Third Sunday in Ordinary Time C. January 25, 2004. Our Lady of Grace 5:15, 9:30. Nehemiah 8: 2-4a, 5-6, 8-10. I Corinthians 12: 12-30. Luke 1: 1-4, 4 14-21.
Paul Newman is a handsome actor with deep blue eyes who has captured the attention of the movie world and women for decades. He was chosen best actor of the year once and was nominated for that honor six other times. Paul Newman is a Hollywood man, yet in his senior years he has witnessed to values that are deeply human and caring, values that are far from the self-centeredness often associated with Hollywood. In 1980 Paul Newman decided to give away bottles of his prized, personal salad dressing. The first batches of salad dressing were mixed in a wash tub in his basement with a canoe paddle. Today this salad dressing is known as “Newman’s Own” and brings in two million dollars a year in sales. I have never tasted the salad dressing, so I am not advertising for it. Every year Paul Newman sits down to distribute after-tax profits from salad dressing sales. This year it will amount to about eighteen million dollars. Newman gives all the profit to medical research, care for the environment, and his special charity, camps for children who are seriously ill. He said, “As I approach my dotage (old age), I become acutely aware of the privilege of long life and the sense of accomplishment and completion that can be run from that simple piece of good fortune. At the same time, it reminds me that some children, at a whim and perverse stroke of bad fortune are deprived of that privilege (of a long life)” Paul Newman reminds us that we all stand for something beyond the success of the present moment. What do you stand for?
Jesus began his public ministry immediately after his baptism in the Jordan and the forty days he spent in the desert being tempted by the devil, testing the meaning of his baptism. Jesus walked into his home town synagogue or church as he always did on the Sabbath. When it was time to read from the Scriptures Jesus took the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and he read a passage that he applied to himself. It was his inaugural, coming out or graduation address. Jesus read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tiding to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” This was the platform on which Jesus would build his public ministry. If we were voting for messiah, would we elect him on this platform – first, good news to the poor: second, liberty to captives; third, sight to the blind; fourth, freedom for the oppressed, and overall, a time that is acceptable to God!
We have been listening to a lot of political speeches lately. What do we use to judge the platform of someone seeking public office in our land. While we believe in the separation of the Church as an institution from the State as an institution, there has been no time in our history that religious and moral values, most often learned in churches, have been separated from the vision and decisions of those who govern our land. While our government does not and should not endorse a particular religion, religious values have always formed the soul of America. Let me give you some examples:
The Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that hey are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Even though the founders of our land declared these to be God-given rights, we fought a civil war to guarantee that all human beings in our land are treated as equal, including black men an women. We amended our constitution to give women the right to vote, guaranteeing the rights of full citizenship to women as well as to men. The first unalienable right mentioned in the Declaration of Independence is the right to life. We are involved in a great struggle in our land about the right to life of the unborn child. Our rather recent and convenient way of denying the unborn child the unalienable right to life is to refuse to recognize the child in the womb as a human life with all the protections that human life has in our land. The death sentence is also a right to life issue. We are currently struggling with whether any crime, however ugly, can strip a human being of the unalienable right to life. Religious values are solidly embedded in the founding documents of our land. How do we preserve the values on which our country was founded? What are the candidates for public office saying?
While the Statue of Liberty is not one of our founding
documents, the words on its base express the spirit and vision of America: “Give
me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The
wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the
golden door." These words are very close to the inaugural address of
Jesus, “I have been anointed to bring good news to the poor, liberty to
captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed.” What are our
candidates for public office saying about these basic American values?
During the Civil War Abraham Lincoln once said, "I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for the day." Lincoln was a man whose life was enlightened by religious values. That is our tradition. That is who we are.
Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most far reaching and powerful of our presidents once said, “If a man is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss which he had better make all possible haste to correct.”
All of our recent presidents and most candidates for public office say “God Bless America” rather easily. The religious values for which we stand are much deeper than the invocation of God’s name. A solid knowledge of the Scriptures, of our rich and varied Ameican religious tradition and of Catholic social teaching are all very important in setting a vision for the future. For the wisdom that gave birth to this land and for the crucial and ongoing influence of the faith communities to which we belong, we give God thanks and praise.