A homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 6, 2022
2 Mc 7:1-2, 9-14, 2 Thes 2:16-3:5, Lk 20:27-38
I am a tech nerd, a gadget head, enthralled with gizmos, a personality quirk that goes back to before my high school days when I was an AV geek playing with 1-inch videotape and gritty black-and-white images from a somewhat massive camera.
So it’s probably no surprise that I usually say goodnight to Alexa — not because it’s a real person but because I have it programmed to rattle off my calendar and the weather for the next day. And then I do something silly: I tell Samuel L. Jackson to sleep tight. His voice randomly replies, occasionally with wishes for sweet dreams but a warning nonetheless to check under the bed.
Because monsters, right?
There’s something primal, something instinctive that leads so many of us to be afraid of the dark, especially when we are young.
There’s the uncertainty, there’s not knowing what may be lurking where we can’t see it. The uncertainty of not knowing if whatever is there, if indeed it is there, is out to get us.
In the dark, are we alone?
And then — Hallelujah! — we’re not. In a good way.
With calm reassurances and a chrome flashlight and a blanket of security like no other, our parents check under our beds and cuddle with us and chase away monsters real and imagined.
Because parents. Because parental love.
And as time goes on, we come to believe, we come to know without a doubt that before we climb into bed, our parents have swept our rooms clean of boogeymen, once again making it safe for us to sleep tight with sweet dreams.
That’s what parents do. Parents provide security in ways seen and unseen.
It’s that kind of security from a parent that St. Paul describes to the Thessalonians. A loving, confident, strong parent.
Our Creator.
Paul’s letters to his far-flung mission communities often chastised the newly converted followers of Jesus for straying from the Law of Love, for falling into old, bad habits. Paul and the other Apostles brought the Good News to people who had never seen Jesus in the flesh and who, some of them, had never even heard of him.
The Apostles’ missionary activities mingled teaching about Jesus and his peaceful ways with examples from their own lives. The Apostles talked the talk, they walked the walk, and then they walked onward to the next potential believers, hoping and praying that the people they had converted would continue on the straight path.
When the new followers strayed, when word of their backsliding reached Paul, he wrote the sometimes-harsh letters we are so familiar with.
But his sticks had carrots. Not in earthly rewards, usually, but always with reassurances about the vastness of God’s love and the never-ending nature of God’s mercy.
Paul reassured the Thessalonians and the Ephesians and the Colossians and everyone he ever came in contact with that God wants and God actively seeks a loving parental relationship with us. Nonstop. Never ending.
Paul reassures us that God wants and God actively seeks a loving parental relationship with us. Nonstop. Never ending.
God promises us security. God will send someone in a boat when the waters rise. God will give a doctor the skill to save a life, if it’s part of God’s plan.
God will always check under the bed, no matter how old we are. And send someone just to double-check.
