Easter 2, Year C (2022)

Acts 5:27 – 32 / Psalm 150 / Revelation 1:4 – 8 / John 20:19 – 31

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, April 24, 2022.

 

“LOOKING FOR EVIDENCE BY TRYING TO LOOK FOR ITS ABSENCE”

(Homily text:  John 20:19 - 31)

“Have you believed because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.”

Those words are those of the Lord, spoken to Thomas as Thomas has declared Jesus to be “My Lord and my God!”

If we’re thinking about Thomas (yes, that would be the one we often refer to as “Doubting Thomas”), then it must be the first Sunday after Easter Sunday. And, indeed, it is, for we are treated to John’s account of Jesus’ appearance to Thomas eight days after the resurrection. In each of the three years of our cycle of readings, the Second Sunday of Easter’s Gospel text is always the account of Thomas’ encounter with the risen Lord.

Thomas was treated to something that you and I cannot experience: He not only saw the risen Lord, but was given an invitation to touch the Lord’s resurrected and glorified body. We can’t do that. Thomas got not only what he demanded, but he was given whatever it was that he needed in order to believe the reality of the resurrection.

If we ask the Lord for whatever it is we need in order to believe, I am convinced the Lord will give that to us somehow.

We can come to faith by seeing evidence of God’s acting in the lives of others. For example, we can point to miraculous healings, something that goes beyond the scope of medical knowledge to explain. I know of such things myself, having seen evidence of them. Or, we can point to someone’s life that has been completely turned around. I think of situations in which there seemed to be no hope of a better and brighter tomorrow, and yet, when all human abilities had fallen short, there was new life and new hope. I know about such things, as well. The complete and total turnaround in my father’s life would be a good example.

But, ultimately, coming to faith is an individual matter. It’s God and us, individually. It is, also, God and us collectively, for sometimes God gives us what we need when we see God at work in the lives of others. That is one reason that the Church exists, to be the laboratory where God is working and moving, allowing us to see evidence of that in others.

Searching for that evidence might be a challenging enterprise. So, perhaps, it might be a novel and productive way to go about looking for the evidence of God’s hand in our lives by looking for the absence of God. We might ask ourselves, “What would my life be like without God in it?” Going about the search in this way is a little like realizing the value of something in our lives once that something is gone. So, for example, we might imagine what it’d be like if some cherished family heirloom was suddenly no longer a part of our daily existence. We can imagine losing the associated memories of that object, for objects in our lives often aren’t simply “things”, they are attached in our consciousness and our memories with meaning and memory.

It can be like that with our faith in God. So maybe we ought to be looking to see what we’d miss if it wasn’t there, the things of God.

Maybe that’ll help us to “see” (though not physically, like Thomas was able to do) the risen Lord.

AMEN.       

The Sunday of the Resurrection – Easter Sunday, Year C (2022)

Acts 10:34 – 43 / Psalm 118:1 – 2, 14 – 24 / I Corinthians 15:19 – 26 / John 20:1 – 18

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, April 17, 2022.

 

“NEW BEGINNINGS”
(Homily text:  John 20:1 – 18)

In my former Diocese, I was, for a time, the Spiritual Director for the Middle School-aged young people’s weekend retreat, which was known as “New Beginnings”. The concept of these weekend gatherings was to enable these young people to see God’s guiding hand and presence in their lives at a time when they are undergoing significant change. So, for example, one of the songs we sang with them was entitled “God Don’t Make No Junk”. (Yes, I know, the title is terrible English…but the song, I think, made a good impression on these young people.)

The Easter event is all about “new beginnings”. Jesus’ rising from the tomb on Easter Sunday morning demonstrates God’s power to create and to recreate, a new beginning.

For the stratified world that existed 2,000 years ago, that message was a radical one, for both within the Judaism of the time and also in the Greco-Roman world of the first century, the message that God could, and would (with a person’s permission), create a new, brighter and more meaningful life was culture-changing, a direct challenge to the expectations of people everywhere.

How did this challenge work itself out in the Church?

As the Good News (Gospel) of the work of Jesus Christ went out into the world, the Church would offer a radical welcome to any and all persons. So, for example, when the Church gathered for worship, noble men and women would sit next to slaves, and they would call each other “brother” and “sister”. The sensibilities of the time in that pagan world dictated that a person should expect to stay where they found themselves…if a noble person, that meant protecting the prerogatives and the perks that went with noble status. For slaves, it meant a life of servitude, one without choices and without hope for a better tomorrow. For many in that society and culture, both for slaves, and, as well, for the working classes, life lacked meaning and purpose. So for many, the attitude seemed to be that purpose in life was to have as much fun as one could manage to indulge in.

Within the Judaism of the time, expectations were also challenged. For commonly-held attitudes dictated that a sick person was to be avoided, in part to avoid ritual contamination that would make a person unable to enter the Temple’s precincts in order to fulfill the requirements of the Law of Moses. But also, the attitude was that if a person was sickly, or was poor, their condition and their predicament was directly due to some sinful condition they, themselves, had brought about.

Into this situation, our Lord comes, offering three things: 1. A radical welcome to all persons; 2. Healing and wholeness of life; and 3. Amendment of life, a new beginning.

Everything we know about our Lord’s earthly ministry centers around His deep and abiding concern for, and value of, each and every person. Secondary aspects of a person’s identity, such as their status within society, or the status of their health, or their ethnicity, or their racial background, or their membership in a group or tribe, meant nothing to our Lord. What was important was that each individual is God’s own, intentional creation, a human being who is deeply loved by God, a human being with whom God desires to have an intimate, powerful, life-changing and abiding relationship.

