Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz - 08/30/20 How Do I Look? "Lucky"

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

Homily from the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time. Am I being conformed or transformed? Christians must not only live differently in the world, we must look differently at the world. Mass Readings from August 30, 2020: Jeremiah 20:7-9 Psalms 63:2-6, 8-9Romans 12:1-2 Matthew 16:21-27 Download the Homily Study

So, this story of this young girl. She was born in Sudan in 1869. She's part of the, I guess, the Daju people in Darfur, modern day area right now. Her uncle was the tribal chief. She had a relatively decent childhood. She said that she has some memories of it and that they were largely pleasant. But when she was eight years old, she was kidnapped by Arab slave traders. In fact, she doesn't even remember her name.

She doesn't remember the name that her parents gave her. But when she's captured by those Arab slave traders, they gave her her name. They just named her lucky in their language. They just called her lucky, which is kind of cruel. They made her immediately, at eight years old, walk 600 miles from her village to where they were going to buy and sell her. 600 miles barefoot, eight years old. For the next 12 years, she was bought and sold and given away at least a dozen times.

at least a dozen times. And one of her owners was this Turkish general and his wife, for whatever reason, she took the light in torturing Lucky, like on a regular basis. She would take a knife or a blade and carve designs into Lucky's flesh. And then she would rub salt into those wounds to,

I think you can imagine this, like this cruelty. She would rub salt into those wounds, not only to make them hurt more, but so that they wouldn't heal properly, so that Lucky would have to have these scars her entire life. In fact, on her body, there were 144 scars like this. Every single day this woman would do this, she and her mother would beat and torture Lucky. When you think about this, this is Lucky's formation. From age eight to 20 years old, for 12 years, this was her formation.

This is how she was introduced to this is how the world works. I mean, you can imagine, I mean, this eight-year-old kid taken from a place of comfort, from a place of home, and being thrust into this. And you have to realize, okay, this is how the world works. This is just how this forms your mind, it forms your heart. Some people are kind for no apparent reason. Some people are incredibly cruel for no apparent reason. The best you can do is just keep your head down.

The best you can do is either steal as much comfort as you can in this broken world, or the best you can do is just not care. This is how she would be formed. The best you can do is just be disciplined, be indifferent, become numb. This was Lucky's formation, from eight years old to 20 years old. But there was something in her that she said even as a child, even as a teenager, she said this, she said, but in all this, seeing the sun, the moon and the stars, I said to myself, who could be the master of these beautiful things?

And I felt a great desire to see him, whoever he was, to know him. and to pay him homage, that even in the midst of an incredible formation towards brokenness and towards death and towards despair, that here is this girl who just realized, but maybe this isn't all there is. And I'm thinking about this a lot because we realize that sometimes we're given options, right? The options in our lives are either the powerful versus the powerless. It's those who abuse and those who are the abusers, or they be abused.

It's between those who are unscarred and those who are scarred. It's between the winners and the losers, those who are loved and those who are unloved. And I think sometimes we think those are only options. Because every one of us, just like lucky, every one of us, our experiences are shaping us. They're forming us. Our conversations are forming us. Our relationships form us. What we take in among the entertainment we take in, it's forming us.

It's shaping our lens. Like how we see, how we look at the world. And so starting today, we're going to start this five-part series. Sometimes you do series around here, and I really wanted to do this with our students. Hopefully, some of them are part of this, but this five-part series is, it's called How Do I Look? How do I look at the world? How do I see the world? What's my lens through which I see myself?

I see the Lord. I see God. You know, it's funny because about three years ago, we did a series kind of like this. We're on the same time. It was called Look Like Jesus. and it was kind of this, this is, I mentioned this to a friend, I said, I don't know if I should do this. We kind of did it three years ago. And he's like, this is part two.

I'm like, oh, yeah, that's true. This is not the same thing. It's part two. We're asking the questions, how do I look in the sense of like, how do I look at winning as a Christian? How do I look at fighting as a Christian? How do Christians fight? How do I look at the goal of life as a Christian? Like, what am I aiming for as a Christian when it comes to just,

my life here. And we were convicted by this, like, we need to do this five-part series because we have to start today with the absolutely clear and straightforward words of both Paul and of Jesus. Paul in the second reading today where he says, he says, do not be conformed to this age. Do not be conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. And again, I was just thinking about this. This should have been the first Sunday that we got to welcome our freshman on campus. And I just, it's built a place in my heart that, you know, we are so often formed and conformed to the wisdom of the world. We're constantly being formed by those relationships and those experiences

and by the things we encounter because we're constantly growing. Like no one is done growing. It's funny, kind of a little side thing. I mentioned this before, but it's worth mentioning again, I think, that I'll sometimes talk with couples who have been married for a long time or a member of a couple who's been married for a long time. And they'll say something like, maybe you've heard this before, say things like, they're not the same person I married,

or they've changed since we got married. And I get like that, I can imagine that pain. I can imagine that difficulty of having to like, what do we do now? But that shouldn't be a shock. People always say it as like it's a shock. Like, that's what you should expect. That after a couple years, after a couple decades, they're not the same person you married.

