Readings: Christ the King

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House of Stones--33rd Sunday of ORD Time

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Praise the Lord! Growing up in Door County, one had to be creative to stay preoccupied. I remember it fondly...stacking those clean smooth white limestone rocks along a white stone beach in Sister Bay at my grandparent's cottage. Between my brothers and sisters, we would create for ourselves a competition to see how many stones we could stack vertically without them tumbling down. In the end, however, we would reach a point where these stones would come toppling down one over the other and all that you had accomplished was ruined in a second. But you would begin again with much more resolve to build it higher or better yet, you would begin to make a castle out of these white limestones from the multitude of different shapes and sizes. We would spend hours meticulously laying stone upon stone matching their sizes and contours up to build a magnificent stone castle. We would sit back in adoration of these limestone temples of wonder and they may even last through the night if we were lucky. But of course, sooner or later, they too would come tumbling down. As Jesus says, “All that you see here—the days will come when there will not be a stone upon another stone.”
And here we are as adults doing the very same thing in our lives but of course, in many more conjured and complicated ways that sometimes even involve manipulative measures. We build up these stone walls of defense to protect ourselves from harm's way. We surround ourselves with smooth amenities and securities so we don't have to face the cruelties of the world and the harshness of the reality of death. We build fortresses of defense in or own lives in order not to let others come into our lives. During all these life building projects, we fail to recognize just how temporal, fleeting and vain they are.
Jesus calls us to recognize these “houses of stones” that we've built up because they will inevitably come tumbling down upon us and others. What we had worked so diligently to create begins to lose any eternal significance we thought it had. Picture Jesus in the temple with all of us around him. We are oohing and aweing at these “costly stones and votive offerings” that seem so incredible and magnificent. While we are awestruck with our heads bent up heeing and hawing at these temporal and fleeting designs of men, we fail to recognize the living stone, the ONE—Jesus Christ. So the gospel says, “While some people were speaking,” of these things, Jesus says, “All that you see here—the days will come when there will not be a stone upon another stone.” As if Jesus is saying to us, “Hey! you're talking about and looking at the wrong thing! Your attention shouldn't be on something, it should be on Somebody and that Someone happens to be in your midst, Me the Son of God!” While we go about our lives believing that what we've built has some eternal significance, the great equalizer of death or the end reminds us that there is someone who we are missing in our lives—Jesus Christ. While we are hording the stores to purchase Christmas gifts in a superficial exchange of charity, Jesus is making the eternal gift of Himself on this altar, but our heads are turned and we are speaking of the earthly and the temporal rather than the eternal. In the midst of our self-adulation and narcissistic love, we fail to recognize Jesus in this gift He makes of Himself to the world through the Holy Eucharist. Does this sound condemning? Yes, because today's Gospel is condemning. The messenger, Malachi says, “the evil doers will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire, leaving neither root nor branch.” Condemning yes, but the Son of Justice will lead to the healing rays of light if we respond to the call of a deeper recognition of Christ's merciful love.
The stacking up of these things of our lives in the here and now will come crashing down. We must place our priority on Jesus Christ, God's true Son, the Living Temple who is the Savior of the world. The economy would have us believe that Christmas starts on Thanksgiving day and ends Christmas day, but our liturgical calendar says something very different. Advent begins a four week journey of preparation for the Christ and the season of Christmas begins on the 25th of December and lasts until January 13th, it doesn't end after the exchange of gifts! A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a friend who recently began to live the Liturgical life of the Church out in all its fullness. He said, “You know, I never carefully celebrated the liturgical seasons as they ought to be celebrated. Now that my who family does, we have begun to see the beauty and balance in engaging these celebrations and its culmination in Easter Sunday. It has changed our lives! It has helped us place priority on Jesus Christ in our lives and we have deepened our faith as a family.” Do you as a family engage the Liturgical year....know when Advent starts, Christmas begins and ends? When the Lenten season calls us to simplicity and how Holy Week and the Easter Vigil is the culmination of the entire Paschal Mystery? Is it ingrained in the communal life of your family? We must stop building towers of Babel, towers of fleeting vanities and begin to build structures of love, pure relationships, and a civilization of life, not a culture of death. Remember, “All that you see here—the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone.”
