The Eternal Wedding Feast

 

In a world where resources were scarce and the food supply limited, what better image for the kingdom of heaven than the abundance suggested by a joyful wedding feast – a royal one at that! That said, the parable leaves us wondering about a number of things. Most obviously, we wonder why did those originally invited guests refuse to come to the feast?

In ordinary life, who turns down an invitation to a royal wedding?  On the contrary, people go to great lengths to get themselves invited to such occasions and are more than willing to rearrange their schedules as needed. In this parable, however, some ignored the invitation and went away, while others (even more strangely) aggressively rejected the invitation. Of course, this was not any ordinary royal wedding, but a parable about the kingdom of heaven itself. Throughout history, there have always been people who have aggressively resisted God’s kingdom. (That’s why we’ve had so many martyrs in the Church’s history – more, incidentally, in the last century than in any previous one!) Even so, I suspect, many more people probably fall into the less aggressive category of those that just ignored the invitation and went away, one to his farm, another to his business. It really is very easy to become completely preoccupied with the small stuff of daily life, with one’s own daily affairs – whether one is constantly climbing up some social or economic or political ladder or whether one is just getting by and making do. If this parable is, on the one hand, a great illustration of God’s great desire to have us all participate in the abundant life of his kingdom, on the other hand it also realistically recognizes how easily the ordinary business of daily life can, if we let it, confuse our priorities and get in the way of our experiencing all that God has in store for us. Of course, the small stuff of daily is important. The question is how important when compared with something that is even more important?

Now, obviously, we who are here today will want to identify ourselves with the second group – those gathered in from all over the place.

The parable makes it clear that those in this group were no better or more deserving than those who turned down the initial invitation, but they were willing to give God a try.  And, for those who follow through, that readiness to respond makes all the difference! Certainly, it has to be quite consoling for us to hear that God’s kingdom is not some kind of closed shop or private club, that there’s plenty of room for even the likes of us!  

But, unlike a classic fairy tale the parable lacks a classic “happy ending.” In Jesus’ world, as in most societies, even a last-minute addition to the guest list for a formal occasion would presumably know enough to dress for the event - unlike in our society where many seem to have completely forgotten (or maybe never learned) how to dress appropriately at any time for any event. Even so, I suspect even a last-minute addition to the guest list for, say, a State Dinner would want to fit in and would want like he or she belonged there. But when the king came in to meet the guests, he saw a man there not dressed in a wedding garment.

That’s what happens, some skeptics might say, when you just open the door and let anyone and everyone in. The story says both bad and good alike, so the king can’t say he wasn’t warned! Just because the door has now been opened to all, it does not follow that the king has abandoned all expectations about how guests are supposed to behave. Being inclusive doesn’t mean anything goes. Responding to the invitation represented an initial option for the kingdom. But, as we all know, people don’t all always follow through on their commitments. Sadly, even of those that do in fact show up, not all will follow up!

When challenged, the casually dressed guest was reduced to silence. He had no excuse. If there is one thing we are usually very good at, it is finding and making excuses! But on Judgment Day the time for excuses will be over.

As already noted, the kingdom of heaven is not a closed shop or private club. It extends a wide-open invitation to all. That invitation having been accepted, however, membership in God’s kingdom - from the initial invitation to the final judgment - is intended to be taken in all its awesome seriousness,  lest we too be found with no excuse, reduced to silence for all eternity.

Homily for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, October 11, 2020. The entire Mass may be watched on the Immaculate Conception Parish Facebook page.

The Veep Debate

Historically, voters rarely, if ever, base their vote on the vice-presidential candidate. Hence the vice-presidential debate does not generally rate the highest interest. Classically at such a debate, the expectation of a new veep nominee is to show that he (in this case, she) can look and act presidential, which she did. Both candidates established their serious standing to be possible presidential contenders in the future.

Of course, one unusual reason for watching the veep debate last night was simply to see something like a normal discussion of the big issues confronting our country, unlike the sorry spectacle put on by President Trump last week. Obviously that was a very low bar to meet. As always, the candidates evaded the issues and avoided answering the exact questions, which is one of the reasons I increasingly see so little value in such debates. That said, this exercise was for the most part happily dull - unlike last week's scandalously high-spirited performance. Even so, although no voices were raised, Vice President Pence set a bad tone by repeatedly taking more time than he was entitled and ignoring the moderator, perhaps aware his boss was watching and would want to see that. In that sense, Pence, with his persistent talking overtime and not really answering the questions, was a milder version of Trump's bad manners.