Because if you're alive, you're going to grow. And if you're going to grow, you're going to change. that the choice isn't, are we going to grow? The choice is, are we going to grow apart or are we going to grow together? Because we do have a choice. Because we are formed by the people around us. We're formed by the relationships around us.

We're formed by this. We can either choose to be conformed to this or we can choose to be transformed by this because we have to realize, remember this, we're living in a post-Christian world. The world, gosh, so many Christians, we continue to believe that the world is our friend. We continue to believe that if we just live like everyone else,

then that'll get us to heaven. It will not at all. Or sometimes we believe that being a Christian simply means believing and doing the same thing everyone else does, we just believe and do a couple extra things, like, I don't know, gift of charity or like go to Mass on Sunday. But that is not the case. Christians don't just believe or do a few extra things. Christianity is the lens through which we see the world. Christ is the lens through which we see everything. Again, be going into Christ, being a disciple of Jesus, doesn't just change the way we see some things. Being a disciple of Jesus, changes the way we look at everything.

That's why St. Paul says, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. That Greek term, renewal of your mind, it's the word metanoia, metta transformation or change. Noia is how you think. St. Paul says you have to change how you think. We can't just expect to be like everyone else, to look at the world like everyone else, to think like everyone else, but to live differently. So we have to change the way that we look at sin.

If we're going to belong to Christ, we have to change the way we look at holiness. We have to change the way we look at love. We have to change the way we look at winning. This goes back to the gospel. Because here's this gospel today. That's just like such a bomb that Jesus drops on them. So Matthew 16, still in the same chapter as last weekend. In that section of the chapter last weekend, we heard Simon Peter stand up.

You're the Messiah. You're the Christ. Basically, Jesus, we get it, there's the kingdom, you're establishing, you're the king. And Jesus is like, yeah, and you're the al-Bai'i, yeah. But you have the sense of like, here's the apostles are like, oh my goodness, we are in on the winning team. And Jesus immediately pivots right from this moment where they all realize, oh my gosh, we're on the winning team. And he says, okay, here's what you need to know about winning. Here's what you're looking at winning wrong.

Because he says this, he says, okay, we're going to go to Jerusalem. Yes, I'm the king. I'm the Messiah. I'm the anointed one. You know who I am, but you don't know what that means. You know that I'm the king, but you do not know what that means. Yes, I'm going to win a great victory, but you don't know what winning looks like. In fact, when you see it, you're going to believe that I lost.

That if you look at this like the world, it will look like I lost. And he goes on, he says, and if you're following me, it will look like you're losing too. when he says, deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow after me. So Jesus is preparing them for this whole thing. You know who I am, and you don't know what that means yet. I'm going to win, but you don't even know what winning looks like. And if you look at it like the world looks at it, you're going to lose heart. How many people are there right now watching this praying with us right now?

And you've lost heart. Why? Because I thought winning would look like this. And Jesus says, oh no, here's what? winning looks like. He says, um, let me hand it over to the chief priest, the elders and the scribes, I'm going to suffer, be tortured, they're going to kill me. He says, that's what winning looks like. And that's why, you know, Simon Peter says, God forbid this ever happens to you. And Jesus turns, you heard the story, Jesus turns Simon Peter and he says, you're not thinking like God thinks, you're thinking like human beings do, right? You've been formed to this age.

You haven't been transformed by the way that I know, that you don't look, you're not looking at it the way I'm looking at it. You know, I think it's really interesting to go into that dialogue with Jesus and with Peter. Because sometimes it's easy to hear Jesus say, you know, get behind me Satan. And imagine that here's Jesus with the attitude of like he's being, he's miffed, like he's angry, that he's really frustrated, like, get behind me, Satan. Like, you're not thinking the right way. Maybe that's the case. I don't know. But maybe it's something else. Maybe what's happening in this scene is Jesus has spent every moment maybe of his public ministry

rejecting the way the world sees winning. Right from the very beginning before his public ministry, when he goes out into the wilderness, and Satan shows up, the, the literal Satan shows up, and he says, yeah, turn these stones into bread, throw yourself off the temple, like let people worship you and just bow down to me, and I'll give you everything. And Jesus has to say to the real Satan, be gone. But Luke points out, this is Matthew's Gospel, Luke points out that Satan left and waited for another opportunity to tempt him again. He realized that maybe in Jesus' life every moment was a temptation to just look like the world. Everyone was at temptation to look at winning like the way the world looks at winning.

And maybe it was one thing to reject Satan's temptation to look like the rest of the world. But now here is Peter, his friend. And his friend is saying, saying, let's not to have that happen. Why? Because I love you. I want to spare you this thing. Why? Because our friends want the best for us. And here is Peter, who thinks he looks at this kind of suffering, looks at this kind of torture and says, that's not the best. I want the best for you, Jesus. But he didn't know what it was. He didn't want to look, didn't know what the best

looked like. He didn't know what winning looked like. And that's when Jesus has to say, you're not looking the way God looks. You're looking the way the world looks. The best is going to be the cross. For me and for you. The best is going to be denying this part of me that wants to run away and say yes to the Father's will. For me and for you.

