“…whatever
is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence
and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
(Philippians 4:8)
We
all got up with a little spring in our step this morning because we felt the
first chill in the air of autumn. Sure,
the temperature only made it down to 70, but as South Floridians that’s a big
deal. I walked out the door of my house
and saw our beautiful church lit up by the morning sun against a bright blue
backdrop of a sky and some wispy clouds off in the back. What a sight!
Immediately I thanked God for the gift of the new day, for making each
sunrise different, and for personally creating this particular Sunday
morning. His day. The Lord’s Day.
God
did the same with each of us when we were created. He did it so lovingly, so
carefully, so uniquely. We were each
created with a purpose. In today’s
bulletin I wrote that we were all traced by the very finger of God
himself. Since God is the master artist
then we are each nothing less than a masterpiece. Pope Francis said so himself in comments
during last year’s Day of Life:
"even the weakest and most vulnerable, the sick, the old, the
unborn and the poor, are masterpieces of God's creation, made in his own image,
destined to live forever, and deserving of the upmost reverence and
respect."
Yet
the world rejects so many of God’s children like they rejected all those sent
into the vineyard in today’s gospel, not realizing that each servant that the
owner sent was sent by God himself. So
many times we fail to realize that we are all part of God's vineyard and we are
each an important vine. Each person has
a role to play in God’s plan. But listen
to the last three words the Holy Father uses: “respect and reverence.” We are to treat the outcasts of society with
reverence. This is a word that we
normally associate with the sacred. We
are reverent when we walk into Church or in the presence of an important
figure, but to be reverent to a homeless person, an Ebola patient, an
undocumented immigrant, a dying old person, or the unborn? That’s not the word we usually use. Society would rather forget all those people
mentioned above. Case in point: In Oregon two years, ago, a retired bus driver
had a recurrence of lung cancer. Her
oncologist suggested that she be given an experimental drug that would give her
a 45% chance of being alive in a year. “The
State of Oregon denied this treatment stating that her prognosis wasn’t good
enough to warrant expensive medication to treat her cancer. Yet in the same
letter denying coverage for her medication, the State offered full coverage
(100%) for her assisted suicide.” (2012 Respect Life Program, “Life Matters:
Doctor-Assisted Death by Suicide”; USCCB website) In our own country, we are throwing the
elderly and the sick to the side and PAYING for them to kill themselves so that
they would be less of a burden on society.
We have
become no better than the people in the gospel that beat and reject God's servants.
We are called to defend the most vulnerable among us especially the
elderly and the unborn (over 50 million lost young lives since 1973, 5 times
the number of people killed in the holocaust).
On this Respect Life Sunday, we must recognize that we are all
“masterpieces of God’s creation” because if we did, we would see each other
with the eyes of God as brothers and sisters that are meant to be treasured,
not rejected and discarded as the world so callously does. And as a masterpiece, we are called to sing
the praises of our Creator at every moment and denounce the culture of death
around us. Those silent, rejected voices
have so much to teach us, particularly the elderly as Pope Francis reminds
us. May we rise up as a Church and
protect those voices, protect God’s creation.
To discard one of His masterpieces would be akin to burning the Sistine
Chapel, except the Sistine Chapel was not made by the loving hand of God.