Moderator Susan Page struggled all evening with his continued contempt for following the rules. She began by asking about what is obviously the pre-eminent moral and political issue facing our country - the coronavirus pandemic. Unsurprisingly, Vice President Pence provided evasive answers tainted by Trumpist fantasies and the remnants of a discredited conservative ideology completely inept when it comes to public health or any public good. Basically what we saw all evening was Pence pretending, by talking calmly, that this is a normal presidency and the issues are normal issues, when what the pandemic in particular has highlighted is how that is simply not the case.

On the second set of questions concerning the role of the veep and presidential health and possible disability, the candidates ignored the questions even more blatantly, although Harris did at least express a commitment to transparency, something which has been notably absent in this present instance of presidential illness.

On the economy, Harris highlighted the fundamental differences between the two sets of candidates - measuring the health of the economy by the strength of workers and families vs. measuring it by its benefits for the rich. Pence, perhaps to please his boss, interrupted Harris, while unsurprisingly falling back on the old Republican talking point about taxes and the Trump tax cuts.

By the time, they got to the environment and climate change, anyone watching probably could have recited their predictable answers in advance. The problem, of course, when the debate is increasingly between assertions of alternative sets of facts, how does the audience adjudicate between such completely incommensurate fact claims?

Harris seemed very strong when talking about foreign policy, using the helpful imagery of relationships. Pence suffered from a compulsive need to show that everything the Obama Administration did was a total disaster, which got in the way of making any kind of positive case for his own administration. The question for today, as Ronald Reagan famously said, is whether we are better off now. Making tedious comparisons with a previous administration does not speak to today. It was almost as if he preferred not to have to talk that much about the present.

It might have been too much to have expected Harris to explain the merit of increasing the number of seats on the Supreme Court - what Pence derisively dismissed as "court packing ' which sounds a lot scarier than it is. Sooner or later, however, Democrats need to explain why the concept is not so scary at all. That said, Harris did a good job of highlighting how the Republicans have in their own fashion been "packing" the courts with their own ideologues.

On the crucial question of a fair election and a peaceful transition of power, instead of answering Pence repeated Trump's complaints about the 2016 election and subsequent events. Again, one wonders if he felt that he had to say that to please his boss.

In general, the discussion improved over time. But the talking past the time limit continued to the consternation of the hapless moderator - and the growing boredom of the audience. Gradually Harris became more assertive about claiming time for herself. It will be interesting to see how that is received - a woman asserting for herself the traditional male prerogative Pence practiced so effortlessly of interrupting and talking over others.

Harris did a good job of highlighting the threat to so many people's health care posed by this administration and their Supreme Court nominee. She might have served her cause even better by talking about it even more every chance she could.  After the issue of the president himself and the survival of constitutional democracy, health care is the Democrats' strongest issue.

When all is said and done, it is unlikely that many minds - or votes - were changed, or that we will even be talking much about this event much beyond today.

Patriotic Duty

A "patriotic duty" is what former Vice President Joe Biden called wearing a face mask during last night's "Town Hall."  Some things - like the moral imperative to wear a mask - ought to be so obvious that they should not have to be said at all. It is a sign of our extremely distressed state as a national community that, instead of being obvious, the duty to wear a mask has become one more thing for us to argue about.

Recently, Dr. Robert Redfield, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a Senate panel that face masks might prove to be our best protection against the virus, maybe even better than an elusive vaccine which we do not yet have. If everyone wore a mask for the next two to three months, he said, “We’d bring this pandemic under control.”

Imagine such a simple response to our present predicament! All we need to do is take this disease seriously and use the means at our disposal to limit the spread of infection. Nothing more heroic than that is being asked of us. 

Yet every day I encounter people in public without masks. What do they think they are doing? What motivates such behavior? 

Already more than 200,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. Undoubtedly, given the newness and the ferocity of this virus some of those losses might have been unavoidable. But we can see from the experience of other societies which have handled this better that we have lost many more than we might have had we taken this disease seriously from the beginning as if all of us together as a society had done the sorts of things we needed to do -  like wearing face masks in public.

The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation has predicted that as many as 363,000 Americans may die of Covid-19 by the end of this year. As others have observed, that would be more Americans dying in less than one year from the virus than the entire number of combat deaths in four years in World War II. But that same institute’s model also suggests that, if 95% of Americans wore masks then as many as 100,000 lives might be saved between now and the end of the year.

