Homily of Ash Wednesday 2024

We live in a time when people have become more aware and caring of our planet and its resources and their fragility. Recycling is becoming more and more common. By keeping paper and plastics and other materials away from landfills and recycling them, those things which we once threw away can be transformed into somethings new and useful. If you think of the equipment on playgrounds, much, if not all, of the plastic comes from recycled milk jugs and other plastic items. Things that seemed to have reached the end of their useful life were collected, reshaped and re-formed into things that will provide joy and usefulness for many years to come. As we come together on this Ash Wednesday morning, we enter into the Church’s great plan for recycling. And the ashes used here today bear a wonderful representation of this.

Once the beautiful palm branches we used as we celebrated Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday last year, those palm-branches have been burned into ashes, and as you may know, ashes can be used as fertilizer. The ashes now remind us of our need for repentance, the need for us to change and grow during this Lent. That recycling of the palms of Palm Sunday into the ashes of Ash Wednesday is a reminder that God is seeking to recycle us. Of course, we will all be recycled when our life here on earth ends, but Lent is a time for us prepare now to be shaped into something ready for the eternal joy of heaven with God, rather than something only fit to be discarded into the eternal trash heap of hell.

Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart. God wishes to reshape and re-form our hearts and our lives with His love. Whatever is not good, true or beautiful or worthy of God in our lives needs to be removed from us and burned away, with the help of God’s grace and mercy and these forty days of Lent are the perfect opportunity to do this through our prayer and sacrifices of penance.

So we ask that the season of Lent that begins today may truly be a time for us filled with God’s love and mercy, and the grace of conversion in our hearts and in our lives. This is our opportunity to be recycled into a better me and you, to become someone that more resembles Jesus Christ. Let us pray that the same God who transforms our simple gifts of bread and wine into the body and blood of his Son at every Mass will lovingly transform each of us, so that we might rise, reshaped and renewed, in the glory of not just Easter 2024, but for the rest of our lives, here and in eternity.

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Homily of the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

And raising his eyes toward his disciples he said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven. For their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.” (Luke: 6:20-26)

As you know, there are four gospels in the New Testament, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And they give you a view of Our Lord’s life and teaching. Saint Matthew emphasizes Our Lord as fulfilling the prophecies about him in the Old Testament. Saint Mark is a rather dark, straightforward account. And St. John is the theologian of the gospel writers, of the evangelists. He speaks with a deeper understanding of the mysteries that Christ teaches. Saint Luke is the only Gentile, non-Jew, of the writers in the New Testament. All the others – Matthew, Mark, John, Paul, Jude, and all the other others, were all Jews.

Abbot Matthew Stark delivers homily for Sixth Sunday in Ordinary TimeSt. Luke’s emphasis, and because he is a Gentile, I think, is the mercy of God and the poor. He teaches that God is merciful and loving toward us, and he teaches that we, you and I, who are pretty well off, have a responsibility to help the poor. By the way, the gospels are all written in Greek because that was the common language at the time in the Mediterranean world. The reason, perhaps, that Saint Luke – a convert from, I guess, paganism – emphasizes those two things is that the culture of Greece and Rome did not think of God as love, if they thought of God at all. They did not think of him as merciful towards sinners. And they had no real idea that you should be concerned with the poor. Jews did know that they were to be concerned about the poor because all throughout what we call the Old Testament, that is, the Jewish scriptures, over and over and over again they, and we, are told to look after the poor. Often they speak of them simply as “widows and orphans“ because those were considered the poorest of the poor.

And so it is today too. Certainly with a place like Covenant House in New York City, they look after people your age who have been thrown out of their homes, who have been corrupted by drugs or some other vice, and they give them a place in which they can recover. And so it is that Luke, the Gentile, the non-Jew, emphasizes what his readers, Gentile readers, who would be not used to hearing it, that you should help the poor, look after them, and also that you are under the love and mercy of God.

So you and I should have in our minds and hearts some regard, some way, of helping the poor. The easiest way, probably, is, if you have money, to give some of it to the poor. But other people do much more. They serve in various ways the actual needs of the poor. But we should be doing something, all of us. Now, Lent is coming, and when that comes, it might be one of the things that you do, is to give something up and use what money you save for the poor. There is a saying of Our Lord’s in Luke’s gospel, which is, “To whom much is given, from that one much is required.” And that person: you and I are that person, because all of us in this church has been given a great deal. We all may have had other things, too, that cause us to suffer or cause difficulty in life, but we are sufficiently well off to be concerned with the poor.

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Ab. Matthew Stark, O.S.B. .
(image: 1970s yearbook)