Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Distractions, distractions, distractions! Coming back from my holiday, my plan

was to catch up on e-mails, but I found that the internet and phone line weren’t

working. In the ideal world, it would have been fixed when the man from the

internet company arrived on Wednesday, but this is the real world, and

hopefully it might be up and running by Monday evening. Having limited

internet access on my mobile phone has been interesting, as it makes you

realise how much you get used to these things. It’s meant that I didn’t watch

any streamed videos, because they would use up too much data. So I just read

books instead.

One book I started reading on holiday was Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious

Generation. How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of

Mental Illness. I’m just getting up to half of the way through, and one topic it

mentions is distractions. Teenagers grow up with phones constantly pinging

and calling their attention away from their homework and the people in front of

them, at least until they tame some of the notifications. Back when ar were a

lad, we didn’t have mobile phones. There was just the landline, TV and radio,

and maybe a console or computer. You did your homework, and then you got

to play. One thing I found in my first years as a priest was that, the more altar

servers you had, the lower the chance of starting Mass on time. When they

were constantly firing questions at me from all sides, I would forget what I was

about to do, and maybe we’d forget to put something out for Mass.

Distractions, or lack of them! In the first reading, the people of Israel are

focused. They know what God’s plan is for them. They gather on the night of

their liberation from Egypt, looking forward to God delivering them from the

hand of Pharaoh, and already they are celebrating and rejoicing together at

what is to come. There, the timespan was relatively short, between the

predictions of the things God was going to do, and them actually happening.

In the second reading, we’re looking at a longer timespan, when there’s more

time to be distracted. God made the promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that

their descendents were to have a land of their own, but they didn’t live to see it

themselves. In fact, in Jacob’s time, his family go to live in Egypt, and it’s

something like four hundred years that they spend there before they make their

journey with Moses for the Promised Land. No wonder some of the Israelites

on the journey through the desert thought it would be better to go back to Egypt

and abandon this difficult journey. But you get nothing if you don’t persevere.

It says they spent forty years in the wilderness, and not everyone lived to see

the day when they entered the Promised Land, not even Moses. But, as a

nation, they did persevere. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the

conviction of things not seen.”

We too, are on a journey, one that if lifelong, and we too have to make sure we

aren’t distracted. Our homeland is heaven, much more important. We also

don’t know how long we are going to live – on my holiday I returned back to

the West Midlands, and there is a memorial not too far from my parents’ home

to a girl, Donna Cooper, who was in the year above me in primary school. I’m

not sure what age she was when she went to meet the Lord – it was either

primary or secondary school; probably the simplest way to describe it was that

it was a car accident.

The Gospel also is about us remaining focused and not getting distracted. “Sell

your possessions, and give to the needy” – that must have gotten people’s

attention. Get rid of the excess from your lives and help those who have

nothing. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” You won’t

be on earth forever, and you can’t take it with you, unless you store it in your

heavenly bank account through good deeds.

The men waiting for their master to return after the wedding feast have to be

ready and alert, and undergo discomfort if they have to stay up ridiculously

late. It’s no good going home to sleep before he returns. If a manager of a

household decides to maltreat those under him and spend his time eating and

getting drunk, his master will not be pleased when he returns, and he’ll be

given a right hiding, as they used to say.

So we have to remain alert, like the Israelites celebrating the Passover in the

first reading, and not put off by difficulties, as some of them were later on in

the desert. Our journey to heaven is lifelong; we are not to turn aside to sinful

pleasures – the Master will find out. And now we also have mobile phones to

distract us as well. How much we need the prayers of Our Lady!

Curious about exploring things further?  If you would like to ask further questions about the topics raised in these homilies (or maybe think it wasn’t explained too well!), please feel free to e-mail Fr Michael at stjoseph.thame@rcaob.org.uk