Homily: The 5th Commandment

[00:00:01] Good morning. Welcome to St. Mike's. It's good to have our guests here. Welcome. In the 16th century, some of you may have heard of one of the greatest saints that we've had in the Catholic Church, St. Teresa of Avila. Amazing woman. Just incredible, incredible insights into humanity, St. Teresa of Avila.

[00:00:27] One of the things that she said back in the 16th century, she said, fear is the number one activator of all of our faults. In other words, it is out of fear that people tend to kind of say things they shouldn't and do things they shouldn't. And I think there's a lot of truth there. I really do. I think there's a lot of truth there.

[00:00:54] That fear is the number one activator of our faults. And if that's true, which she says, then it is worth asking, right? What is it that we fear? I mean, I'll tell you what I think. I think that a lot of times people are afraid the most of the unknown because they can't control it.

[00:01:16] And one of the greatest joys that you and I have in life is when we confront that fear of the unknown and we realize it no longer has power over us. In other words, it would go like this. Lord, I don't know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future. I don't know about the unknown.

[00:01:38] But when I finally go into it and say, you know what? I don't have to control it. We call that faith, deep sense of peace. It's okay. It's okay, Lord. I don't know how we're going to get through this, but we're going to get through this. And then we don't say things that we shouldn't because often when we say things that wound other people, man, they never forget it. They never forget it. Let me give you an example.

[00:02:08] About five years ago, I was preparing this couple for marriage. Awesome couple. And one day she comes in and she's just like sobbing. Just sobbing. And I said, what's going on? What's going on? And she begins to tell me that she had a conversation with her aunt. And she's like super excited about the wedding coming up. And her aunt looked at her and said, oh, honey, this is just your first wedding. This is just your first marriage.

[00:02:38] As if to say, you naive little girl. And I said to her, give me her address, please. And I will go. I mean, this is not very threatening, I don't think. But like, I mean, I was like so mad. I mean, can you imagine? I mean, I guarantee you this is what's going to happen. Years from now, she's going to come to her aunt's funeral. That's what she's going to remember.

[00:03:05] Martin Luther King Jr. used to say that the worst type of homicide is spiritual homicide, not physical homicide. So last week, you recall, we talked about the fourth commandment. What was the fourth commandment? Okay. What's the fifth commandment? Don't kill. Don't kill. So I think most of us are pretty good with the fifth commandment there.

[00:03:35] Okay. But there is, if King is, MLK is correct, there is such a thing as spiritual homicide. So what does that mean? It means very simply, look, we need to be careful about what we say. We do. So maybe you can help me with this. The last thing, right before we receive Holy Communion, we come together and everybody's kneeling down and everybody says together, Lord, I'm not worthy that you should enter

[00:04:05] under my, but only say the word and my. Okay. So let's assume that your neighbor who's not Catholic says to you, are you guys Catholic? Yeah, man. Where do you go? We go to St. Mike's. Yeah, I've heard of it. Is that on some, yeah, that's on some, but do you want to come? Yeah, cool, man. Come with us. So let's assume he comes and he hears you say, Lord, I'm not worthy that you should enter under my.

[00:04:35] Okay. And then he turns to you as you're driving home saying, what does that mean? What do you mean roof? What do you say? I don't know. Call Father Ben. No. I mean, what are you going to say? What do we mean when we say roof? I mean, it's a direct quote, right?

[00:05:02] From the centurion who said to Jesus, he said, look, you don't have to come into my house to heal my son. Just say the word of my soul. He'll be healed. It's a direct quote from the centurion. He wasn't even Christian. By roof, we mean body and soul. We're receiving Jesus into our body and our soul. So then right after that, we say, if you say the word, my soul will be healed. What does that one mean?

[00:05:30] Well, in brief, we're saying, Lord, look, I just, I invite you into all the stuff in me that needs to get cleaned out. Imagine God's grace is like spiritual liquid Drano. All right? I don't think the saint said that, but you know. In other words, my insecurities, my resentment, my brooding, my bitterness. Just come in, Lord, and clean all that out.

[00:06:01] I mean, you can see it. I don't even see it sometimes. I'm so used to living with it. So I just invite you in to clean it all out, man. Because you know what happens when we don't? We act out of it. If Teresa Vaville is correct, and I happen to think she is, she's a pretty smart woman, then what we're often saying without thinking about it, we're saying things, acting out of that stuff. Okay?