The best is going to be, I'm going to give my life, not see what I can get for my life. For me and for you. You know, I think it's really important for us to note this. The best isn't the cross on its own, and the best isn't suffering on its own, the best isn't sacrifice on its own. It's the self-sacrificial suffering on the cross out of love. Because you know this. It's not how much Christ suffered that saves us.

It's how much He loves that saves us. It just happens that in this broken world, love always involves sacrifice. And how often do we do this? In our love for others, we want to spare them. Our love for others would spare them pain. It would spare them difficulties. It would spare them struggle. But that means that our love would also spare them from greatness.

That means how we look at goodness, how we look at goodness, how we look at winning, would spare them from the opportunity to love heroically. It would spare them from the opportunity to lay down their lives out of life. because it looks like losing. And I think in our desire to make things easier for them, we would give them mediocrity. And we robbed them of the opportunity to live and to love heroically. Jesus doesn't do this. He didn't do it in his own life and he doesn't do it for us. He says, no, actually, love demand sacrifice. That's what I'm going to need from you. You're going to have to deny yourself. You're going to have to pick up your cross. Like I pick up my

cross. And again, this is very, very key. This is not stoicism. This is very... Stoicism is that the temptation that young woman lucky might have had. Like the best you can do in life is just get numb to it. The best you can do is being different. The best you can do is become hard and like face the difficulties of life and no matter what. And that sometimes people think that Christianity is like stoicism because we believe, take up your cross, deny yourself. But that's not the end of the sentence. Jesus says, if you do this for... love of me. If you do this for my sake, that's what changes everything. It wasn't how much Christ

suffered that saves us. It's how much he loves that saves us. And it's not how much we suffer that saves us. It's how much we're willing to sacrifice out of love that saves us. That's by St. Paul in Romans chapter 12 verse 1. Today he says, he says, brothers and sisters, beloved, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and beloved to the Lord. And be willing to be willing to lose. are what looks like losing for the sake of love. Why? Because you've met love. We ask the question. Knowing this, how do I look? How do I look?

I think the last thing. I want to look like someone who is lucky. I want to look like someone who is blessed. I think of her. That woman, young woman, that, well, she's 20 years old. She stayed with some religious sisters in Italy. She got sold, given way to people in Italy. She didn't want to go back to Sudan, didn't want to go back to Africa.

And so the family who owned her essentially had her live in a convent. And in that convent, she met Jesus. The sisters would tell her about this God who is the most powerful being in and out of the universe, but became powerless for her sake. The sisters told her about this God who is loved, is love, who actually loves her. My sisters told her about a God who has scars. Lucky was declared free by the Italian government, because slavery was illegal. But she was already free because she had met Jesus in the year 1890 when she was 30 years old, she was baptized. And she took the name Josephine Margaret,

and then she actually kept the name, Lucky. In Arabic, Lucky is Bakita, but she took the Latin form of it, Fortunata. So her name was Josephine Margaret Fortunata. Three years after she was baptized, she joined that religious community of sisters and she became a bride of Jesus. She realized she was not a choice between the powerful and the powerless, between the scarred and the unscarred. It was the difference of life, how we look at life, is between those who are loved and those who do not yet know how much they are loved. For the next 42 years, Sister Josephine Bakita lived as a bride of Christ. It's really remarkable. She had at one point the reason why she claimed the name Fortunata, Claim the name Bakeda, claim the name Lucky.

She said once she said, if I were to meet the slave traders who kidnapped me and even those who tortured me, all 144 scars, I would kneel and kiss their hands. And you say, look, are you kidding me? You're not lucky. You're not fortunate. You're not blessed. You're not winning. She said, if I were to meet the slave traders to kidnap me and even those who tortured me, I would kneel and kiss their hands. For if that did not happen, I would not be a Christian today. If that did not happen, I would not be a bride of Jesus Christ.

today. At the end of her life, she experienced this incredible pain. She's confined to a wheelchair and when people would ask her how she was, she would say, she would smile at them and she'd say, I am as my master desires. Not a master who lorded over her, not a master who inflicted scars, but as a master who had scars himself. How do I look? How do I want to look? I want to look like someone who is lucky. But even more, I want to look like someone who is loved. Sister, Saint Bakita, she was canonized in the year 2000. St. Josephine, lucky, St. Josephine Bakita.

There's someone who is not just lucky. She was not just blessed. She is someone who is loved. And she said this. She said, I am definitively loved. And whatever happens to me, I am awaited by his love. And so my life is good. Whatever happens to me, definitively love, whatever happens to me,

How do I look? I look at the world as someone who is loved. And that love changes the way that we look at everything.