Homily for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
18 August 2013
18 August 2013
Fire.
Many people love
it. Many people hate it. Some people are fascinated by it. Some people fear it.
It destroys, but it also creates. Its flames and heat terrorize, but it also
soothes through its almost whimsical dance.
The one thing it
does universally is to move people. Literally.
When we see fire,
we want to stay the heck away. We don’t want to be burned! Sometimes the heat
and the brightness are too overwhelming, and we have a sensual overload.
In today’s Gospel,
we hear Jesus announce that He was sent to bring fire upon the Earth, and how
He lamented the fact that it was not already burning. That fire which Jesus was
talking about was the movement of the Spirit in the hearts of the people of
God. Yes, while the Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus hadn’t
yet happened, which means Pentecost and the decent of the Holy Spirit hadn’t
yet happened, the Law and the Prophets had somehow failed to move the people to
live by the Covenant they had with the Lord.
Jesus wanted His
words, His actions – His very presence! – to move the people to a deeper
relationship with the Father. He wanted to ignite in the hearts of all women
and men a desire to burn with passion for the Lord.
And He still does.
Jesus wants us to
be, to use a phrase I’ve somewhat coined, “spiritual pyromaniacs”. Jesus,
through our relationship with Him in Word and in Sacrament, wants us to take
the flame of faith that we received at our Baptism and spread it in the world.
He doesn’t want us to be timid or shy about our faith. He wants that fire to
literally move you and me to bring others closer to God. To be a “spiritual
pyromaniac” means that you and I have a burning desire for God in our lives,
and, by the way we live our lives, want it to be spread to our family and
friends.
But why should we want
this fire? To be a spiritual pyromaniac calls us to recognize the power of the fire
of God’s love. To be agents of spiritual pyromania with this fire calls us to
become agents of evangelization. Spiritual pyromania teaches us that this fire
is for us the agent by which the Gospel becomes alive and the life force in
this world so full of spiritual death and spiritually dead people.
However, to be a
true spiritual pyromaniac demands us to goes a bit further.
One who truly knows
and understands the great power that fire has is constantly reminded that fire
doesn’t simply “burn” – it consumes. And through its consumption, it purifies.
The fire that Jesus wants us to burn with is the fire which consumes all that
is distorted, evil, vile, misguided, and wrong in our lives. To be a true
spiritual pyromaniac is to allow the fire of the Holy Spirit to burn away, to
consume by its heat and its glow everything that divides our hearts from God,
the Gospel, and our role in its evangelization. One who truly engages in
spiritual pyromania allows the fire of God’s love to burn away anything that
divides one’s heart from loving God alone.
What needs to
remain is a purified, unadulterated, unified love for the Heart of God. This is
important because one who burns alive with an uncontrollable fire in their life
for our God knows that this becomes a fire of unbridled passion for our God.
And so the true spiritual pyromaniac moves from “consumption” to
“consummation”, allowing the fire of the passion we have for God and God’s
fiery passion for us to join together in one ecstatic movement and mission.
When the fire of
our hearts joins in the consummation of God’s love for all that He has created,
everything that we have been, are, and hope to become is united into the
eternal will of God. Our lives and our will fail to become our own, but are
used as torches burning brightly to allow God’s will to be completed on this
Earth. The fiery consummation of our hearts to God, just as the consummation
between man and wife, will allow new life to come forth in the way that the
Lord calls us to the vocation, mission and ministry He has invited us to from
the moment of our initiation into the Church.
Be warned! If we
truly live out this spiritual pyromania, if we exercise this emphatic flame in
our hearts for the evangelization of the Gospel, people are not going to want
to hear us. They will be repulsed by us, by our message, and even by our very
presence. Our secular society doesn’t want to its members to become spiritual
pyromaniacs, because when one lets the fire of God’s love to consume one’s
self, and allow that consumption to turn into the consummation of our hearts to
God’s, it scares people. It scares people because there is no controlling the
Heart of God; there is no controlling the flames of the Spirit.
But they want their
control. They want to be able to turn on the flames of passion when it suits
them and to turn off the flame to exact revenge and so-called justice toward
those who wrong them. Society tells us it’s better for us to control the fire
that God has placed within us. This is such a lie. God wants us to live with
reckless abandon in the fire of His love. He wants us to constantly be consumed
by the passion which burns for us, and we, in return, ache for the consummation
of our entire being to be united with our God.
The fire given to
us by God IS divisive. The message of the Gospel is not one of bunnies and
rainbows and cheap ideas of love, peace and daisies. The fire of the Gospel
should enrage us for God’s justice to be poured upon the Earth. The fire Jesus
came to give us is a call to radical love, radical poverty and radical
relationship – that everything that we think, say and do should never be about
us, but is a call to care for the others in our lives. The Gospel is difficult to live out. The call
to evangelization is one that scares us to death. But that’s the moment where
we need to be consumed by the fire of God, and seek out our heart’s
consummation to His.
My brothers and
sisters, to be true disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ is to be willing
participants in the evangelization of the Gospel: Allowing the fire we have for
our God to be spread to others by the way we live our lives. People will reject
us, reject the message of the Gospel . . . They’ll even reject the fire of
God’s love in their lives. Nevertheless, if we truly accept our call to be
spiritual pyromaniacs, then the Lord will never allow the fire of His love to
be extinguished in our hearts. Rather, He will intensify that love; He will add
fuel to the fire. And that fuel is the very Eucharist we celebrate today. And
in our consumption of that Most Blessed Sacrament, the Lord will consume us in
the fire of His passion for us. We, then, in turn, need to allow the
consummation of our hearts, our lives, and our will to that of God’s. And in
that consumption and consummation, we never become ashamed of the Gospel.
That is what it
means to be a spiritual pyromaniac. That is what it is to never run away from
the fire of God’s love, but, ultimately, to run into it with reckless and
ecstatic abandon.
We heed the words of
Saint Catherine of Siena:
If
you are what you should be, you will set the whole world on fire.
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Enjoy the journey . . .
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