Mid-Lent in East Tennessee

 

A couple of weeks ago, we all heard Peter’s famous words while watching Jesus transfigured: Lord, it is good for us to be here! Now I am not Peter, and Summit Hill is not quite Mount Tabor, but – with all the appropriate caveats – I can with all my heart echo Peter today: how good it is to be here! In my 28+ years of priesthood, I have had an abundance of good experiences, but I can say with no exaggeration that I never have I been happier as a priest than in my 10 years here as your pastor. So, it is good to be here!

 

And in that spirit of genuine joy, we mark this Laetare Sunday, as is the Church’s custom with rose vestments and flowers on the altar, traditional symbols of rejoicing, even as we push full speed ahead into the even more somber second half of Lent.

 

Last night, some of you were present at The Foundry for our retrospective on 50 years of Paulist ministry in Knoxville. In fact, as many of you may know, the Paulist Fathers have been serving the Church in Tennessee much longer than that, starting way back in 1900 with 54 years of mission outreach in Middle Tennessee. With Winchester, TN, as the Paulist Fathers’ home base, those early missionaries preached literally from a trailer and helped establish parishes which still thrive today in the capable hands of the local diocesan clergy. Then, from 1954 until 2013, the Paulist Fathers maintained a major mission parish in Memphis. And then, as you all know, we have been here in Knoxville since 1973, sharing the good news of Christ and the life of his Church in this city’s downtown at its oldest Catholic Church and at its university. 

 

As Paulist Fathers, we are committed obviously to the mission of the Church and, in a special way, to our founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker’s conviction that the Catholic Church was just what American culture needed. The world has changed a lot since Hecker’s time, but the Church’s mission - our mission - remains the same. 

As Pope Saint John Paul II famously said: “Those who have come into genuine contact with Christ cannot keep him for themselves, they must proclaim him.” It was for that reason that Hecker felt inspired by the example of Saint Paul and chose him as our community’s patron.

 

Along with preaching and teaching and organizing local churches and recruiting leaders for them, an important part of Paul’s apostolic activity was raising money. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul and his mission partner, Barnabas, brought financial aid for the struggling community in Jerusalem from the Church in Antioch when they went to Jerusalem around the year 46 [Acts 11:29-30]. Over the next decade, a very busy and productive period for Paul, he continued to raise money from his Gentile converts to assist the struggling Church in Jerusalem and wrote about this in some detail in his two letters to the Corinthians [1 Corinthians 16:1-4; 2 Corinthians 8–9] and in his letter to the Romans [Romans 15:25-33]. 

 

Paul’s Financial Appeal was a charitable response to the real needs and struggles of the Jerusalem community and the special responsibilities the Jerusalem Church had in relation to other Christian communities. It was also an expression of – and, for his Gentile converts, a lesson in - the unity and interdependence of individuals and local communities in the wider Church. Paul took this responsibility very seriously, as an essential expression of what it means to be a Church community, what it means to be diverse and different people all united in one Church, one Body of Christ. That is the spirit in which we should approach all the appeals we receive to unite our efforts to meet the multiple needs of the Church here and elsewhere. Among those is our Annual Paulist Appeal, our annual invitation to you to contribute as you can to continue the life and mission of the Paulist Fathers as we with our reduced numbers and aging membership still seek to make real Hecker’s conviction that the Catholic Church is just what American culture needs – because, as we just heard, God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

 

At a particularly challenging and decisive moment in Israel’s history, God called the king of Persia, of all people, to be his chosen instrument in restoring Israel and its Temple. Likewise today, God continues to call upon each of us in surprising and unexpected ways to do surprising and unexpected things.

 

Homily for the 4^th Sunday of Lent (Laetare Sunday) and the Annual Paulist Appeal, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, March 10, 2014.