11th Sunday of Ordinary Time 2023

Now I know what they mean by the expression “being caught up in a Hollywood production.” If you drove by the church the last couple of days, you saw our parking lot full of cars and trucks associated with the Netflix production that they have been filming here in Chatham all Spring. This week they were filming driving scenes for the show, and they asked to use our parking lot to park a few cars and use our parish center to serve lunch. Little did I know they would turn the place into the studio back lot. As the expression goes, “It is all good” because they paid us a generous rent and left things as they found them. Although, they did clean us out of toilet paper.

I understand the production being filmed is based on an Elin Hilderbrand novel called, “The Perfect Couple.” The book is a murder mystery about a lavish Nantucket wedding where the Maid of Honor is killed.

Last week on the Feast of Corpus Christi, I preached about the Eucharist and how Catholics believe it is the Real Presence of Christ. I told you that belief is a Mystery of our faith. It is a different kind of mystery from a murder mystery. The Mysteries of our faith aren’t problems to be solved, unlike a murder mystery where we will find our answer if we follow the clues. We can’t solve the Mysteries of our faith because they pertain to God, who is immutable. While we can study God and ponder God’s complexity, which can help us establish a relationship with God, we can never completely solve the mystery of God. There is always more to learn about God.

As Catholics, we believe the Eucharist is the Real Presence of Christ. Every time we celebrate the Mass, Jesus Christ is present in the Eucharist; Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. The Eucharist is a mystery and the sum and summit of our Catholic faith, and while it is a mystery, we still need to study it. We always need to go deeper and deeper into our knowledge of the mysteries of our faith.

To help encourage all Catholics to refresh their understanding of the Eucharist and to open themselves to learning more about it, our American bishops are conducting a Eucharistic Revival. It began with a diocesan phase conducted last year. The parish phase started last Sunday, and the bishops plan for the revival to culminate next summer with a Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis in July. The congress will attract tens of thousands of Catholics from throughout the country to pray together and learn more about the Blessed Sacrament. It will be the first Eucharistic Congress in the United States in over eighty years. I’ve already made a preliminary commitment to attend. Maybe some of you would like to join me? Just let me know.

To begin to implement the Eucharistic Revival here at Holy Redeemer, starting today, I plan to give a series of homilies over the next six Sundays on the Eucharist. I’m calling the series, “It’s a Mystery to Me.” I’ll begin today with an overview of the Mass. Over the next five weeks, I’ll discuss five different aspects of the Mass with you. We’ll look at the Mass as 1) Stirring, 2) Story, 3) Sacrifice, 4) Supper, and 5) Sending. I intend for this series to help even life-long Catholics, who believe they know everything there is to know about the Eucharist, to look at it with fresh eyes. In preparing for this series, I’ve learned a few things about the Blessed Sacrament myself. If you open your mind, you, too, will also discover new things about the Eucharist.

COVID had a great impact on Church life and Mass attendance. When it first hit in March 2020, even church services suddenly stopped. Mass and all sacramental life as we know it came to a halt, and we had to try to innovate new ways to bring Christ‘s presence into our parish. We had to think outside the box.

We began to Livestream our Mass on our website. It started with a rudimentary camera setup on a table in front of the sanctuary. It felt strange to celebrate Mass in front of an empty church, looking into a camera with only Howard Wheldon reciting the Mass responses and our then Music Director, Ryan Peterof, playing the organ and singing. Watching Mass on their computers and making a spiritual communion wasn’t enough for many parishioners. They felt like they were in a sacramental desert and hungered for Communion.

As the shutdown continued, we tried to help satisfy parishioners’ desire for the Blessed Sacrament. We started giving Communion on the church’s front steps to those who had watched the Livestream Mass but wanted to receive the Sacrament. In the Summer and Fall of 2020, we celebrated the 10AM Mass in the parking lot. We bought equipment to broadcast Mass over a radio frequency so parishioners could listen in their cars. As a parish, we tried to do innovative things to keep sharing the Eucharist, and many of you have told me how much you appreciated it.

To understand the mystery of the Mass, I’d like us to recall one of the most popular Gospel stories. It is one of my favorites. It is a Mass in a microcosm. I’m referring to the story of the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus. We read it on the Second Sunday of Easter just a few weeks ago. It comes from the Gospel of Luke and gives us the details of one of the first Masses ever celebrated by the Church.

Luke begins by writing about two disciples who left Jerusalem on the afternoon of the first Easter to walk to Emmaus. Biblical archeologists have never been able to pinpoint a village seven miles from Jerusalem named Emmaus. That leads me to wonder if Luke was telling us the disciples were on the road to nowhere. I wonder if, overcome by Jesus’ Passion, Death, and Resurrection, they were wandering around trying to make sense of all they had experienced over the last few days. 