Bad behavior, socially irresponsible behavior - like not wearing a mask whenever in public - is not inevitable. it is a choice, a bad choice, an immoral choice. It reflects the evil ideology of individualism and its false notion of freedom. But individualism, as Pope Francis has once again reminded us in his latest encyclical "does not make us more free." Nor does it make us "more equal, more fraternal" (Fratelli Tutti, 105). On the contrary, if we are to have any hope of arresting our social disintegration, we must together again become conscious of our responsibility to and for one another, without which there is no such thing as society, only suffering - that moral state of war which Thomas Hobbes long ago wrote about in which human life really is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." For too man of our fellow citizens, sadly, such is their life right now.

In this crisis, regarding masks and so much else, one's "patriotic duty" is increasingly obvious.

Fratelli Tutti

On Saturday, the vigil of the feast of Saint Francis, the Holy Father travelled to Assisi to celebrate Mass in the crypt where Saint Francis is buried and to sign there his latest encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship, which may be said to represent a kind of compendium of Pope Francis' social and political thought at this point in his pontificate and in this time of pandemic. It forms the third part of a programmatic trilogy consisting of his Apostollic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, his environmental encyclical Laudato Si', and now Fratelli Tutti.

The encyclical is long, as such documents tend to be. It is wordy and full of quotations of previous papal pronouncements, a perennial problem which makes it unlikely that ordinary Catholics - let alone others - will take the time to read it all. Which is a great shame, of course, for the Pope has here given us a profound and purposeful response to the catastrophe of contemporary society and politics.

Like his earlier environmental encyclical, Laudato Si', this document derives its title from words attributed to Saint Francis, whose spirit animates this encyclical as it animated its predecessor. Indeed, the document begins by recalling Saint Francis' famous visit to Sultan Malik-el-Kamil at the time of the Crusades, demonstrating "the breadth and grandeur of his love, which sought to embrace everyone." In that spirit, just as in Laudato Si' the Pope paid special mention to Orthodox Partiarch Bartholomew, here he acknowledges Grand Immam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, whom he met in Abu Dhabi in 2019 when the two issued a statement "on Human Fraternity and World Peace and Living Together." 

The Pope summarizes the purpose of this encyclical as his "hope that in the face of present-day attempts to eliminate or ignore others, we may prove capable of responding with a new vision of fraternity and social friendship that will not remain at the level of words." That contrast between fraternity and social friendship on the one hand and attempts to eliminate or ignore others on the other comes close to summing up the spirit and sense of the encyclical, the principle which animates the document's detailed discussions of particular political problems and economic and social situations characteristic of contemporary societies. 

The encyclical was begun before the pandemic. In light of the added dimension provided by the world's poor response to the pandemic, the Pope asserts: "Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality." He expresses a similar sentiment about the financial crisis of 2008, the response to which "did not include rethinking the outdated criteria which continue to rule the world."

Parts of the encyclical sound almost like direct responses to the current crisis of U.S. politics and to the recent dominance of neo-liberal economics, as well as an attempt tp articulate a meaningful middle ground between the excesses of globalization and universalism, on the one hand, and localism and "populism," on the other. Thus, for example:

"Political life no longer has to do with healthy debates about long-term plans to improve people's lives and to advance the common good, but only with slick marketing techniques primarily aimed at discrediting others."

"we no longer have common horizons that unite us"

"Things that until a few years ago could not be said by anyone without risking the loss of universal respect can now be said with impunity, and in the crudest of terms, even by some political figures."

"Individualism does not make us more free, more equal, more fraternal."

"We need to pay attention to the global so as to avoid narrowness and banality. Yet we also need to look to the local, which keeps our feet on the ground."

"There can be a false openness to the universal, born of the shallowness of those lacking insight into the genius of their native land or harboring unresolved resentment towards their own people."

"Lack of concern for the vulnerable can hide behind a populism that exploits them demagogically for its own purposes, or a liberalism that serves the economic interests of the powerful."

"The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith."

The Pope is particularly strong in his emphasis on the traditional Christian understanding of "the common destination of created goods," citing Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Gregory the Great, and Saint Paul VI, and also citing Laudato Si': "the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property" and "if we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all."

On immigration, he specifically cites the case of the United States, calling Latino culture "a ferment of values and possibilities that can greatly enrich the United States."

The Pope remains particularly committed to a culture of dialogue: "Authentic social dialogue involves the ability to respect the other's point of view and to admit that it may include legitimate convictions and concerns." How different the Pope's perspective from so many disputants in our contemporary culture wars, who unhesitatingly dismiss each other as malevolent and are completely incapable of recognizing the perspective which underlies the other's position on such sensitive issues! Francis notes: "A realistic and inclusive social covenant must also be a 'cultural covenant,' one that respects and acknowledges the different worldviews, cultures and lifestyles that coexist in society."

