Homily

I have been thinking this week about division. One meaning of the word "division" is "to separate into parts or groups." So when you are doing the laundry, you separate the white clothes from the dark clothes because if you don't you will not have to separate them in the future. That's a good kind of division. 48 divided by 6 equals 8. That's a good kind of division. 36 divided by 6 equals 5. That's a bad kind of division. So there are obviously good and bad possibilities when you are dividing. And one place where we can find a lot of bad possibilities, and bad realities, is when we ourselves create certain divisions.

St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, as we heard, frustrated and upset because he finds them divided. After their gatherings, they celebrate the Eucharist, and they also have a kind of meal together, everyone bringing something to eat. But at this meal there are those who are bringing bacon burgers for their dinner, and they are scandalizing their fellow Christians who are afraid to eat any kind of meat because it probably had been first offered in a pagan sacrifice, and therefore they would not touch it. St. Paul tells the meat-eaters that they are correct in saying it's fine to eat meat, even if the animal had been killed first at a pagan sacrifice, because pagan gods are baloney, which is just another kind of meat. But St. Paul knows that there are parishioners in the Corinthian Church who believe they cannot in good conscience touch any meat that appeared on a pagan altar, or even take the chance it might have been on a pagan altar. And this issue is dividing the parish. Therefore St. Paul tells the meat-eaters to leave their burgers at home, even if it is fine to eat them, because if they are causing such division between themselves and the carrot and cabbage Catholic in their parish, they are wounding they very Body of Christ Himself, and doing it for nothing else than to have a little meat at the parish meal. Bad division.

I was thinking of bad divisions this past week when I read several stories about the Obama healthcare rules which you all should be familiar with, or at least the part that mandates that all Catholic institutions, except for churches, will have to offer free contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs in their insurance plans. The division comes about as reporters, or people they are reporting on, speak of "liberal or conservative Catholics," or "Right-wing or Left-wing Catholics," as though there are different types of Catholicism, different understandings of the Faith that are just normal in today's society. Therefore it is difficult to know what genuine Catholic teaching is because some people say this, and others say that. But of course this is more baloney. The teachings of the Church are very clear, and you can find them in a book called, "The Catechism of the Catholic Church." The Gospel of Christ is not liberal, nor conservative, it is simply the truth of God. And I urge you all never to take political terminology and apply it to members of the Church because then it makes politics more important than our membership and unity in the body of Christ, like meat eating in Corinth. It makes it seem as though a person's political views are more important than their faith. Now, certainly there are people whose politics are more important than their faith, people who may be ignorant about their faith, people who form wrong ideas about their faith, and even people who act in bad faith. But it is not our job to divide these people from the Church, even as we stand up to speak up for the truth of Christ. We may oppose their ideas and show those ideas to be false, misguided or even un-Christian, but we care not called to label them as our enemies in Christ. We can and should, at every time, stand up against any teaching, program, law idea, or statement made by someone who says they are Catholic and yet their public position runs against the teaching of Christ. But we should also stand up to pray for them, even if, especially if, they make us angry, because as St. Paul says they too are brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. Surely we do not want them to fall out of the Body of Christ, but rather come back in full unity with our faith. Surely we are not a people who believe that votes are more important than prayer. Surely we do not desire to put politics before Christ.

The dictionary gives us some synonyms, words that are similar to division: break, rift, disunion, rupture, estrangement, and alienation. It may be so that some members of the Church especially those in public life, may place themselves outside of the Body of Christ by their actions, yet while we can weigh the truth of their positions, we cannot judge the disposition of their souls. As we heard in today's Gospel, that judgment belongs only to Jesus Christ.

Even closer to home, we should look to see if we are wrongly dividing ourselves from other people, especially those in our own family. I was speaking to a couple recently, (not from our parish), and they were deeply divided over what to do in regard to their teenaged son. They were so divided that they came in separate cars because they didn't want to be that close together for the time it took to get here. It soon became clear to me that the real problem was not about their son, but about their marriage and their relationship with each other. After only an hour-and-a-half talking with me they both left here to get lawyers. No, just kidding! I have great respect for them because they began to see how they were cutting each other off, putting up a wall between them, and their teenaged son and he with them. Their whole family life was a hardship because of these divisions between people that did not have to be there, and I think these parents will start to fix that. It is true that sometimes people will cut themselves off from us and we can't help it. It is true that there may be situations, usually rare, where we have to stay away from a person and let them go. But I believe we should be very, very careful about seeing ourselves as a sheep, in a family, a community, a Church, that is full of goats.