By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Archbishop Thomas Wenski preached this homily Sunday, Oct. 27, the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, during a Mass at St. Coleman Church, Pompano Beach, where he installed Father Michael Garcia as pastor.
I am happy to be back at St. Coleman again. This is a happier occasion than when I was here for the funeral of Father Tom Foudy.
Of course, I am here today for a special reason. I am here today to formally install Father Michael Garcia as your pastor.
He’s been here a while already – so some of you might be saying, I thought he was the pastor. Well, yes – sort of. When I put a priest in charge of a parish for the first time, I usually name him as an “administrator.” Then, after a while, if he doesn’t mess up too much, I’ll name him a pastor. Different title, new name… same pay, and same responsibilities. But I guess it also means you get to keep him for a while.
So, he will make his profession of faith before all of you shortly – and he pledges that he will do his best to serve you as the pastor of your souls. Being pastor (or even an administrator) is not easy today – if it ever was. The first thing you learn is that you can’t please everybody all the time. But a pastor is not supposed to please everybody – and anyone who tries to will always end up pleasing nobody. No, he is not supposed to try to please everybody, but he is always to try to please the Lord in all things and above all things and, if he does that then, I think, he’ll be a pretty good pastor – a pastor, who as St. Augustine said, is concerned “about feeding his sheep and not just about feeding off of the sheep.”
Let me share a few thoughts on the Gospel reading we have just heard.
Last week, Jesus spoke about the need to pray always – and with great persistence. In today’s Gospel parable – the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector – Jesus teaches us about the proper attitude one must bring to prayer. Sure, in the parable, Jesus condemns a “holier than thou” attitude that seemed to be the “occupational hazard” of the Pharisees and perhaps not a few of the devout. There is a tendency among all of us to make invidious comparisons between ourselves and those we think are “worse” or “lower” than us.
But the parable invites us to go deeper – to the very core of our relationship with God.
God loves us not because we are good (that was how the Pharisee of the parable thought); God loves us despite the fact the we are not good– and, if we do manage to do good, rather than boasting about the good we do, we must humbly recognize that if we’ve done good, it is only because of God’s love working through us.
You know, some people accuse Catholicism of laying “guilt trips” on people. You hear some fallen away Catholics speaking about “Catholic guilt” – and they brag about growing out of it. The Church dares to speak about unpopular, politically incorrect things like sin. She dares to invite us to consider our participation in sin and to seek God’s forgiveness. But this is not about a “guilt trip”; it is about a “reality check.”
Often, we read in the lives of the saints, how they often spoke of their sinfulness. This was not some false humility – but simply a statement of stark reality. And, at every Mass, we are invited to call to mind our sins. But this is not about laying a “guilt trip” on us – it is about making a reality check. Without these reality checks – and they are sometimes called “an examination of conscience” – we can fool ourselves – like the Pharisee in the parable.
And so, in this parable, we see two men – the Pharisee and the tax collector. And one of them, the tax collector, is in contact with reality – and the Pharisee is not.
The postures of the two men of our parable reveal much. The Pharisee stands with his head unbowed – as if the temple belongs to him; the tax collector “keeps his distance” as if he has crossed the threshold of a house in which he really doesn’t belong. The Pharisee talks to himself – not to God – as he lists the virtues he sees in himself, over against the vices he sees in others. We could say that he was so full of himself there was no room for God in his heart – which is he why he left “unjustified.” But the tax collector can only discover (and acknowledge) the sin he finds in himself. In doing so, he creates the space within himself that now God can fill – which is why Jesus says that he left the temple “justified” – which in the language of Scripture means, being in a right relationship with God.
That right relationship with God, or what St. Paul calls in the second reading the “crown of righteousness” that awaited him for having fought the good fight, requires more than just passivity on our side. As we heard in the first reading, “The one who serves God willingly is heard.” We have to have the humility that will allow God to fill up our emptiness – in other words, not to be full of ourselves like the Pharisee but to empty ourselves. In other words, like I said earlier, God doesn’t love us because we are good; but if we are good it is because the love of God has been at work in us. So even when we do good, we must give thanks to God saying with St. Paul, “To him (to God) be glory forever and ever. Amen.
