Cardinal Francis George
Homily on the Occasion of the 75th Anniversary
of St. Vincent Ferrer Parish, River Forest, Illinois,
January 8, 2006
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
The story proclaimed in the Gospel for the Feast of the Epiphany, captures our imagination, as it did the imagination of those to whom it was first proclaimed in Rome. One of the interesting things in visiting the holy city of Rome is to look at the sarcophagi, the caskets in stone of those who were buried there, for Romans always took particular concern abut the burial of the dead. And if you go back two thousand years you can see the switch in the way they used to carve those stone coffins from pagan symbols -- the stories of Bacchus -- to Christian symbols, particularly Christ, the Good Shepherd. You could see the gathering of strength of Christianity in the city of Rome by watching the way in which the symbols and carvings on the sarcophagi, the coffins of the dead, changed.
MAGI
One of the things you might notice if you looked at those stone coffins, is the frequency of the scene of the Magi coming to adore the newborn Jesus. There are many scenes in the Gospel that might have been put on a casket or in a home or anywhere else, but the Romans, newly converted to Christianity preferred this scene. When I asked people why they said, "Well, because they understood what was being said here. The early Romans, while they were still Christians, were part of a great empire that had been present even at that time for over 800 years. In all the great events that marked human history, they were used to being present when important things happened. And of course the birth of the Lord was what divided human history, the most important birth in the history of the human race. So how were the Romans present? Well, they knew they weren't present in Luke's Gospel. The shepherds, Mary and Joseph, everyone who showed up there was a Jew, for salvation is from the Jews as Jesus himself said. These were the chosen people for whom the savior was to be born. So how could the Romans be present. Well, they took up Matthew's Gospel and they said ahaa! Three gentiles. Three people who weren't Jews show up, with gifts, and they worshipped. And they become part of the household of the Lord, part of the family of God, part of the new chosen people, the Church. And in the gentile three kings or three magi the Romans felt that they were present at the birth of the Lord, this all-important event in the history of the human race. And so are we.
Those of us who come from a non-Jewish background, those of us who are the descendants of gentiles, as are the overwhelming number of Christians in the world today, recognize in these three stargazers, people who could have been in our ancestry, people who made us present at the birth of the Lord. What is important in this story, is that at the very beginning of Jesus' life on earth, he came, not only to save his own people, but to save all the nations, to save all of us. The very word for this feast, "epiphany" is a Greek word that means "showing," that means "revelation." But of course, if Jesus shows himself to everyone, then we have an obligation, as his disciples, to continue that "epiphany," to show him to others, to be light for the world.
STARS
That is the second point in the Epiphany gospel that captures our imagination, stars. Three kings, stars. Stars are magical things, aren't they. All our popular songs about stars, say we "wish upon a star," we wonder what stars are, we talk about movie stars, who for good or ill light up the screen. Stars are wonderful phenomena of nature. And so they pique our interest, as they interested three astrologers, three wise men, three kings, three magi, two thousand years ago. What's important is that stars are universal. Everyone on earth can see them. So God could use the stars for the gentiles. The Jews had the prophets, and they had scripture, and they had dreams, they had ways in which they had gotten used to God forming them as a people in history. The gentiles had no such relationship to God. They just had nature, which does speak to us of God. if we have eyes to look and ears to hear. And so the three kings followed stars. And they followed a star in their own land, a pagan land, wherever that was, probably east, the tradition says Persia. They followed a star into the Holy Land itself, into Jerusalem, the capital of God's own people. And they finally followed it to a little stable, to a little town of Bethlehem, where they found a little baby. And somehow they were moved to worship him.
God accompanies us, in good times and in bad, in strange places, and in familiar places. He accompanies us in every land we might find ourselves in, and in every stage of the journey of life. He stays with us. Not always -- the star was blocked for a time -- they had lost it. Sometimes we can think that we are abandoned, but we never are. God finds means, other people, the Church herself, family, strangers sometimes, to show us the way. To be our stars, to be light, and we should depend upon that providence of God and never doubt it even when times seem very dark, indeed. The light will shine again in ways that will bring us into unfamiliar places, places sometimes we wouldn't want to go, or we wonder what are we doing here. But they kept following, those three kings, following whatever light was available to them, until having discovered the source of the light to the whole world, they adored. And then what happens? Then having met the Lord, and having become part of his people, they were warned in a dream. An angel came. They didn't need stars any more. They now had the means that God always uses to speak to his people, his own people, to which they were now joined. And so they went back to their country another way, but always, always, under the providence of God.
