Dcn. Tom McClelland's Homily:
        23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Sep 10, 2006

How real is God for you?  How often do you talk to God and listen to Him?  In other words, is God a real part of your daily life?  And are you excited about God?  As Catholic Christians, we profess our faith by reciting the Creed.  We say, "I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen."  Nothing is excluded from God's creation.  Everything is made by God.  But are these just words that come out of our mouths from habit, or do we really, deeply believe what we say, and do we think about what those words mean?  So, I ask again, how real is God for you?

In our gospel reading, the realness of God and the presence of God in the world is exactly what Mark is trying to establish for his readers — the fact that Christ (who is God) IS no doubt the Messiah.  In our first reading from Isaiah, we heard the prophet promise that the Man of God will open the eyes of the blind.  The deaf will hear, and the tongue of the mute will sing.  Isaiah, the greatest of the prophets, made those promises 700 years before Christ, and all of Israel longed for the coming of the Messiah.  Seven hundred years later, the evangelist, Mark, is saying, "Look!  Here he is!  Jesus really is the long-awaited Messiah."

In English, we read in the Gospel that "the people brought to Jesus a deaf man who had a speech impediment."  When Mark wrote that line in Greek, he used the word mogililan to describe the man's speech problem.  That Greek word is found in only one other place in the whole Greek text of the Bible — it's right in today's passage from Isaiah, where the prophet describes the "mute" singing.  The people of Mark's time, who knew Isaiah backwards and forwards, recognized that perfect connection.  In the verses just prior to today's gospel reading, Jesus cures the Syro-Phoenician woman's daughter.  Isaiah had promised cures.  In the following chapter of Mark's gospel, Jesus cures the blind man.  Isaiah had promised that the eyes of the blind would be opened.  Mark sees the miracles of Jesus as the perfect fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy, and he is excited about it!  And he wants us, too, to be excited about God!  When did you last see an excited Catholic?  Fr. Jim gets a little excited now and then, but the rest of us barely turn up the volume when we sing a hymn.  Then we settle right back down again.

How real is God for you?  Did you notice how personal and physical the drama is in the Gospel?  Our focus is drawn to a hand, a finger, ears, a tongue, and spitting.  Mark is emphatic — God has truly come in the flesh.  As Isaiah promised, God has made the living waters of baptism flow in the desert of the world.  He has set captives free from their sins, which is what we sang in today's Psalm.  He has come to us, that rich and poor might dine together in the Eucharistic feast, just as James tells us in today's Epistle.  God has done for each of us what He did for that deaf mute.  He has opened our ears to hear the Word of God, and he has loosened our tongues that we might sing praises to Him.

But how real is God for you?  Really?  How much is Jesus a part of your life?  How often do you have lunch with the Holy Spirit?  In our modern world, what is real?  Heaven help us, we say: "Coke is the real thing."  Or you've heard the expression, "He's the real deal."  I guess that means that this "he" person is bold, brash, and swaggers.  So what is real?

One way for something to be real is for it to be physical.  Then our senses will tell us it is real.  If we can see it, taste it, touch it, and so forth, we know its real.  When David put the stone in his sling and whacked Goliath in the head, for example, Goliath understood real.  We know music is real, because we can hear it.  And our nose will easily tell us about the reality of a rotten egg.  All external, physical things are certainly real.

Then there are internal things.  Some of these are physical, too.  Pain is certainly real.  Some of us have had our back go out, or we've had the misfortune of slamming our fingers in a car door.  THAT is real pain.

Some internal things are not physical, such as emotions.  But nonetheless, we know that emotions are very real.  Sadness, joy, confidence, fear, love, hate, anger, and gratitude are examples of very important realities in our lives.  These are our feelings!  These emotions, and our ability to communicate our feelings, more than anything else distinguish us humans and are very real.

There is also our intellect.  We pack our heads with facts and figures.  We learn over time how to do things.  We create art.  We build things.  And we can teach these things to our kids.  We can add and subtract and make objective decisions.  We can understand that the Earth is round and that the moon orbits around the Earth.  We humans are good at examining all sorts of things in nature and gaining an ever-increasing understanding of them.  Thus our memories and our ability to reason are very real.

Where is the reality of God in all of this?  Or as I asked initially, "How real is God for you?"  One of the problems we humans have is separating the natural from the supernatural.  Everything I've talked about so far (physical things, emotions, and intellect) is part of the natural world.  These things are tangible and understandable, and we easily comprehend their reality.  With God, we have to recognize and accept something that is not so easy, that He is supernatural.  Some of us, I know, upon hearing the word "supernatural," start thinking: "Do-do-do-do."

God is the infinite divine being, a pure spirit that exists separate from any of the natural things of this world.  He created the natural world, and in the miracle of His creation, he has made us human beings to be of both body and spirit.  It is God who creates our spiritual souls when we are conceived, and it is our biological parents who produce our human bodies.  What a profound thing it is, therefore, to contemplate that each of us is a union of spirit and matter.  But my experience in life is that most of us don't think very much about that part of ourselves that is spiritual or supernatural.  Instead, we focus almost entirely on the natural things — our schedules, meals, money, school, job, clothes, and friends.  But it is important to stop and realize every day — "Hey, I'm a spirit, like Jesus, having a temporary earthly existence."

It is our spiritual soul that is our innermost being, and our soul is very real.  It is the part of us that is made in the image and likeness of God.  It is our spiritual soul that will exist for eternity and will have an everlasting relationship with God.

Because God is supernatural, our human earthly minds can only know the things about God that He chooses to reveal to us.  And God has indeed revealed many things.  The inspired Word of God, the Holy Bible, reveals God to us, and the Tradition of His Church, which He established with the apostles, shapes our understanding of His revelation.  For example, we know that His relationship to us is as a Father, and that we are children in relation to him.  We know that He sent His only Son to be the example of how we are to live in this world and to redeem our souls to everlasting life by his death on the cross.  We know of God's great love for us, and that His love is always present for us and is unchanging.

So our hearts and minds know that God is real.  Our challenge is to make to make him a more real part of our every day life, a part of what we do each day, so that we may grow ever closer to Him.  We need to pray more.  We need to talk to God throughout the day!  We should take at least 10 minutes everyday to go somewhere quiet and listen to God.  We can read a piece of scripture everyday.  You can join our Bible Study program that will start in two weeks.  You can say grace before every meal.  Examine your conscience every night before going to sleep.  Talk to others about your experiences of God.  The more aware you are of Jesus and the Holy Spirit in your life, every day, every hour, the more real God will be for you.  The more real and personal God is for you, the holier you will become, and like Mark the evangelist you will be more excited about Christ, and then God will definitely be more real for you.

Just imagine what this parish and our whole community will like with so many excited and enthused Catholics around!  May God bless you.

After thought.  You will know God is real for you when you prefer God over other things.

God will be real for you when you go visit that cancer patient and cry with them rather than send a card.

God will be real for you when you skip buying the new HDTV in favor of giving your money to help feed the hungry.