lead him to death.  By this point in the passage, Pilate has already sentenced the Lord to death and he has been scourged.  He is beaten and bloodied.  For however the vicious Roman scourging may have made his humanity and identity as Jesus unrecognizable, all the more would such a horrendous sight make his identity as God unrecognizable, even unbelievable.  Yet, in that civic setting, in the midst of the profane, despite all protestations to the contrary, despite man’s inability to recognize or accept it… God Himself was present!  Though submitting Himself to the twisted ways of man, our Lord was fully in command of what he was doing as God to suffer and die for our salvation, the salvation of the world and the souls He had made.  And He was doing all this right in the midst of the world and in the midst of the seat of civic authority.

 We experience some of that here today.  Today, also in a civic setting God Himself is present despite any protestations to the contrary, despite man’s inability to recognize it.  God Himself is here asking us to carry Him, just as He has done in various moments of salvation history: whether in the ark of the covenant, whether as a newborn Infant in Mary’s arms, whether being lifted up on the Cross, whether in the smallness of the Sacred Host in the hands of a priest… God Himself is here and He is asking us to carry Him into all the places He intends to go… into our holy places and sanctuaries, into our souls by grace, and, yes, even into our profane spaces, into our civic spaces where so-called “ordinary life” should not be separated from the realities of the kingdom to come.  For the “real world” as we so often call it would be very unreal indeed if separated from its foundation and destiny in God who created it, who cares for it, and calls it back to Himself.  This procession can serve as a reminder that we are called to carry the Lord into all things.  We are called to carry him in faith and how we live that faith, such that we, members of the Body of Christ, give witness to others by our words and actions that Jesus is with us and that he is Lord!  We are called to carry Him about in our moral choices.  We are called to carry him in the words we speak by which we might evangelize others.  We are called to carry Him about in our service to the poor and those about whom the Lord said, “When you did these things to one of the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me” (Mt. 25:40).  We are called to carry Him about in how we organize this secular city of man, so that it more greatly reflects the order of the City of God.  We are in a moment now and through election day that gives us a privileged opportunity to exercise our moral duty to vote with our Catholic values in the hopes that we do our part to bring our city, state, and nation into greater conformity to the Kingdom of God.  The timing of this procession is a great witness and reminder that we should carry the Lord into our precints when we vote.  The Gospel passage today tells us in no uncertain terms that the Lord’s kingship belongs also in our civic spaces as he continues to accomplish his work of salvation in the souls of our time and place: the souls of the Pontius Pilates of our time, the souls of the soldiers of our time, the souls of religious authorities of our time, the souls of all the ordinary men and women, boys and girls, of every time and place.  As Catholics we believe that patriotism is a virtue.  Patriotism is a call to devotion and service to the land of our forefathers.  There is no patriotism greater than devotion first of all to the Father of all, the Father and Creator of this land.  As happened in the Gospel, when some meet the Lord in civic spaces the result may be an occasion for sarcasm, mockery, and rejection.  But we who are believers serve as signposts today, pointing our contemporaries to the real presence of God with us.  By prayer and fasting, which I beg of you to take up in these next days, we serve to pray for our nation in this electoral cycle, praying that good and godly candidates be chosen to lead us.  We serve both by the reverence of our bodies and the sincerity of words to truly mean that acclamation: Hail, King of the Jews!  Hail, Christ our King!  We commit ourselves today to carry our Lord into all the activities and places of our lives.  We give the Lord thanks for remaining with us.  And we ask that we may be more docile to his grace so that, unlike the mockery of the soldiers, we may truly reverence him as the king of every aspect of our lives, the king of our parishes, the king of our city, state and nation.

Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XXVII per Annum B
Gen. 2:18-24; Ps. 128; Heb. 2:9-11; Mk. 10:2-12 (shorter form)
6 October 2024

 The Pharisees test Jesus in the Gospel passage by asking about marriage and divorce.  The force of Jesus’ response remains powerful still today in an age marked by many challenges in relationships.  The Pharisees indicate that Moses permitted a “bill” of divorce.  Jesus responds to the Pharisees by himself quoting the Book of Genesis and taking them back to “the beginning.”  It’s like saying, see how far you have strayed… get back to God’s original idea and mind.

