Father Thomas Welbers' Homily	Jump back to Homily Index
Homily for the Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time August 22, 2004 Luke 13:22-30 Isaiah 66:18-21 Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13	Listen to Audio

My father, who went home to heaven almost ten years ago, was something of a homespun philosopher, as most fathers are in retrospect, and of course the relevance of his wisdom grows with the passage of time. While not exactly a poet, he certainly had a keen ear for doggerel. One of his favorite poems was on a refrigerator magnet purchased in a souvenir shop somewhere in his travels, and hung proudly in the kitchen ever afterward. It went like this:

“I dreamt of heaven the other night / And the pearly gates swung wide; / An angel with halo bright / Ushered me inside. // And there to my astonishment / Stood folks I’d judged and labeled / As quite ‘unfit,’ ‘of little worth,’ / And spiritually disabled. // Indignant words rose to my lips / But never were set free, / For every face showed stunned surprise / Not one expected me!”

The final surprise of God’s kingdom is the clear message of all our readings today. The Jewish nation of Isaiah’s time shared one characteristic with fundamentalists of every stripe, including Christians and Muslims. Fundamentalists are absolutely certain who are not saved; they share a common conviction that anyone who does not believe and act just the way they do is thereby excluded from God’s love.

Yet God’s message is that it is his will to include all. The people listed in the first reading were the enemies of God’s people at the time of Isaiah – they were the very ones who threatened harm and destruction. Yet Isaiah risks prophetic unpopularity by assuring the Israelites that God’s plan of extending his love to all creation includes even “those people.”

Luke’s Gospel repeatedly assures us of the universality of God’s designs for salvation – that no one who seeks will be denied. But, of course, there is a danger – and it’s a danger we must recognize for ourselves without judging others. We have to seek what God wants to give us. It’s not that God might exclude us; it’s rather that we have the power to exclude God.

It’s possible that if we pass up opportunities for grace often enough that we will no longer even recognize them when they come. God will never stop offering us moments of grace, and the Holy Spirit will always prompt us to be faithful in walking with God in our lives. The danger is not that grace will dry up and opportunity for seeking and finding God will be withdrawn. God is forever faithful. The real danger instead is that we will dry up and develop a thick crust of habit, comfort, and insensitivity that grace will have difficulty soaking in.

This is why conversion has to be an ongoing process. We can never bask in the satisfaction that “we have made it.” The author of the Letter to the Hebrews, our second reading, emphasizes discipline, even the discipline of suffering. It is painful to keep our eyes open and for something new and unexpected, both when times are easy and routine, and when impossible challenges face us. Yet it is in both those times that God is working to reveal that he is still there, that he has not abandoned us. It is a painful discipline to attend to God’s desire to change us, without yielding to the temptation to try to change others into our own image.

God is ever finding ways to pop the imprisoning bubble of our own limitations and surprise us with a new vision of his kingdom.

© 2004 Thomas Welbers