Richard Bollman, S.J.

HOMILY. 12^th Sunday C, 2007

"Birth of John the Baptist"

Isaiah 49:1-6; Acts 13:22-26; Luke 9:18-24

SCRIPTURE COMMENT.

There are enough references to John the Baptist in the New Testament

to suggest that he was a troublesome figure to interpret.

His ministry, clearly, continued through his disciples

after Jesus died and was raised: as a kind of sub-group of Christians?

Or as a parallel path of new faith?

What we know is that the Christian community

respected him, but wanted his role to be seen as entirely preliminary to Jesus.

So when his name comes up, it is always clear:

1) that he is not the Messiah, no matter what some people thought; and

2) his baptism was a baptism of repentance only, not of the Holy Spirit.

So you’ll notice here in the passage from Luke,

when Jesus is declared to be the Christ of God,

that declaration comes to be the one declaration Jesus accepts,

even though there is another school of thought that he himself

is the continuation of John the Baptist, come back from the dead!

From the Hebrew prophets today,

the Song of the Servant of Yahweh is offered to us

as a gloss on John’s life, largely because of the reference to

being called and named from the womb.

This kind of sanctification from the womb is what distinguishes

those three holy people whose BIRTHS (not only their deaths)

are celebrated by the Roman Church: John, Mary, and Jesus.

HOMILY:

Children have been on my mind a lot this past week,

a number of parish babies being born,

pictures sent by e-mail,

labor stories both long and short.

Stephanie’s baby is here now,

Stephanie whom you know from our staff;

and this is a quote from her message:

"she came into the world and right into my arms.

It was peaceful and loving and just what we were hoping for

when planning to labor and deliver at home."

Then there was Kathy McGrath who went in for her usual check up

only to find the doctor saying–hey, get down to Good Sam,

you’re having a baby.

She started pushing at 8 o’clock and her son came at 8:22.

Zach and Nikki Zimmerman’s son got stalled along the way,

something about the crown being too big or not well situated.

He was delivered by C-section.

I myself was a breach birth, as my mother reminded me

on many occasions, usually in the company of women friends.

It’s probably not right to say every birth is different,

I mean there must be a limit to the variations,

but still, every child is certainly different: and isn’t that amazing.

This comes to me with the words of Isaiah:

"from my mother’s womb Yahweh gave me my name,"

not only the name my parent’s have used, but that inner name

which is my calling, my reason for being here.

Look around: each of us, the Bible insists on it,

were put together by God from the start,

and what we know of each other is just the tip of it.

Each of us are living out a story of connections and possibilities

gifts and sufferings and directions that are our own.

The gifts, the wounds, the personal choices,

all that combination of destiny and genetic coding

and parental influence, all that mixed bag--

what to call it?

I like to think of that inner person as "the Human One."

Jesus called himself that: a term that got translated "Son of Man,"

but it just means: this Human Being. That’s who I am.

Or I could put it this way,

after all the joys of being an infant, being the center of the world,

our real purpose emerges when we start to feel

what it is just to be a human being, the weight of it, the flesh and blood.

All those ways we’re different from our sister or neighbor,

the stuff we just have to live with and work with:

being human: this is the unique, yet common path.

I resist this often enough.

You too, perhaps. We tend to think our life is working out

when we excel at something, when we can tell all the good things.

Children do this readily when they’re young, coming home from school:

"We had pizza for lunch today, with pineapple on it!

Mary Lou helped the girls’ team win the relay race!

I was Number One in the Spelling Bee!"

But then the teen years come, and a silence spreads over all.

I think it’s appropriate: because it’s in those years that we come to see,

life is more of a challenge and a heartache than we had counted on!

I spent my "teen years," my growing up years,

with the Jesuits, where I had the pleasure and the danger of maturing

with a number of companions who were bright in ways I would never be, courageous and risky in their work,

and it would often make me wonder if I shouldn’t be striving and doing in the same way. What a trap that is.

Wanting to be somebody else. Resisting your own grace, your humanity.

And let me tell you something even more startling:

I’ve been finding that the more I follow my real calling,

the more God turns my attention to my own defects.

my struggles and addictions and sins even,

my ego investment: we really seem to get where we need to be

only when we keep breaking down along the way.

It’s painful, but there doesn’t seem to be any other path.

I learned a prayer recently from friends who work the 12 steps,

friends who are in recovery from alcoholism.

The prayer comes right from their big book:

"My Creator, I am willing that you should have all of me,

good and bad.

Just remove all those defects of character

which stand in the way of my usefulness,

to you and my neighbors."

That’s not a bad thing, to gradually change your goal

from being successful, to being useful:

no longer to be perfect, just to be useful.

It’s one of the things, for example, that our working crew in Harlan

might learn this week.

There’s always a tendency in construction to want to do the work fastest

or to finish first, or to be the most neat and precise

or to advance from hammers to power drills.

Those can be good things, but only so long as they make you useful.

A big part of John the Baptist’s story was to discover

that he is not the center of the world,

that all his efforts at piety and religion have brought him only to the point

where he can say he is not worthy to change Jesus’s shoes.

This is not just a way of saying that Jesus is greater than John,

it’s a way of John discovering that his mission is fulfilled

even as he recognizes his limitations.

His mission is fulfilled right there as he recognizes his insufficiency,

where he embraces his limitations as a gift.

"My Creator, I am willing that you should have all of me:

just remove all those things that stand in the way

of my usefulness, to you and to my neighbors."

We give up what we thought was necessary,

and then we start really to live.