Father Ken’s Message:
Good afternoon and welcome to the Catholic Cathedral of Sapporo. Today we begin Ordinary Time in the Catholic Church calendar. The fun and glitter of Christmas is behind us and beginning on February 17th Ash Wednesday we begin Lent. During “Ordinary Time” we Catholics should reflect upon the very ordinary ways that God enters our lives and makes them “extraordinary.”
First, I have to tell you that my last week was far from “ordinary.” Besides being a priest, I am also a college professor at one of the local Catholic colleges (Angels College). I left work last Wednesday evening to go to visit my Dermatologist who treats me for Skin Cancer. The drive to her Office is about 20 minutes. Enroute my left-side rear tire got punctured by a large screw in the road and caused a flat tire. I pulled over to the side of the road and called JAF, which is the automobile roadside help service here in Japan. The truck arrived in about 30 minutes and the repairman changed my flat to the spare tire. He appeared to me as an Angel. It was a cold snowy night and I could only shout afterwards, “thank you God.” From that experience I am able to understand better the Readings for Mass today.
In the First Reading we read about God calling young Samuel into his service in the Church. He lived in a religious shrine in ancient Israel and it was his mentor Eli who helped him to understand that it was God who was calling him because he wanted him to help him. Samuel thought of himself as an ordinary boy but God saw the extraordinary in him. When Samuel grows into adulthood God would call him again to find and anoint the first King of Israel, Saul, and the second King of Israel, David. Samuel thought of himself as ordinary but he changed the history of the world and made way for the birth of Jesus because Joseph the foster-father of Jesus was a descendent of King David.
In the Second Reading Saint Paul is calling the early Christians of Corinthians to better understand their sexuality better in the vision of God for human persons. In ancient Greece there were gods of sexuality and performing sexual acts was considered as worship for these Greek gods. Truthfully sex is not a demon or a god. Sexuality is essential for the birthing of new human beings and for love to be celebrated as sacred to couples. Essential to that Catholic principle is that people are respected as somebodies and not nobodies. People are not objects to be used by others for mere pleasure, people are subjects of their own life in the dream of God therefore deserve respect and dignity. Because Jesus resurrected from the dead, he showed that the human body is essential and should be respected from conception at the beginning of life until natural death which leads to the resurrection experience. Society today promotes the illusion that sex without love, sex without responsibility, sex without commitment, sex without marriage is somehow a key to happiness. We Catholics believe happiness is found in God and that our bodies are more than its biology. Our bodies are Temples of God’s presence. We are asked by God to glorify his creation in our bodies through love and responsibility for ourselves and for others we love. We come to church each Sunday to remember that we are made in the image of God and our life mission is to live like God loving one another. Sexuality is not an ordinary thing; it is an extraordinary gift to us from God our Father in Heaven.
In the Gospel this morning from St. John we have a different version of the call of the disciples from the other three Gospel writers Matthew, Mark and Luke. In John’s Gospel it is the disciples who discover Jesus. But he looked so ordinary that they did not recognize Jesus. It was John the Baptist that had to point out who Jesus was for them to follow him. My brothers and sisters Catholics, Jesus is daily passing us by and asking us the same question he asked the two disciples in the Gospel passage today: “What are you looking for?” If we also wish to discover where Jesus lives we must look for him beneath his many disguises. He invites us to come and see him in the homeless, the lonely, the sick, the ugly, the old, the sad, and the spiritually lost.
This time of year, at my college we staff and faculty are busy trying to find jobs for our new graduates who will enter society at the end of March. For me the three Bible Readings are like an advertisement for employment jobs from God. We as the sons and daughters of God in 2024 are each called like young Samuel, the Catholics in Corinth, and the new disciples to full employment as Catholics. We are called to Catholic action to be the head, the heart, the hands and the feet of God for our various societies we belong to restore human dignity and love through whatever works we are each best at doing for the glory of God. Each of us are vital to the work of God. Let us all do three things in response to the three Bible Readings this afternoon. Like Samuel let us listen to God more in prayer. Like St. Paul’s advice let us use our sexuality to praise God through loving and one another. And let us open our eyes to see the suffering Jesus in the people around us and do something for them. Thank you very much.
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