The Pope has some particularly insightful things to say about conflict about forgiveness. Unsurprisingly this leads into a more predictable discussion of war and the death penalty.  The latter issue has continued to be particularly salient in American politics. While recognizing legitimate public authority's right to punish crimes, the Pope develops a less familiar strain in the tradition, citing Lactantius, Pope Nicholas I, and Saint Augustine against capital punishment. Francis cites his own past words calling "for the abolition of the death penalty" and also opposing life imprisonment.

These are just some of the preeminent points the Pope makes throughout this lengthy and very detailed document, to which I am sure we will return with greater specificity in days to come.

The encyclical addresses many issues, some of which will undoubtedly appear contentious in the American context, where a certain strain of American Catholicism seems increasingly more aligned with the President than with the Pope. 

Francis concludes by invoking Blessed Charles de Foucauld's "journey of transformation towards feeling a brother to all." In a document focused on high-stakes issues of politics and economics and social and cultural policy, it seems a very fitting return - in the spirit of Saint Francis - to what is foundational for a full Christian life, exemplified in the modern era in "the universal brother," Blessed Charles de Foucauld.

Produce at the Proper Time

 

Our recent history has keenly focused our attention on the fragility of our national society and its institutions, both religious and secular.  Many of us here are surely old enough to remember a time when religion’s public place in American society seemed strong and secure, when Church attendance was higher than it had ever been, when seminaries and convents were bursting at the seams, and when it seemed as if things could go on like that forever. A similar assessment could be made in the secular world. Many of us are old enough to remember a time when manufacturing jobs were plentiful, labor unions were strong, a family could support itself on a single salary, prosperity (while not universal) was much more equally shared, and our country was a pioneer in public health. Recent years have witnessed widespread decline in most of those measures, and this year has been basically one calamity after another – a global pandemic, economic collapse, and racial and political conflicts that have wiped out any pretense of social harmony. As we survey the shambles of what once seemed so strong and sound, we may easily appreciate the Prophet Isaiah’s description of the vineyard that had so dramatically failed to produce its expected crop of grapes.  Just as we today instinctively seek explanations for the things that have gone wrong, likewise the Prophet Isaiah both sought and provided an explanation for the disasters that Israel was facing. In Israel’s case, of course, there was no ambiguity about why things were going so badly. The vineyard in Isaiah’s song represented God’s People who, in spite of all God had done for them, had failed in fidelity.

Centuries later, Jesus used the same image of the vineyard to challenge his hearers regarding their own response. Even though this particular parable does not begin with the typical introduction, “the kingdom of heaven is like,” it is pretty obvious, nonetheless, that we are intended to hear and interpret it in continuity with Isaiah’s vineyard song. In other words, we are intended to hear and interpret it from the standpoint of the landowner, who is obviously the parable’s stand-in for God.

Historically, of course, Jesus addressed this parable to the chief priests and elders of the people, with whom he was in conflict, because of their failure to recognize and accept him. Through them, however, he is now addressing this parable to all of us, for whom it should be even more obvious who is meant, when the landowner sends his son. Hence his question (What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants when he comes?) is addressed as much to us, as it was in the first instance, to the chief priests and elders of the people.  And, like them, we all know the obvious answer, even before we hear them say it.

This, of course, is what conversion, becoming a disciple, challenges us to do – to look at ourselves and at our relationship with God without excuses, from God’s point of view. When we do that, then we necessarily have to re-evaluate everything – just as the stone that the builders rejected was re-evaluated in order to become the cornerstone. And then we will become a new kind of tenant – a people that will produce fruit.

Now that’s actually meant to be good news. In other words, there is a solution to the basic human predicament. We can get right again with God (and with one another). Unfortunately for those in the parable’s original audience whose failure to respond positively to Jesus provided the historical basis for the parable, what’s meant to be good news for the world may have sounded like bad news for them. The challenge of the parable is to recognize the incredible opportunity God has given us in sending us his Son, a life-transforming opportunity - to adapt the words of a famous 19th-century hymn, to mend our foolish ways, r-clothe us in our rightful mind, In purer lives God’s service find, – in other words, to become better tenants in God’s vineyard, this world in which he has put us, and get on board as fully active citizens of God’s kingdom. 

Homily for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, October 4, 2020.