It’s not either or: Homily for Friday, February 16, 2024

Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.

Do we just check off the boxes? Go through the motions during Lent? The people Isaiah describes in the first reading did just that. We cannot.

It is not either or

So, yesterday I talked about the notion of freedom as license that a lot of people think that, or at least there are people that think, that freedom is really about being able to do whatever we want to do. And that’s really license. Because we could be free to do, as I mentioned in yesterday’s example, the sad and tragic shooting in Kansas City.

Well that’s a freedom. You can do whatever you want to do. You can do that. But that’s not freedom. That’s license. Freedom is always about becoming our best selves. But license is tempting because in so many aspects of life we tend to make things either/or.

We see it politically. You’re either on this team and for me or that team and against me. There’s this clear yes/no, this/that. Today’s first reading reminds me of my life as prior of our formation community, our community where young Dominican student brothers are preparing to be Dominican brothers and priests.

And there was a debate in the community about fasting. More specifically, should we observe the traditional practice of having meatless Fridays every Friday of the year, which used to be the way it was and has a long history in the church. And this led to a whole debate about what fasting is. And then it came up all over again during Lent. What should we do as a house during Lent?

And we tended to pit against each other two things that both had good value. We tended to be much more in our conversations about either/or or better/worse rather than saying both/and, both/good. We couldn’t see that both could in fact have a deep spiritual value in our life. I would argue that we did this in the church as well in so many ways.

Vatican II came along, a wonderful, tremendous, powerful ecumenical council. But we tended sometimes to say things before not good or great, depending on your perspective. Things afterwards, great or not good, depending on your perspective. As if somehow we were to be battling with these two competing ideas. But the Church was the Church.

The Church before the Second Vatican Council was good and holy and righteous because Jesus Christ was present in the church. The church before the Second Vatican Council was in need of reform. And so Vatican II was a good thing.

The Church after the Second Vatican Council is good and holy and wonderful because Jesus Christ is present in the Church. And he’s with the Church. He’s promised to be with the Church. But not everything done in the name of the Second Vatican Council was good. There were clearly things that were not the best decisions to have been made.

So the question becomes, how do we become people who are both/and? In the reading today, Isaiah is pointing out people who think that fasting is a really good thing, but that it doesn’t need to really change their lives.

So they’ve done the things, they’ve fasted, but it’s not changing how they interact with each other. It’s not making them more faithful to God. It’s not helping them to follow God’s way more fully and completely. It’s not making them more just in their business dealings, for example.

But the solution sometimes that’s leapt to is that we shouldn’t fast at all. But we should be focused only on the things in today’s reading that Isaiah mentions, which are all phenomenal things. And they’re very hard. I can see why we don’t want to do them, because we’re still trying to figure out how to do them.

Releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke, setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke, sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless, clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own.

We still haven’t been successful at that. People are still oppressed, and they still don’t have the things they need, and so forth. But maybe perhaps we’ve not been successful because we haven’t made the sacrifices to put doing and surrendering to the will of God first and foremost. And that’s what Lent is really about. It’s about becoming more and more like the person of Jesus, and recognizing that in every age, Jesus Christ is active and alive in the church and desires our conversion.

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