As difficult as this divine teaching from Jesus is for our ears in this age, it was likewise difficult for Jesus’ contemporaries in the Gospel scene.  They, like we, live in a culture where divorce is widely known and accepted.  There were different opinions about legitimate grounds for divorce in the Lord’s time, some more permissive, and some more restrictive, but the reason the Pharisees can even ask this question at all is because the legitimacy of divorce is assumed in Jewish society, since Moses had developed a policy for it.  It is probably very difficult for us to comprehend just how shocking Jesus’ answer was.  Moses is a revered authority in Judaism, but the Lord’s response reveals a flawed concession in Moses’ policy.  He tells the Pharisees that, yes, Moses allowed divorce, but he did so because of sin, the hardness of heart that kept God’s People from receiving the very Word of God.  And then, the next shocking move, by reinterpreting Scripture and, specifically the teaching from the Book of Genesis, Jesus says that divorce is not possible and that no human authority can separate what God has joined.  At the very same time, then, and this would shock them, Jesus is indicating that he and his teaching are of a higher authority than that of the revered Moses.  We get another glimpse of just how surprising this must all have been when the next verse tells us that the disciples wait until a bit later, in the privacy of a house, to circle back and ask Jesus again, as if to say, “Earlier, when you said divorce is not part of God’s design for marriage, did we hear you correctly?”  The Lord doubles down and says: The man who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery; and, the woman who divorces her husband and marries another commits adultery.

The same serious challenge confronts us as we hear this Gospel.  The larger question for us is whether we will listen to God’s Word and accept it as saving teaching to guide us, or whether we will listen more to the hardness of our hearts and our own struggles with sin, looking for concessions around divine teaching.  The context here in the Gospel is about marriage and divorce, but truthfully the implications are much broader.  Will we admit that divine teaching cannot be changed by us and that it makes demands upon us?  Even though our minds and our wills, darkened by the fall of original sin, struggle to grasp and to do what is good and right, will we admit that divine teaching is actually better for us and makes us more fulfilled, despite our challenges with obedience?

As the Lord referred to Genesis in his response about divorce, I also want to turn to that passage, which served as our first reading today.  I think refocusing on Genesis leaves us with the positive teaching that is the foundation of these difficult words in the Gospel.  What we learn in Genesis is that God Himself has designed the relationship of marriage.  By making us male and female, and establishing a unity among man and woman in marriage in the very act of creation, God has made marriage to serve as a sign of Himself and His own unity with and love for us, His creation.  Furthermore, in the New Covenant, endowed by the saving grace issuing forth from the Lord’s Cross and Resurrection, marriage stands as the covenantal sign of Christ and his Church.  Christian marriage is to be marked by the positive goods of unity, indissolubility, and openness to the blessing of children, by which marriage reflects the way God unites Himself to us (unity), the way God draws us to eternal life, never separating Himself from us (indissolubility), and the way God’s love issues forth for us in the new life of grace, especially eternal life in Heaven (fecundity).

This is the positive truth about marriage in our Catholic teaching.  This truth is actually better for us than what the world proposes.  This truth remains unchanged even when our sinfulness and doubts would have us believe things about marriage that are not consistent with God’s mind for marriage.  One final lesson from the Book of Genesis is instructive, I think, for understanding the type of sacrifice required of us to embrace even hard teachings, and this particular teaching on marriage.  When I consider how it is that the suitable partner, Eve, is made for Adam, it involves that well-known image and story of God casting Adam into sleep in order to take a rib from him and fashion the woman.  If we accept that divine teaching is better for us, even as it places demands upon us, then we can learn something from this act of creation that can inspire how we view marriage and, honestly, how we embrace any teaching of faith that strikes us as difficult.  What can we say that Adam learns when God finally makes Eve and he, Adam, first lays eyes upon her?  We can say Adam learns that he is no longer alone and his life has meaning and, in fact, is better when he makes sacrifice and gives of himself.  When he gives up his own flesh and blood, imaged in the rib, he awakes to that nuptial cry of the “finally!”, the cry of “This one, at last!” is the suitable partner.  It is precisely in laying down his life, precisely in giving of himself, even his very flesh and blood, that Adam finds meaning and purpose in his very being and in his living.  Yes, it requires sacrifice, but the nuptial cry of Adam, his “this one at last!”, anticipates the cry of Jesus from the Cross: “It is finished”; and, Adam’s gift of himself anticipates that difficult lesson that each disciple must accept: the way to follow the Lord, the way to be satisfied in this life, the way to lasting peace, the way to eternal life is by embracing God’s teaching, especially when difficult, and rejecting the worldly message that speaks to, and seems to make sense to, a darkened mind and a fallen world.  The lesson of Adam’s sacrifice and self-giving, whereby true meaning and life are found, remains for us, too, no matter how difficult it may be to accept God’s teachings, no matter how challenging it may be for us, no matter how our cultural forces may reject such teaching and make concessions due to hardness of heart.  Yes, we can admit this is difficult, it can bring suffering, it requires us to embrace the cross; but, in so doing we learn what Adam learned in his self-giving that resulted in Eve, and we learn to be like the Lord, the leader of our salvation who was made perfect through suffering (second reading).