Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time About ministry Exod. 19.1-6a; Rom. 5.6-11; Mt. 9.36-10.8

I think there are multiple ways to connect these 3 readings, but I'd like to take a cue from this passage from Matthew. It is the beginning of the co-called "mission discourse" in which Matthew has Jesus establishing the ministry of the Jesus movement. So, I want to talk about ministry.

Matthew gives us a lead for talking about ministry when he speaks of "harvest". This is the standard biblical term for the final judgement. It refers, then to the fact that God is going to assess us on...what? And that is what I'd like to look at today, within the context of ministry.

We get an intimation from the first reading. Moses is reminding his people that God "bore them up on eagles' wings." So they are to be judged on their response to what God has done for them. But I'm not so sure that this Jewish memory is ours, even though it ought to be. Then, Paul, in Romans, is talking about somebody dying for other people. I think this comes closer to us Christian wannabes, namely that we're going to be judged on our response to our belief that Jesus did die for us and that his death is significant for us.

But I would like to come at this from another angle; namely from the ministry as it is exercised in the Church today. What word is being given to us, by the ministers of the Word? I've mentioned the article in The New York Times about a large seminary in the States and the article has spawned a fair amount of comment elsewhere as well. Recall that the seminarians described in that article look at the world as alien, more than that, as dangerous and opposed to Godly living. So they see themselves as needing to shepherd the faithful into this safe enclave that is the Church. I suppose those priests-to-be understand that they are to be judged on how well they do that and I suppose they think the people inside that enclave will be judged on how well they resist everything outside the Church. But, as I said, this way of looking at things is contrary, frankly, to what the Second Vatican Council was all about. Which is to say that, "no, God is not confined within the sacristry. God is abroad, all over. And ministry, therefore, ought to be the job of trying to point out the activity of God outside the Church as well as to be a minister of the Word and sacrament inside the Church.

So, there is another way of looking at ministry and judgement. This sent me back to a book published in 1996, Who's in the Seminary? Roman Catholic Seminarians Today. It's a study done by a former Oblate priest, who worked for years in their vocation program, It was, in fact, his doctoral thesis. The study looked at seminarian attitudes in Canadian seminaries. It is a totally local product and I want to read to you some statistics. I want to read four of the questions this study asked seminarians in 1995. the author has a chart comparing the answers given by seminarians in 1970, 1985 and 1995. I hope I'm not wasting your time, but I think both the answers and the pattern of answers is extremely significant.

There is an introduction to this doctoral dissertation by Andrew Greeley. He is, among many other things, the best known, and perhaps the best, sociologist of religion around. He writes:

"Their piety, alas, is alarmingly out of sync with that of other priests and the educated Catholic laity. This could become a very serious problem as the years go on, because the laity, who are already losing respect for priests, may well go into open revolt against them."

And there is evidence that this cleric/lay division is growing wider.

Why do I bring this up? Because it is my Church. It is your Church. And I think there is a terrible problem embedded in those statistics. A problem that dogs the Church and has done so for some time. It is a problem contained in the claim that, basically to be a good Catholic is to believe the right things, with far less attention to whether or not you did the right things. Orthodoxy was notably separated from orthopraxy. (In the seminary this separation was expressed in a sharp independence of the dogmatic theology classes from the moral theology classes.)

Again, all this has to do with the harvest, the judgement. Are we to be judged on knowing the right answers? Or is judgement to take a different shape, both broader and deeper? I think this is a crucial question, crucial for me as a minister and for all of the Church. (It is also crucial for what it intimates is going on in the seminary.) I'd like to propose an alternate version of judgement. And from my experience of the Church it has to be based on a negative example. The Church I grew up in was a Church in which the central value and virtue was obedience. That awful statement, attributed to Pius X, that "the laity are to pay, pray and obey," describes the Church I grew up in. And a senior pastor in my diocese, repeated that statement as also describing the clerical ministry. And both I and the people to whom I ministered would be respectively judged on the basis of that statement. What's wrong with that Church? It is, basically, a Church which infantilizes people. And there are all kinds of serious implications of that. It keeps us from taking responsibility for our own lives. In a very real way, it shuts down intellectual discourse between people, or within one's own mind. But unquestionably, the most nefarious consequence of that Church, is that it makes community building impossible. You cannot have a human community in a nursery school. You cannot realistically talk about people being open to each other, listening to each other, hearing each other, attending to each other, responding to each other. Unfortunately this has been the situation within the Church for far too long.

Greely, who by no means is alone in this, is dead right. We are headed for very difficult days if the ministers of the Church, and the Church at large, are going in opposite directions, as we seem to be. For one obvious thing, such a situation obscures that upon which each of us is, in fact, to be judged, both the minister and those who are ministered to. And it does this radically. If we are a Church, called to be a community, then we cannot avoid thinking about these matters. Surely, we must first be aware of them. That's why a recitation of these statistics is a homily - a conversation. We are supposed to converse with each other before God, in the light of Christ.

There re problems in place. Which lead us to what? To a cheap despair, always so ready to have? Or to more earnestness in my own life; a closer examination of my own ministry. And my participation in the life of the Church - and for all of us here, a closer examination of what we think the Church is today. We are not a bunch of mindless objects. If a homily works, it leads us to prayer and these considerations have surely done that for me. I hope they do it for you, too.