Once we begin these journeys to build our lives on the Truth of Christ, something will change. I can guarantee that! We will begin to be persecuted for building the Truth in a world of lies. Jesus says, “You will be hated because of my name.” When was the last time you made a stand for your faith at school, at work, at home, or in your neighborhood? Knowing that the end result could leave you hated, alienated, or alone? Yet we are afraid of sharing our Catholic faith and living it radically because of the fear we have of being labeled. Instead of building up stones on the eternal rock of Christ, we build them upon fear, indifference, apathy and complacency. Chances are if we are avoiding persecution because of these selfish stones we are not engaging our faith on the level of potential that it is meant to be lived. We live in trepidation and fear rather than in the freedom of the Gospel and the life of Jesus Christ. I've been ridiculed, teased, slandered, and suspected because I am a priest of Jesus Christ and a representative of His Church—the one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. I wear my collar in public purposely to say to others and to the world, “My house is built on the Living Stone--Jesus Christ.” I welcome persecution in the name of Christ admitting my weaknesses and I pray, like St. Paul that I may be an imitator of Him to the world. We can hope to say with St. Paul, in the midst of persecution, “in toil and drudgery, night and day we worked so as not to burden any of you.”
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the National Catholic Youth Conference in Columbus, Ohio with sixteen of our youth from St. Pius. Twenty thousand youth were singing, dancing, praying, and learning about their faith. The keynote speakers were phenomenal. There was one thing that kept rising up in my heart and it was evident, in the hearts of all the youth in the arena. Anytime a speaker would talk about being courageous about your faith and being proud of being Catholic there would be an ovation—everyone up on their feet cheering. There is a frustration among Catholics of being persecuted. We are proud of our faith, yet in defense of it we remain silent. Instead of holding our heads high in public and making a proud acknowledgment of faith, we shrink back in fear and trepidation because of the fear of what others may think or the fear of not knowing how to respond. Whether it is an unsaid response, verbal attack, or simply a poking fun of, persecution is a reality we must increasingly face as Catholics in the modern age. “You will be hated because of my name.” Cardinal George, the Archbishop of Chicago told us at seminary, and I believe it to be very accurate that, “Christian persecution will begin through litigation and legal procedures eventually matriculating through society slowly but methodically.” We should not be surprised when others persecute us. A prefiguration of the end times is persecution, yet each and every day we avoid placing ourselves in a place of persecution because the stones we've stacked upon one another are flimsy and fragile.
There is a surge of Catholics who no longer want to be discredited because of their faith. This ground swell comes because at the heart of us Catholics we have so much to be proud of, so much good that happens within our Church, so much of our lives invested in tradition. We just need the ammunition to stick to our teaching and be courageous. Today, we build our foundation on the living stone of Jesus Christ. We see Jesus in our midst rather than the the glitz and pageantry or worldly living. We gladly take on persecution for the sake of Christ knowing that it will lead to our salvation. We put our foot down and engage the beauty of our liturgical seasons in order to more fully live our baptismal call to holiness. We believe in our hearts that we can make a stand for our faith by learning more in order to have a defense. We yearn to be imitators of Christ. Yes, “All that you see here—the days will come when there will not be a stone upon another stone.” And yes, “You will be hated because of my name.” But remember, when that “house of white limestone” comes tumbling down it may be the best thing that ever happened to us because we may realize for the first time...we may come to believe for the first time that, “not a hair on our head will be destroyed.” We will believe that, “by our perseverance, we will secure our lives.” We will believe that death has been conquered by the living stone of Jesus Christ our Lord both now and forever. Amen.