In other words, what God offers through Jesus Christ is nothing less than a new beginning: A new, more meaningful, purposeful, life.

Such a new beginning means that, no matter where our life’s journey has taken us until now, God offers us a new beginning. We aren’t stuck or consigned to a tomorrow with little or no hope. God’s gift, God’s offer, is freely offered. But we have to accept it. Once we do, then we must expect changes, for God never leaves us where He finds us. That, too, is part of God’s new beginning, offered to us.

Thanks be to God!

AMEN. 

The Sunday of the Passion (Palm Sunday), Year C (2022)

Luke 19:28 – 40 / Psalm 118:1 – 2, 19 – 20 / Isaiah 50:4 – 9a / Psalm 31:9 – 16 / Philippians 2:5 – 11 / Luke 22:14 – 23:56

 

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, April 10, 2022.

 

“GUARDING AND GATHERING”

This Holy Week’s events, and the theme of those events, might be summed up in the following two words: “Guarding” and “gathering”.

This past week has offered me an excellent example as a way to understand all that Jesus was about in making His way into Jerusalem, where He would confront the powers of that age, even to the point of death. The way of understanding that Jesus is doing comes from nature, and it has to do with  a mother bird, who wards off possible intruders from her nesting place, so as to guard her newly hatched chicks.

This past week, members of the Friends of the East Broad Top (Railroad) assisted members of the Rockhill Trolley Museum, which is adjacent to the railroad, with the rehabilitation of some of the trolley museum’s track.

One day near to where we were working, a small Killdeer bird came at us, squawking for all she was worth, flapping her wings as widely and as wildly as she could, and making aggressive moves toward us. Eventually, we figured out that she had a nest nearby that she was protecting. (Sure enough, later on in the week, we spotted her again, sitting on what was, most likely, her nest, even as she kept a close eye on our movements.)

This mother bird acted like so many mothers in the animal kingdom do, ones who would sacrifice even their own welfare in order to protect the possibility of new life coming into the world.

Our Lord’s actions in this Holy Week are of the same stuff: He guards those who are His own, even to the point of taking on far superior forces of the powers of that age (at least on the surface, those forces seemed to be superior), and even to the point of sacrificing Himself for the protection of that new life which will come as a result of His sacrifice.

And as a result of this sacrifice, new life does, indeed, come into the world. That new life consists of all who come in faith to claim the inheritance of new and everlasting life that comes through the gift of Jesus Christ, that one who rose again from the dead on Easter Sunday morning, that one who demonstrates God’s power over all forms of evil, including the power of death itself.

AMEN.

Lent 5, Year C (2022)

Philippians 3:4b – 14 / Psalm 126 / John 12:1- 8

 

This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, April 3, 2022.

 

“THE GREATEST AND MOST-CENTRAL REALITY”

(Homily text: Philippians 3:4b – 14)

Many, if not most, people have some sort of an organizing principle or reality in their lives, something that gives shape (and hopefully, meaning) to other aspects of life. For example, for some, it might be their work or their profession. For others, it might be a hobby or some other recreational or leisure activity. For still others, it might be family or a group of friends.

For St. Paul, that central reality, that organizing principle, is Jesus Christ.

In today’s reading from his letter to the Philippians[1], he tells us just how important his relationship to Christ is. He says that his religious pedigree (that is, his past in Judaism) is “rubbish”[2]. It means nothing to him now. It certainly doesn’t form any sort of a platform for him to try to reach higher toward God.

Notice the language he employs: “I strain, I press on”, he says, toward the “upward call of God in Christ Jesus”.

Notice Paul’s use of the word “call”. For Paul’s reality began with a call from the Lord, the one who, as Paul made his way on the road to Damascus, saw a bright light and heard the Lord saying, “Saul, Saul[3], why are you persecuting me?” In response, Paul replied, “Who are you, Lord?” The Lord said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” [4]

Paul’s relationship with the Lord began with the Lord’s call to him. It wasn’t, certainly, the other way around…for Paul recognized that his attempts to find favor with God through his own efforts, through his own scrupulous adherence to the requirements of the Law of Moses (Torah), didn’t amount to anything. That past, he says, is “rubbish”.

We surely get the idea that Paul’s relationship with Christ overshadows any other reality in his life. We get the idea that Paul’s relationship with Christ colors all other ingredients in and parts of his life. His whole life is organized around knowing Christ and making Christ known to others.

Paul’s call to know Christ and to make Christ known is a marvelous Lenten theme. For in Lent, we are called to examine all areas of our lives, in order to see just how each area relates to our love relationship with God in Christ. Each area of life is subject to God’s call to us. Each area of life is subject to a reshaping in order to bring it into alignment with God’s call to holiness.

We might put ourselves in Paul’s shoes, in order to pick up the mirror, look ourselves squarely in the face, and ask, “How is my life organized around my relationship with Christ?”

After all, there can be no higher calling, no more central concern, no more important question to be answered than that one.

AMEN.

         

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[1]   Many biblical scholars think that Paul’s letter to the Philippians was the last letter he wrote. It’s possible that he composed this letter during his time of house arrest in Rome, perhaps about the year 62 AD, some two years before his martyrdom.

[2]  Some translations render Paul’s statement by saying that he counts them as “loss”.

[3]   Saul was the original version of Paul’s name, which was changed later on.

[4]   The account of Paul’s conversion may be found in Acts 9:1 – 9. It is repeated in Acts 22:6 – 11.