To God’s holy people who sojourn at Saint Mary
Magdalene And to the Church of the baptized in Gresham, in Noonday, in Bullard and in Flint
Grace and peace from the Lord Jesus Christ
HAPPY IS THE MAN WHO HAS THE GOD OF JACOB FOR HIS HELP, WHOSE HOPE IS IN THE LORD HIS GOD.” (Psalm 146: 5)
The seasons of Advent and Christmas remind us that we are indeed not the least in the kingdom of God. We are reminded that we are not half-forgotten details in the memory of God. We are reminded again and again by the words of the Scriptures and by the prayers of the Liturgy that we are God’s most precious children. That must make us full of Hope, full of assurance that we matter to God. Even when trouble and worry darken our days, even when we are struck by illness and by tragedy, we are boosted by the sure and certain hope that we are loved. These are days of Hope.
Isaiah proclaims the faithfulness of God
We hear the great prophet of Israel, Isaiah shout hope in to the darkness, he screams salvation into the vast vacuum of political failure in which he was living. Isaiah refused to believe the dominant culture’s thinking that luxury and wealth and selfishness can be the goal of all our efforts and work. Isaiah sees a greater future, when all the peoples shall stream to a new and eternal Jerusalem, a heavenly place where God enjoys his people and allows them to be near him. Isaiah’s great optimism is not based on some belief in human goodness or human genius – instead he is confident that God will come among his people and change the hearts of men and women. Isaiah is confident that the future is bright, because he has confidence in God’s goodness. Isaiah trusts God.
The work of our hands cannot save us
There is a great temptation to trust ourselves and our own ability. The psalms remind us of that recurring human tendency to put our trust in things. “Do not put your trust in princes, nor in human beings, in whom there is no help.” (Psalm 146:3)This is all the more powerful a thinking in modern America, where there appears to be a coalition of forces to put grace into the background and to draw human effort into the limelight where it may become the only force which moves the world forward. Secularism seeks to make religion a private matter, and which makes God a figment of our imagination. Some Christian teachers stress the centrality of human work, and the divine reward for work well done. We call this ‘prosperity theology’ i.e. that God rewards the hard-working and hates those who do not succeed. Indeed, this pernicious theology even teaches that work is itself necessary to be loved by God. In some theological circles, this leads to a belief that only successful people may rest assured that they are loved by God. Successful people find all the self-help they need in the Bible, and the success of the works of their hands is proof that God loves them. Their money proves that they are saved. Those who are hungry and poor and addicted may be helped, but only so that they can become more and more perfect – like the successful people who deign to help them. What happens in that scenario is that ‘salvation’ becomes the same as human success, and ‘work’ replaces virtue as the road towards God. It is a strange alliance of unlikely bedfellows, the anti- religious secularists with their philosophy of progress, and the misguided Christians with their theology of prosperity. They have both fallen for the lie that only the human person can change the world. They both deny the power of God’s grace. In neither of them can we find hope, the sure hope of the faithful Christian.
Work of human hands is noble
This is not in any way to take away from the nobility of work. The Fathers of the Church wrote about practical work as a way of disciplining our bodies and a way of teaching us important things about salvation. Our Holy Father Benedict, in his recent encyclical letter, writes on this topic.
The young noblemen who flocked to his monasteries had to engage in manual labor…... A wild plot of forest land is rendered fertile—and in the process, the trees of pride are felled, whatever weeds may be growing inside souls are pulled up, and the ground is thereby prepared so that bread for body and soul can flourish.
You only have to walk into any Benedictine house and there, carved somewhere you cannot miss, you will find the words “Ora et Labora” “Prayer and Work.” Those who pray with fervor also work with fervor. That is why the Church must always do works of mercy, not to bring about a more prosperous world or to increase gross domestic output, but to shape our hearts into the plowshares and pruning hooks of which the prophet Isaiah spoke. “They shall turn their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. They shall train for war no more.” Doing work is noble, all the more noble when that work praises God.
Human freedom allows us to make choices
Human work can do great things. It can also do great evil and harm. We are indeed the hands of God in this world. But we are not God and we cannot change the hearts and minds of the world without the help of grace. We can choose to do evil as well as good. The irony of it all is that God’s gift of freedom empowers us to do evil as well as good. Since man always remains free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitively established in this world. Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last for ever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself.
Isaiah spoke of a New Jerusalem, a theme that is taken up in the Book of Revelation. Isaiah calls the people to be people of hope and to look to Jerusalem.. But it is the Lord who will bring the tribes to his city, it is God who will raise up the poor and the lowly. A new City of God will rise from all the folly and the strife of our lives. But human effort, can sanctify and improve the world when we do them in awe and wonder at the power of God.
In these weeks of festivity, feasting and family get-togethers, let us be joyful and hopeful. Even when we do stupid and sinful things we are loved by a merciful God. Our repentance brings a smile to the face of God our Father. Our successes please him and our failures soften his heart even more for us in our trouble. We are commanded to do good and to avoid evil, but our salvation does not depend only on our own strength of character and our record of good deeds. We are indeed a people full of hope, full of the joy that comes from knowing that our God loves us. God is on our side, he is always Immanuel – God with us.
Father Tim Kelly, Pastor, SMM
December 12th 2007 Feast of Our lady of Guadalupe.