Fr Mathew's Homily: A 23 rd Sunday

First reading from Ezekiel: If your brother dies in his sin, you will be held accountable. In other words, you are your brother’s keeper.

Paul reminds us that love, tested in immediate relationship with our neighbor, is the fulfillment of all laws. The dramatic sins of adultery, murder, and stealing are violations of the law of love as they reflect selfishness, manipulation, and egotism.

The gospel presents three strategies for conflict resolution: They’re confrontation, negotiation, and adjudication. In ecclesiastical terminology, adjudication is called excommunication.

The force of excommunication is lost on American individualists who have little allegiance to any group, including family.  Americans prefer to “go it alone” and “do it my way.”(Remember the song, “I did it my way”). “See if I care. I gotta be me

Without community and family one is effectively dead. When we exclude family and community, and only “I” matters, spiritually we’re committing suicide because God is Trinity, Family and Community.

What is sin? I am not asking you the Baltimore catechism definition of Sin! Sin is brokenness in our life. It’s a disarray and rupture in us and in our relationship with God.It is disharmony; it is isolation.

It's in this context Jesus says in today's gospel, ‘If two or more gathered in my name I will be there.” When there is harmony God is there because God is, as I mentioned before, Trinity: God is community, family, harmony and a flow of relationships.

What is hell? The real hell is disharmony, disconnection. It is the land of brokenness Some people think that heaven and hell start only after death. That is not true. Heaven and hell start here on this earth right now as we're alive.  When we are in disarray- when there is brokenness in our relationships whether in our families or communities, we start hell here.  

We initiate here either hell or heaven depending on our relationships and then it’s perpetuated here after our death. According to Teresa of Avila, our relationships in community and family are the indicators of our greater relationship to God than the heights of mystical prayer.

A few years ago, there was a picture in "Outdoor" magazine of two huge and beautiful mules that had died horrible deaths.  These two deer mules had gotten into a fight, locked horns, and could not get free. They died with horns tightly in place.

Let me tell you, there are a lot of people who have locked horns with someone, and as a result, are dying a slow, bitter and agonizing death.  We start dying here with horns pinned and that gradual spiritual death becomes complete after our physical death by ending up in real hell.

In his book “The Great Divorce”, C. S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist, draws a stark picture of hell. -According to him, hell is like a great, vast city, a city inhabited only at its outer edges, with rows and rows of empty houses in the middle. These houses in the middle are empty because everyone who once lived there has quarreled with the neighbors and moved.

Then, they quarreled with the new neighbors and moved again, leaving the streets and the houses of their old neighborhoods empty and barren. Lewis says, ‘That is how hell has gotten so large. It is empty at its center and inhabited only at the outer edges, because everyone chose distance instead of honest confrontation when it came to dealing with their relationships.

From this it is very obvious that reconciliation and harmony are “sine qua non” conditions in our spiritual life without which we can not enter heaven.

Reconciliation implies two people.  It may take many years to happen.  However, forgiveness can happen in two minutes. Why forgive?

A couple years ago, during one summer there was power outage in Mattawan. There was no electricity for five days in my house.

I have an old refrigerator downstairs in the basement, besides one I have in the Kitchen. I had kept some fish and meat in that old refrigerator in the basement.   For some reason, I had forgotten all about the meat and fish in the refrigerator in the basement during the outage.One day as I was going to the car garage through the basement I felt a foul smell.

I followed the odor, and it took me to that back room off the rectory basement. It was coming from the refrigerator.  When I opened its door, it almost knocked me over. I won't give you the gross details of what I saw and smelled - but I'm sure you can imagine it.  I spent the next two hours emptying and cleaning the refrigerator, and spraying Lysol into the air, and lighting candles and doing everything I could do… to get that smell out of the air.

Why should I forgive?  When I harbor anger and revenge and hateful thoughts, I am like that rotten refrigerator. We are like walking- rotting -open garbage bag emitting foul smell.  With that foul smell, do you think you can ever enter heaven?

Final thoughts: 

Here are a few questions for our reflection

---Do I have any unfinished business in my life with regard to my relationships to any members of my family or community?

---By evaluating my emotions with regard to my relationships, can I say there is no brokenness and rupture and disharmony in my relationship to my family and community and thereby to God?

---If I die right now, because I have started heaven here on this earth and because of my optimum relationship with my family and community, can I say I can claim heaven in the life after death?

---Because of my unfinished business with the members of family and community, am I walking around like garbage bag diffusing foul smell?

---If so what steps have I taken to dispose of that smelly garbage bag of hate and anger that I have been carrying around?