Homily

To surrender. The idea of surrender is one way to describe what we do for a decent portion of our living days. We have our habits, routines, duties, obligations, necessities for life and patterns that form our days. These are the things we do and the way we act after we get out of bed, or when we go to work or school, or shopping or to church. It can be about the way we cook, the foods we eat, what we do at our jobs or school. It can be about how we spend our evenings, or how we raise our children, or about what we do on the internet. There are so many areas of our life that are largely governed by our habits or following our sense of habitual duty. And, as a rule, we surrender to these patterns and habits most of the time. That's not a bad thing. Indeed, it can be very helpful. Imagine having to make every decision and thinking about ever action, every single day. “Should I go to work? Should I feed the children? Should I wear clothes today?” Having to make so many choices would choke our lives. So, we surrender to a good number of our habits and patterns and that can be a very helpful thing, allowing our lives to run more smoothly and efficiently. If we had to make all those choices about every single element in our lives, over and over again every day, "choice" would soon become a dirty word.

In this way of speaking, "choice" is the opposite of "surrender." Granted almost every habit begins with a choice, but after that we often surrender to the habit usually without a direct and thoughtful choice. And I propose to you that the people in today's Gospel who are bound for hell are the people who had way too much "surrender" in their lives. We often think of the hell-bound as people who do very bad things, and of course that’s one good way to get to hell, if that’s your plan.

But here the Lord surprises us with a very different outlook. The people who are going to hell are also the people who did not choose. They did not step out of their daily patterns and ways of thinking and acting. They did not look past their somewhat comfortable surrender to the life they had arranged for themselves in order to choose to help people in need of their time, in need of their money, their comfort, their prayers, their personal assistance. They did not choose to help those in trouble. They preferred their comfort and routine. Because helping the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, those in prison, those without decent clothes—these things are not part of our regular daily habits and patterns. They are not part of our routines. They are not about the patterns of our regular round of activities. We have to choose to see the needs of others and then we have to choose to do something about them. Those who know how to choose wisely are those who can look past the comfort of the regular daily surrenders and see there are other needs that must also be looked after. Such people are heaven-bound, not simply because they do good for others, but because when they follow the commands of the Lord to love their neighbor, both in word and in deed, they are in fact serving Him.

How are we helped to see what we should choose, and how we should choose it? We grow in our awareness and in our ability to make those good kinds of choices, ironically, by our surrender. But it's not the surrender to habits and patterns that we have made, but rather a greater surrender of ourselves to Christ our Lord. Our willingness to read and to hear His words, our willingness to choose to spend more and better time with Him, our willingness to worship Him, to follow Him, to better conform our lives to His truth, these things lead us to better recognize how we ought to see, and what we ought to do, in order to serve Him and to serve Him in our neighbor. There is nothing necessarily wrong with surrendering to our good daily habits and routines unless they are keeping us from surrendering ourselves more completely to Christ.

Lent is a season given to help us shake it up a little bit, or even shake it up a lot. The same routines produce the same results. The same ways of thinking produce the same ways of acting. The same viewpoints and observations will produce nothing new or better for our own lives or anyone else's life. The same kinds of surrender will keep us in the same situation, not a better place.

The changes we need to make to become better Christians will probably not drop into our lives on their own. But they will come, more and more, if we choose to surrender ourselves to Jesus. Then, like the heaven-bound people in today’s Gospel, we set our sights more intensely on what He has asked us to do, how He has asked us to believe, and Who He has asked us to love, and how He has asked us to love them. (Choices)

In our times, much of the culture believes that the primary job of the Church and for Christians is to help the poor, and this Gospel today might seem to support that idea. But of course, this is not true. The primary goal of Christians is to love and to serve our Lord, and to do that even by loving and serving our neighbor. This is one of the reasons I do not support the Eugene St. Vincent de Paul Society. I am not talking about the local parish conferences, such as those St. Vincent de Paul groups at St. Alice, or St. Paul’s churches. I’m talking about the big Eugene St. Vincent de Paul unit that has all the secondhand stores. I don’t criticize that group because the people behind it do not do good works, but because they do good works apart from Christ, and do it under the name of St. Vincent de Paul. St. Vincent de Paul would certainly be appalled by the way they abuse his name and his mission. You will not find the name of Jesus on their website, but that name was constantly on the mind, the heart and the lips of St. Vincent de Paul. I would much rather support an agency like Catholic Community Services which tries to operate under the Gospel of Christ, because we are not called to simply do good works. We are called to serve the Lord, and to also serve Him in our neighbor.

The season for choices is coming upon us once again. Let's not surrender to the sameness of our status quo but set our minds aright toward the glory of God and continue to struggle to better surrender ourselves to Him.