Archbishop’s Journal: We must be servants of all, especially those in need
- September 20, 2009
Archbishop George H. Niederauer delivered the following homily at a Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sept. 20, in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of San Francisco.
Imagine this scene: a mother, about 60, gathers her adult children in her living room. She tells them that she has been diagnosed with incurable cancer, and that painful treatments will soon begin. The mother goes into her kitchen, and the children begin to talk among themselves. She returns and asks them what they have been talking about. There is an embarrassed silence, and then one of them asks, on behalf of all, “Which of us is your favorite? Whom do you love most?”
That is like the scene with Jesus and the twelve apostles today, in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus predicts that he will be handed over to men who will kill him, and that three days later he will rise from the dead. Then they all walk home together. When they arrive home, Jesus asks the twelve what they were talking about along the way. After what Jesus had said, they began arguing about who among them was most important of all! How shallow and self-centered can you get? So Jesus tells them what “success” means in the kingdom he has come to establish and proclaim: “If anyone wishes to rank first, he must remain the last of all and the servant of all.” Why is that? Because Jesus himself was the servant of all, all the way to the Cross.
To give the twelve apostles credit, at least they are embarrassed by their shallowness: “At this they fell silent. . . .” They didn’t want to tell him what they had been talking about. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how everything looks like it’s true self in front of Jesus Christ? Suddenly their pride and selfishness embarrass them. Even a priest, Jesus Christ’s weak, imperfect human agent gets this “Jesus” treatment: Someone in a group I’m part of starts to tell a story, then suddenly stops, looks at me, and says, “Maybe I shouldn’t really be telling this story in front of You, Father.” I think to myself, “Maybe you shouldn’t be telling it at all.”
Of course, everything we say and do is “in front of Christ.” If we make a racist remark, we make the remark about Christ, and to Christ. If we sell drugs, we sell them to Christ. We conveniently forget that–life is so much more comfortable another way. It’s a natural human inclination to operate according to the pleasure/pain principle: seek and do what gives pleasure, or comfort, or even convenience, and avoid the opposite. It’s the way of the world. Jesus came to announce a different way, however – to BE a different way: “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.” Opposite to the way of the world around us: self, first, last and always. So we must choose.
For instance, the way of the world is to seek out the powerful people who can help you out and make your way easy. Stick with winners; don’t spend any time on losers. What does Jesus teach instead? Listen to the gospel: “Then he took a little child, stood him in their midst, and putting his arms around him, said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes a child such as this for my sake welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me welcomes, not me, but him who sent me.’”
Why did Jesus choose the little child? Well, children are helpless and vulnerable in this life. Most of the time they can’t make us rich or famous. Children need us: Our help, our example, our care, our patience, our love. So a child is a great example for Jesus to use when he’s showing us that we must be the servants of all, especially those most in need of us.
But there’s more to it than that. Kids are naive and inexperienced, but they are more open and flexible than adults, more spontaneous and joyful usually, and, while they constantly have their battles, they are much quicker to forgive and start over again. Contrast all that with what James is talking about in that second reading today: the jealousy, strife and vile behavior among adults in the Church.
And he gives a pretty good first-century psychological and spiritual analysis of what is going on when we sin. Listen to it again: “Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions that make war within your members? You covet but do not possess. You kill and envy but you cannot obtain; you fight and wage war. You do not possess because you do no ask. You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” At the end it comes back to being self-absorbed and self-centered, rather than Christ-centered, rather than being open to his love for us and his love for others through us.
And that clear choice between self-centeredness and Christ-centeredness brings us to our celebration today, our celebration and our giving thanks for 150 years of the service and witness of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of San Francisco, seeing and serving Jesus Christ in others, especially the most needy of our sisters and brothers.
The St. Vincent DePaul Society was founded in France in 1833 by Frederic Ozanam and other laymen and laywomen. They put their work under the patronage of St. Vincent de Paul, the seventeenth-century founder of the Congregation of the Mission and the Daughters of Charity. St. Vincent’s devotion to the poor was so great that the Church has declared him the patron saint of all works of charity. (I can never mention St. Vincent de Paul without putting in a plug: rent the video of his life story, “Monsieur Vincent,” a film that won the best foreign film Oscar many years ago. Yes, it has subtitles, but you won’t be disappointed!)
In 186O, only 27 years after it began in France, the St. Vincent DePaul Society came to San Francisco. Now, 150 years later, this Society provides services to over 1,000 men, women and children each day, offering hope and service to the poor and suffering on a direct, person-to-person basis. They battle the cycles of homelessness, substance abuse and domestic violence. Their programs include a detox center for homeless and low-income people; a sobriety-oriented affordable single-room occupancy residence; a free clothing- and grocery-distribution program; the city’s largest continuum of shelters and services for battered women and their children; and the largest homeless shelter in northern California. Every one of these programs means “hope” and “life” for so many people, and every one of them is seriously challenged by these tough economic times.
Almost one million people around the world are members of the St. Vincent DePaul Society. We pray for all of them today at this Eucharist, and we give thanks to God for them. Most particularly we give thanks for the women and men of the St. Vincent DePaul Society of San Francisco. They make no distinctions of creed or race or anything else, because St. Vincent did not and neither did Jesus the Lord.
At this Mass we offer and receive the Body and Blood of Christ, first offered by him on the Cross. Faith and hope and love empower us to see the Savior beneath the appearances of bread and wine. That same faith and hope and love, deepened and strengthened by Eucharist, empower us to see Christ our loving Lord in the neediest of our sisters and brothers, to see Christ in the poor, as Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, in “a most distressing disguise.” We pray for the San Francisco Vincentians that they will be strengthened today and all days, so that they may see Christ in those most distressing disguises, and, like the father of the Prodigal Son, that our Vincentians may replace those disguises by means of the ring, the sandals and the finest robe of Christian love and service.
By Archbishop George H. Niederauer
From September 25, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