So often, don’t we come to Mass hoping for spiritual comfort? We’ve had a challenging week. Maybe we have faced problems at work or school. There has been a crisis in our family life or other relationship that we need to sort out in our minds and hearts, and we bring it here to church, hoping to receive some direction from God. I like to believe that was happening with the two disciples on the road.

Luke tells us that Jesus came up and began to walk with the disciples. He listens to their suffering. He asks them what is troubling them. They are shocked to hear Jesus claims not to know all the tumult that happened to their leader, Jesus, whom they believed was the Messiah of God.

Jesus begins to help them understand what scripture taught about the Messiah. He points out to them all the sacred texts that teach what to expect from the Messiah. He reminds them that the prophets taught them to anticipate the Messiah to be a suffering servant of the people, not a great military or political leader. At Mass, we are supposed to get a similar insight from the Liturgy of the Word, that part of the Mass where we listen to a Hebrew Scripture passage, a Psalm, a reading from a letter from the Apostles, and a Gospel Passage. Following the readings, the priest preaches a homily intended to explain the scripture so we can apply them to our lives.

The disciples reach their destination in the story of the Road to Emmaus just as night is about to fall. It seems to them as if their traveling companion means to continue on his journey. They urge him to come into the house, eat dinner with them, and stay the night. Jesus accepts their invitation and sits down to supper with them. Since Jesus is their guest, they urge Him to be the one to break the bread. It is when Jesus breaks the bread, just as He had on Holy Thursday a few days before, that they recognize Him.

Isn’t that the second part of the Mass? In a more elaborate way, that is what we do during the part of the Mass we call the Liturgy of the Eucharist. We take the gifts of the Offertory, bread and wine, the priest blesses them, and through the grace of God, they become Jesus’ Real Body and Blood.

Luke writes that once Jesus broke the bread, the disciples recognized Jesus, but He vanished from their sight. Even though it was night, the disciples were so excited to have Jesus in their midst; they hurried back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples, and when they got to the Upper Room, where the apostles and disciples were together, they shared their news and heard about instances of Jesus appearing to His disciples. 

God intends that we feel the same sort of excitement when we leave Mass. After encountering Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist, God hopes enthusiasm about learning of Jesus’ resurrection will fill us with the desire to share it with our friends. God desires us to leave Mass with the yearning to seek out the lost sheep, cure the sick and drive out demons. 

The Mass aims to help us meet Jesus and develop a relationship with Him. God wants us to enter into the mystery and grow in our love of God. How do we meet Jesus in the Mass? There are four ways. First, we meet Jesus in the Word, the scriptures. During the Liturgy of the Word, we hear quite a bit of the Bible read at Mass over the three-year cycle of readings, but we need to pray with scripture. I often encourage parishioners to do that as part of their daily prayer.

The second place we meet Jesus is in the person of the priest. When the priest celebrates Mass,  we say he does it “In Persona Christi” or in the person of Christ. That means he performs the actions of Christ. While I, to the best of my ability, try to be as Christ-like as possible, remember I’m human and not divine. I hope I always appear to celebrate the Eucharist with reverence and solemnity and live outside of the sanctuary as a disciple of Jesus.

The third way Christ is present is in the Eucharist; we have been discussing that and will discuss it more over the next few weeks. The fourth way Jesus makes Himself present is in you, the congregation. In today’s Gospel, Matthew tells us how Jesus told the Apostles He needed laborers in the vineyard that would carry out His ministry. He sent them to do the same work He was doing. Jesus sent them to care for the troubled and abandoned, the people who felt pushed to the peripheries of society. They were to preach that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, cure the sick, raise the dead, and drive out demons. After receiving the Eucharist, the faithful are responsible for being the presence of Christ in our world this week.

In addition to that, I ask you to make another commitment today. I ask you to commit to coming to Mass each of the next five weeks to learn more about the Eucharist. I know some of you might be planning to go to a wedding, baby shower, or some other important family event that will take you out of town. Some of you are vacationers who are with us for only this weekend. I invite you to join us on our Livestream. I’m not encouraging you to skip attending Mass in person in your regular parish or substituting a Livestream Mass for an in-person one where you visit. Our Livestream is on 24/7, so join us for any of our weekend Masses. We also archive a weekend  Mass, so it is available whenever you want to view it. You can even binge-watch it whenever you like. The Mass means to unite us as a worldwide community of faith. Learn more about it through these homilies so you can help bring more of our brothers and sisters into the Kingdom of God.