TWO LANGUAGES
I think reflecting on the way this story comes together, tells us something about ourselves as Church in this land. We speak two languages, don't we? We speak the language of angels sometimes, a Catholic language, about grace, and sacraments, we speak of the Rosary, the Way of the Cross, we speak of tabernacles, we speak of the virtues, theological and moral. We have a language that is our own. A language that is proper to us as the Church, God's new Israel. And that's perfectly proper. But we speak that language within a world that doesn't know it. And so we also speak another language. A language that everyone can understand. A language that is like stars, universal in its scope, and yet we speak it in a way to lead people into the household of the faith. There is always that tension in our lives between being at home speaking our own language, being around the Lord in familiar settings, and then being ourselves truly but none the less open to a world that doesn't understand the Lord, that hasn't followed a star or heard an angel, that doesn't understand who he is, yet we have to be light to that world too. There's a great challenge, of speaking a language elsewhere that will lead people here.
A CENTER OF SERVICES
This parish has been guided by the Order of Preachers since its foundation. And that is a preacher's problem. How do you speak a language that will capture people where they are, and bring them to where God wants them to be. But it's not just a challenge for those who preach in church. It's a problem and a challenge for everyone who is baptized and confirmed, and who is to be the light of Christ in the world. It's a problem and a challenge for the whole church, for all of us. This parish has met that challenge in many ways, but like all parishes it can, at times, be reduced to a center of services. Think of seventy-five years of service here. What marvelous services you have been given. How great has been the teaching, how thorough, how authentic. How wonderful has been, not just the light of the stars, but the warmth of God's love reaching out to visit the sick, to capture those who otherwise would be overlooked or abandoned. Every time a parent, a mother or a father, teaches the name of Jesus to a little child and shows that child how to make the sign of the cross, light for the world is being shared. In so many ways -- you know them far better than I -- this parish has been a center for the services you need to be faithful to Christ, to be members of his body the Church.
We celebrate that, and will celebrate it all this year, your seventy-fifth year. And how you should celebrate it, how I celebrate it with you with great joy and with great pride, in you and in those who have shaped this parish for so many years. Proud to be your archbishop. Grateful for you.
A CENTER OF MISSION
And yet also I must challenge you to go beyond those services that maintain the faith to taking up the mission that will save the world. For if we just become service centers, then somehow, we may be comfort for one another, but we're not light to the world. And so, your parish also in recent years has taken up the challenge of evangelizing, that means preaching who Christ is to a world that not only doesn't know him, but very often doesn't want to know him. Because it's dangerous to get to know Jesus Christ. He'll change you. And nobody wants to be changed, really, do we. We all kind of struggle to be who we are, and, leave us alone. So when you come along and say, "Well, follow the light, and when you get to its source and you go back out, you'll be different." People begin to say, "Well thank you very much. We'll talk about this tomorrow." We do it ourselves. We struggle before we go to confession. Do I have to say this? Do I have to go now? OK. Nobody likes to be converted. But conversion is at the heart of this story, because it is at the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Church exists to convert the world. To serve us, of course. But far more important, to convert the world in every age. That challenge you are meeting because this is a marvelous parish. But, we can meet it better, all of us. And I ask you to reflect upon that as you celebrate seventy-five years of marvelous services, and great deeds in the past. Look to the future. But it will be different. It has to be different, because Christ keeps calling us to be ever more deeply converted, to be ever more identified with him, to be ever more following his way, and less and less following our own. That's my prayer. For you and for myself as you enter into this year of grace. For your willingness to enter into it, and to think and to plan and to plot how you will become a center, not just of service but of mission -- not just of service to you or to the archdiocese, but of mission to the world in this year -- for your willingness to do that, with all my heart, I thank you, and congratulations, and God bless you. Amen.