A Homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Jonah 3:1-5, 10 1 Corinthians 7:29-31 Mark 1:14-20
“Do you promise respect and obedience to me and my successors?”
What a question! As unambiguous as it is brief, it is posed just before a priest is ordained. To flesh it out, here are the “stage directions” from the rite of ordination.
The candidate goes to the bishop and, kneeling before him, places his joined hands between those of the bishop. The bishop asks:
“Do you promise respect and obedience to me and my successors?”
The answer, the only acceptable one, is briefer still. The candidate responds:
“I do.”
But the church in her wisdom, perhaps sensing that things are easier said than done, gives a closing, optative line to the bishop:
“May God who has begun the good work in you bring it to fulfillment.”
This Sunday, priests in my diocese have been asked by our bishop to preach about our vocation story. Shall we check in on the fulfillment mine has brought? That has been an issue for me even before it began. When I finished my high school formation, I had my first and only one-on-one meeting with the bishop of Dodge City, Marion Forest, the grandfatherly figure in ruby slippers and gloves who had confirmed me. He was not wearing either that day.
“I am sending you to college at Holy Trinity Seminary in Dallas. How does that sound?”
I had never heard of it, but that was true of most options he might have offered. “The Capuchins told me that I should ask for the Josephinum.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, but we’ve sent men there before. That sounds fine.”
This is part of the history, which I carried with me to the ordination promise of obedience, but there is more. Two years later, I applied for and received a full scholarship to study philosophy at The Catholic University of America. One of the priests at the Josephinum remarked that he was surprised that my bishop, who was then Eugene Gerber, would send me to formation at C.U.A.’s house of studies, Theological College.
“Was I supposed to ask him?”
Again, there was a lot I did not know. So, there was a tough follow-up. I started with a letter, laying out my good fortune and my ignorance. Bishop Gerber countered with a phone call, saying that he was coming to see me. Dodge City, Kan., is a thousand miles from the Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio.
I was always at a disadvantage in speaking to Bishop Gerber because I thought he was God. Theologically, I knew he was not, but if God were going to become incarnate all over again, for me he would have looked and sounded like Bishop Gerber.
And Bishop Gerber said no. Christ-figure that he was, he explained his reasoning, and he talked about consulting others whom he trusted in making his decision. But there was no question that it was final.
I am deeply ashamed to say that I foolishly called his thinking asinine. He did not flinch. In desperation, more at my situation in the seminary than in the conversation, I threw out, “Then maybe I can accept the full scholarship that I was once offered at the University of Kansas and go there.”
Was this man cool and in control! “I can support you in that.”
“You’re O.K. with me going to a state school, but not to The Catholic University of America?”
“I know Father Vince Krische at K.U.’s Newman Center. He’s a good man. I trust you with him, and when you are finished at K.U., I will send you to the North American College in Rome. I am not denying your intellectual gifts. I am safeguarding your vocation.”
We have almost arrived at my promise of obedience, but first, one more twist. Midway through my time in Rome, I became familiar with a line from the Old Testament that diocesan priests often quote. It is Exodus 1:8: “And there came to power in Egypt a pharaoh who knew not Joseph.” One day “out of the blue,” a fellow seminarian told me, “Your bishop is the new bishop of Wichita.” Never all that involved in ecclesial politics, I did not realize that this could happen. My stern but wise Father was gone, without even a goodbye.
I barely knew Stanley Schlarman, the new bishop who placed my hands in his just before he ordained me a priest. His style was utterly different, ebullient and emotional. I was his fair-haired son, but my assignments constantly changed, and they were always introduced by what I call “vocational charades.”
“Terry, tell me! What’s your dream assignment?”
“I like what I’m doing now, bishop.”
“No, Terry, tell me your dream assignment.”
“Teach at Saint Mary of the Plains?”
“No, Terry. Dream bigger. Never mind, let me tell you your dream.”
We can abbreviate those conversations and simply note that I was not allowed to leave the room until my dream—my deep, true dream—had become clear to me.
I am in a new situation now, one I did not envision when I put my hands in Bishop Schlarman’s and he added that proviso, “and to my successors.”
His successor is one of my former students, one whom I remember as a somewhat stubborn seminarian. I had asked the students to write a “theme homily” that incorporated a then-popular church-themed movie, “Mass Appeal.” I wanted them to learn how to respond to what the Second Vatican Council called “the signs of the times.”
He refused. My student explained to me that one should only preach on the Scriptures and then only say what the Holy Spirit reveals to you as you read those Scriptures. I responded that I found that to be a rather truncated understanding of inspiration, leaving the Holy Spirit with limited opportunities to enter our lives
The Holy Spirit has a sense of humor. If you take nothing else from this homily, leave with that.
In conjunction with a “Called by Name” initiative, my former student, Bishop John Brungardt, has asked all his priests to tell something of their vocational story this weekend.
So I am preaching a “theme homily” but not without staring at the Scriptures. And to be honest, I do not feel that I have won a decades-old argument. I have reached that relatively late-in-life point where I no longer presume that I am the center of the world, which the Holy Spirit oversees. At least at my best, I am.
We all know that Jonah did not march right into Nineveh when he was told to go. There was an interlude of “vocational discernment” in the belly of the whale.
Not so in the Gospel, when Jesus calls Simon and Andrew, James and John. Indeed, it is hard to understand how there would not be hesitancy on the part of these fishermen. Has the story been edited to remove the reluctance and fear? Why did these men follow a stranger?
The great biblical exegete St. Jerome suggested that
there must have been something divinely compelling in the face of the Savior. Otherwise, they would not have acted so irrationally as to follow a man whom they had never seen before.
Now there is a thought! They looked Jesus in the face, and they knew.
Does that seem far-fetched? But is that not how all of us do it, in all our vocations? Perhaps not as much in our initial discernment as in our faithfulness to them? We look at the face of our spouse, we look our kids in the face, we look at the people we work with and for, and we know what we must do.
Granted, that does not tell us where we are going or what will be demanded of us. It would be nice if it did, but it does not. But it does tell us who we are going with and for whom we are embarking on the journey. And that is enough. We know the face calling to us in the faces of others. We can follow.
