Here is my homily for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 27, 2009. Thanks for checking in and reading and responding…
The gospel for today: Mk 9:38-43, 45, 47-48
At that time, John said to Jesus,
“Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name,
and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.”
Jesus replied, “Do not prevent him.
There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name
who can at the same time speak ill of me.
For whoever is not against us is for us.
Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink
because you belong to Christ,
amen, I say to you, will surely not lose his reward.
“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,
it would be better for him if a great millstone
were put around his neck
and he were thrown into the sea.
If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.
It is better for you to enter into life maimed
than with two hands to go into Gehenna,
into the unquenchable fire.
And if your foot causes you to sin, cut if off.
It is better for you to enter into life crippled
than with two feet to be thrown into Gehenna.
And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.
Better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye
than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna,
where ‘their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.'”
HOMILY:
Many heard the story last week in the news that horrified people around the country. An 18 year old young woman who is a freshman at Hofstra University in New York reported to police that she had been at a party with a group of people. A young man had lured her back to his frat house where she was tied up in a bathroom stall and raped by five of these young men.
Most people just hearing that story are incredibly repulsed by such evil. That there are evil individuals like rapists in the first place – that’s hard enough for us to comprehend. But for five people to be together and all five of these young college men to participate in such a hateful act of abuse and no one stop it – well, I just couldn’t understand it. I suppose that because I am working with college students, I’m a bit more sensitive and protective of “my kids” – so hearing something like that, well it stayed with me longer than many other horrible stories that I hear or read in the news. It bothered me so much that while I was at a meeting on campus with some administrators, sharing some observations, concerns and so forth about our students here, I began to cite this story as an example of some of my concerns. How do 5 young men participate in such deviant, destructive behavior? And as I was recounting the story, I was interrupted by someone around the table.
“Father, you must not have heard the news this morning.” Which I hadn’t. “The woman recanted her accusation. This was consensual.” Rather quickly, people around the table kind of shrugged their shoulders, nodded as if to say “Oh…” And sure enough, this person was right. In the newspaper there was a picture of the young men, posing in front of the jail they had just been released from. The headline “HOFSTRA CO-ED’S RAPE CLAIM A LIE” as the young men smiled with thumbs ups as they celebrated the fact that the truth came out. The story talked about how family members, understandably, were relieved that the charges were found to be false. How they wanted justice now for the false accusation and talked about how outraged how “ridiculous” they felt this young woman was.
After all it was consensual.
While I’m glad the truth came out – I definitely wouldn’t want these five men to go away to prison for 25 years for a crime they didn’t commit – what sickened me even further with this whole episode is the reaction people had to “the truth.”
So let me get this straight – because this was consensual, it was okay? Really? And so, the fact that this young woman made this horrible accusation – and it was a horrible accusation – the fact that she felt such shame, such embarrassment, such fear of being labeled or ridiculed by classmates, such worry of being rejected by people that she loved for making this “consensual” decision – that she lashed out the way she did – does that tell us something too?
Some accused her of being crazy. But I just kept reading these stories to find any of the young men or their families to acknowledge or even hint that THIS WAS A BAD THING THAT THEY ALL DID. Yet, the consensus was, no it was okay because it was consensual.
And that perhaps has bothered me most of all. Because this isn’t just about sex. This isn’t about how our world or our culture continue to cheapen sex and devalue it and pretend or ignore that as we continue to cheapen and devalue and misuse sex (and one another) and use it for our own selfish needs or wants – that it leaves a trail of brokenness and hurt among many men and women. That’s one major thing to be concerned about.
But the bigger question here that Jesus challenges us with tonight basically asks exactly how comfortable are we with sin? As we’ve become more and more disconnected or isolated from one another, we seem to be losing a sense that my sin affects you and your sin affects me. Whether it’s something minor like a guy screaming a curse word across campus – or something more dramatic, a sin of indifference where a person gets hit by a car and people continue to walk on – not even stopping to see if how bad the person was hurt and what they could do to help.
Your sin affects me just as my sin affects you. Which is why Jesus is using such dramatic imagery in the gospel today. Jesus goes so far as to suggest the amputation of limbs than to allow those body parts to contribute to the cooperation of evil which could hurt us and others.
[You can insert your own comments concerning the five young men]
His point is that the goal of being a Christian is to get to Heaven. The goal is to live like we’re citizens of heaven already and that we have to help each other as we journey to get there. That’s why Jesus kind of blows off the petty concern that John makes in the gospel – Jesus they’re not in our group and they’re casting out demons in your name. As Christians, you and I need to be focused on heaven – getting there ourselves and taking everyone with us. And whether the Newman Catholic Campus Ministry does that – the missionaries from FOCUS or some other group of Christians – the important thing for all of us who say that we love Jesus is to act like we do… And the most common thing among all those who say they love Jesus is that they hate sin Because sin in short is an invitation to Hell.
The problem is, in Facebook-terminology, we haven’t RSVP’d to that invitation. We haven’t accepted the invite – but we haven’t exactly declined. It’s just there. That’s what sin does – it looks attractive. It tries to connive us to take a glance, give it a try, what the hell? [pun intended]
Consensual or not, for that young woman and those five young men – they’ve experienced Hell. For that young woman to make up such an accusation tells you the depths of the pain, anguish and shame she felt. If it was as “ok” as the world seemed to treat it once they realized it wasn’t a rape and was a consensual act – she wouldn’t have been driven to such despair and depression to do what she did. And for those young “men” who participated in this, (and I use the word “men” loosely) the lack of conscious they had, the fact that they felt vindicated should frighten any woman who would go out on a date with these individuals.
Yes, they’ve experienced Hell. And the more we shrug our shoulders and say “Oh” and just move on – bewildered – rather than call it what it is – sin – the more we allow one another to think that perhaps it’s okay, or, well, it’s not my place to say something like that to tell someone else that that’s wrong or, I don’t want people to be offended by my beliefs; yes, the more we don’t want to confront our own sinfulness and truly have a change of heart – realizing that my sins affect you and your sins affects me – the closer we all get to revoking our heavenly citizenship, to rejecting God’s love, to hitting ‘Ignore’ on Christ’s invitation to Eternal Life.
