Homily for November 18, 2007 Thirty-Third Sunday of the Year

The Gospel story for today is Luke 21: 5-19. Jesus tells the people commenting on how the temple is adorned with costly stones and votive offerings that the day will come when not one stone is left standing on another. They ask, “When?” and “What will be the sign?” He answers, “Take care not to be misled” and talks of wars, insurrections, persecutions etc.
The second reading was from 2 Thessalonians 3: 7-12. Whoever will not work, should not eat.
This was also the Sunday on which people came from different parishes (over 10 were represented) to help prepare Thanksgiving Food Baskets.
I read this Gospel thinking of all of you from different parishes who would be coming to help us and, as I often do, I said, "Could I have another Gospel?"
How does that fit? I want to try to make it fit. As I listened to the second reading today - and I had overlooked it in my preparation for Mass - St. Paul said, "Remember how we didn't eat anyone's food while we were among you." I thought, "How ironic, to read that when we are gathering here to prepare food baskets to give away."
Paul did not take any money for preaching. He supported himself by his own labor, and he was quite proud of that. There's a biblical scholar that wrote a book once on the biblical ministry of priesthood, and among them he included ordinary work. I don't feel so good when I read that, because I get paid for preaching. For Paul, it was very important that he earned his own way and that he earned his own keep.
He said if anyone won't work they should not eat. Well, when I heard that, just to throw out for your awareness, most of the people who come here tomorrow to receive free food will be working people, not people who don't work and are unemployed, but people who work in jobs that do not pay enough money to allow them to buy food for themselves and to support their family. I think it's just very important for us to keep them in mind, the vast number of people who work in jobs that do not pay a living wage and do not allow them the dignity of buying their own food. Just be mindful of that.
Then in the Gospel, I want to talk about hope, and what is the source of our hope. We all want to know the future, don't we? We all want to know what's going to happen. Who are the experts today to whom we look to tell us the future? Any guesses? What? Statisticians! The pollsters! We want to know who's going to be elected for president next year. We read the polls, and the polls give us a sense of being in control, because we know what people are thinking.
If we want to know what the likelihood of something happening is, we look at statistical probabilities. If we want to know how we're doing in our schools, where do we look? Not where should we look, but where do we look today? ISTEP, test scores. We don't talk to teachers who know the students; we don't listen to the experience of people. We want numbers, and the numbers will give us the illusion that we're in control.
Do you know where I'm going? We are preoccupied with measuring things and with statistics and probabilities. Is that a source of hope?
I read recently of some people who did an experiment in the health care system. They took one group of patients that was having surgery, and they gave them all the statistics about their surgery. They took another group of patients and they helped them frame what was happening to them in positive terms. Which group of patients do you think fared better? The second group, right? Statistical information doesn't really help anybody. That's one thought about hope. Usually when we talk about hope we are talking about the probability that something will happen.
The other thought about hope I had is that young people seem to have more hope than older people. Does that seem true to you? Does it? Why is that? Cynicism. The older we get, the more prone we are to say, "We tried that and it didn't work." Right? The more our experience, it limits our ability to hope. Well, what is hope, then?
Forty some years ago I read a book about hope that has stayed with me for 40 years. It was a book by a French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, and it was on the metaphysics of hope. Don't be put off by the big words. But he defined hope in this way: Hope is the experience of someone who has entered deeply enough into communion to, in the face of everything that we know, rise above it all.
Does that make sense? Well, you see, in the Gospel today, when Luke wrote his Gospel about Jesus predicting all those bad things, by the time Luke wrote his Gospel, all those bad things were already happening. What he was calling them to is to remember that Jesus told you that all of these things would happen. So don't be discouraged, but live with that communion, and let that be your source of strength and hope.
Well, to tie all that together today, we are coming together. We are experiencing communion with each other in doing a good thing, and, I think, in that communion we have with one another, with our God, gathered around the altar, and with the people who will come tomorrow.
Look around this church and imagine that more people than you see in this church will come through those doors tomorrow and come down the aisle to receive food. So think not only of our communion with each other, but of our communion with them, and somehow God is in all of that. I think that is our source of hope for the world and for life.