What God wants for us

Homily for November 6, 2016 (32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
2 Maccabees 7:-12, 9-14; Psalm 17; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38

Very early this morning (2 AM!) we marked the beginning of Daylight Saving Time.  We were called to “fall back” one hour on our clocks.  This will give us brighter mornings…and earlier evenings.  But setting back our clocks can’t change the fact that, for the next five weeks our daylight hours will continue to dwindle.  It will get darker…and colder! Autumn will inexorably become winter as surely as we move through the various seasons of human life, from infancy to (hopefully) our senior years and finally death.

Sadly, for far too many people in our world and in our neighborhoods, death comes early, quickly and cruelly.  Just last weekend, as the Cubs were battling to win the World Series, 17 people were killed in Chicago.   Like the seven young men and their mother in our reading from 2 Maccabees, people continue to be tortured and murdered for their faith.  In the 2nd century BCE, they were among the many Jews in Palestine who resisted the imposition of Greek culture and customs and chose instead to be faithful to the Law of Moses and the covenant of their ancestors. Today ISIS fanatics torture and kill Christians, Yazidis and even other Muslims in their efforts to create a caliphate and impose their twisted version of Islam on people in Iraq.

In the midst of so much death Jesus in the gospel reminds us that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob “is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”  When we proclaim the Gospel of Life in the face of a globalized Culture of Death, we are not proclaiming an abstraction but rather the natural and concrete consequence of who God is and what God wants for us not only in this life but also in eternity.

In one of the Eucharistic prefaces that we use for Masses for the Dead, we hear:  “for your faithful, Lord, life is changed, not ended, and when this earthly dwelling turns to dust, an eternal dwelling is made ready for them in heaven.” Living with this hope, we can join St. Paul and hold each other in prayer, relying on the strength and protection of our loving and faithful God.  Living with that same hope, we also deepen our desire and commitment to loving one another and changing lives here on earth.

That same spirit of hope and holy resistance to violence and oppression, especially against those who are most vulnerable, is what inspired Sr. Rosemary Nyirumbe to found St. Monica Tailoring School near Gulu, Uganda for girls and young women who had been abducted and turned into child soldiers and sex slaves by Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army.  Many of them returned home only to be ostracized by family and friends.

Sr. Rosemary learned tailoring and sewing skills in order to teach her young charges.  Today with the assistance of the USA-based Sewing Hope Foundation they take materials that people would otherwise throw away and turn them into beautiful handbags, clothing and jewelry that are sold online to support the mission.  Sr. Rosemary more recently started a literacy and writing program for adults.  In doing their work, her students not only develop new skills, they also recover a sense of their own dignity.  Their lives are changed, not ended.  Just as surely as fall turns into winter, winter also turns into spring. +