[00:06:30] So we need to get, we need to clean that out. Maybe we can put it this way. People fear the unknown because they can't control it. But when we finally realize we don't have to control it, we have faith and we have peace. But that requires taking our hands off of it and saying, Lord, you take it and not taking it back. Does anybody here remember Hurricane Elvis?

[00:07:01] Those of us that are Memphians. If you're not from Memphis, I'm sorry. Nobody's perfect. Okay? But if you talk to any Memphian, they will remember July 2003, Hurricane Elvis. So we had straight line winds for about a grand total of one minute. A hundred mile an hour winds, one minute. Eighty percent of Memphians lost power in July. For two weeks. You remember this? We finally got air conditioning back.

[00:07:30] We're like, thank you, Jesus. Right? We finally got it back. It was a tough, tough two weeks. So recently I was talking to one of our parishioners and he owns a tree company. You can imagine no shortage of business in Memphis. And he was telling me that during Hurricane Elvis, I didn't know this, the trees that survived were the ones with the deep tap root.

[00:08:00] Like pine trees and oak trees. They got a deep tap. They go deep into the ground. He said they lost a few limbs, but those are the ones that survived. So, pardon the analogy, let's just put that on our spiritual life for a second, shall we? What is your tap root? Well, what do you mean, Father? This is what I mean. Some people have a tap root of insecurity, of bitterness,

[00:08:31] of brooding. And they tend to accentuate the negative because they can't fix that tap root. And some people, have you ever known these people, they're just happy people? They're in a reservoir of happiness. They see the positive in life. You see the two. What do you think, who do you think is going to survive when the winds of life blow?

[00:08:59] Because the people with an inner tap root, an inner reservoir of insecurity and bitterness and fear, they're going to impact other people around them with that. They are. Matthew chapter 10, Jesus talks about, we would say, spiritual homicide. He says this. He says, don't be afraid of the people that can kill the body, but they can't kill the soul.

[00:09:29] He said, I'll tell you who to be afraid of. Be afraid of the one who after killing the body can also kill the soul. Who is that one? Us. Us. Our own choices. This is why it's so important. It's so important that we understand that sometimes these words that come out of our mouth can deeply, they can commit

[00:09:59] spiritual homicide. You know what the word discouragement means? The word discouragement literally means to remove courage, to discourage. I have removed this person's courage like this young woman's aunt has tattooed her heart. And sometimes we say things that deeply discourage people, right? We say, Lord, please, please, give me prudent words. You know,

[00:10:27] a few minutes ago, we had this gospel. And this is what we did. Everybody here, we go, Lord, be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart. So that's what we're saying. Lord, bless this thing because we can really do a lot of damage if we're not careful. Just help me to have good words so I'm encouraging, not discouraging. So I'll close with this.

[00:10:59] Some of you, if you've been in Memphis for a long time, you may remember many years ago the I-40-240 interchange was a very, very dangerous area. In fact, every year at that interchange they had a number of accidents. And they finally fixed a lot of it, but it was very dangerous. And I will never forget, some of you may remember this as well, two days before Christmas in 1988, December 23rd, 1988. There was a tanker

[00:11:28] that was making that turn, lost control, hit the retaining wall, exploded. 10,000 gallons of liquid propane. They estimate that the fireball was about 700 feet high and about that wide. Sadly, that day about dozens of people were hurt as well. And I remember, I remember so clearly,

[00:11:58] this is two days before Christmas, and I remember on Christmas Day, my sophomore year in high school, I was lying in bed crying. I was crying for these people I never met. And I thought, can you imagine spending Christmas knowing that your spouse or your child died instantaneously in this way? And over the course of the next few days, I was just so lifted up

[00:12:27] because all around the city of Memphis, Catholic churches, non-Catholic churches, civic centers, people came together to pray for these families and to offer support. It was really, really beautiful. It gave me a deep sense of pride and I remember thinking, that was one of the first times in my life, I remember thinking, maybe, maybe I should be a priest.

[00:12:57] And I said this to my girlfriend at the time, she was like, fine. I said, well honey, I didn't mean it that way. It's not very romantic. But I remember thinking, gosh, if I can help somebody in that situation, I want to do it. Right? Here's my point. Often in difficult situations, in tragic situations, we see the very, very best in people and the very, very worst.

[00:13:27] What makes them different is their spiritual tap root. What is underneath there? What is the kind of moral character that you have and that I have? Because I can guarantee you this, when you got a good one, it is the people around you that benefit. And when you don't, it is the people around you that have to live with that.