True Bravery – 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Sermon by Father Levine

Fr. Joseph Levine; Holy Family Catholic Church and Missions; Burns, Oregon; June 16, 2024

We are always courageous.  

Courage, strength, manliness: what boy would not want to be able to say of his father, “My father is a brave man”? What woman would not want to be able to say of her husband, “My husband is strong and brave”?

Bravery, however, is neither a matter of brute, physical strength – nobody would call the dumb goon or thug, ‘brave’ – nor is it a matter of a reckless foolhardiness – bull riding is not a matter of bravery.

On the other hand, consider St. Paul, who can say with truth, We are always courageous. By all accounts he was not physically very impressive, but his bravery can definitely be witnessed in the dangers and hardships he endured for the sake of Jesus Christ. Driven to boast in order to preserve his spiritual children from the seductions of cunning men he declares: Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one – I am talking like a madman – with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger from false brethren; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. (2 Cor 11:23-27)

St. John Chrysostom exclaims in praise of St. Paul: “Paul, more than anyone else, has shown us what man really is, and in what our nobility consists, and of what virtue this animal is capable of. Each day he aimed ever higher; each day he rose up with great ardor and faced new categories of dangers that threatened him. … The one thing he feared, indeed dreaded, was to offend God; nothing else could sway him. Therefore, the only thing he really wanted was to please God. The most important thing of all to him was that he knew himself to be loved by Christ. … Death itself and pain and whatever torments might come were but child’s play to him, provided that thereby he might bear some burden for the sake of Christ.” (LOH Vol III. Pg. 1322) There is St. Paul’s bravery, emerging from his tremendous strength of character, rooted in his love of Jesus Christ.

St. Paul does not boast about the time he healed a man who was crippled from birth and unable to walk (Acts 14:10) He does not boast about the time he faced down a wicked magician and displayed divine power striking him with blindness (Acts 13:7-11).  Bravery is not about mighty deeds, whether done by divine power or human power. There is no bravery involved in warfare by means of a ‘drones’. Bravery faces danger and death without flinching; bravery is not a matter of recklessly throwing your life away; bravery serves a higher cause, as St. Paul served Jesus Christ, the highest Lord of all. Bravery is not a matter of physical strength; it is a matter of strength of character. Bravery requires that a man first of all be master of himself, mastering his own impulses the way a cowboy masters a bronco.

In today’s 1^st reading, St. Paul teaches us the source of the highest bravery, living faith. We know that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord. Note the way he speaks of being at home in the body, that expression speaks of the goodness of this life in the body, a life that is not to be simply thrown away. Yet, it is a goodness that is secondary, because here we are away from the Lord.  So it is more desirable to leave the body and go home to the Lord.

Our faith enables us to face death with confidence, refusing to give in to the temptations to sin, choosing rather to please the Lord, even if it cost us our life, knowing that we have an eternal home with the Lord. Our confidence rests upon our faith, on an awareness of an unseen reality – the invisible God is most real and the source of all reality – relying upon the words of our Lord, upon his unshakeable promise.  This is the faith that conquers the world (cf. 1 Jn 5:4-5). Faith conquers the world because it gives us the strength to resist the world’s lies, seductions, and threats. This is the faith of the martyrs who chose death over offending God by sin. This the faith displayed by St. Polycarp, who when told to revile Christ, replied, before going to the stake to be burnt, “Eighty and six years have I served him, and in nothing hath he wronged me; and how, then, can I blaspheme my King, who saved me?”  (Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.3)  

Yet, we are not faced with such dangers and such choices on a day to day basis.  On a day to day basis we do not require a ‘do or die’ sort of courage; we require the courage of patience and perseverance, the courage of the long-haul and the long-view. This courage requires real vision.

Jesus’ ‘farmer parables’ in today’s Gospel gives us the vision we need for the courage of the long-haul and the long view.

The farmer must plant the seed and care for the plant, tending a growth that he does not cause, all the while waiting for the harvest. Only, while the farmer has experienced past harvests and knows what to expect, the harvest of eternal life is great beyond our experience, our imagination, and conception. What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him. (1 Cor 2:9)

Further, we might need a real conversion in our way of thinking, from an mentality of fixing machines, to a mentality of cultivating things that grow. When we see a problem we want to fix it like we fix a machine. When we fix a machine, we grasp in our mind how the machine works and what is wrong with the machine, and then we impose our solution on the machine as something which is pretty much subject to our control. Growing things, however, are different. Some activity on our part is necessary, but finally we have to recognize our own limitation in the truth that God gives the growth. (1 Cor 3:7) Because God gives the growth that also means that the harvest arrives not at a time of our determining, but of his determining. In farming and ranching that is not too much of a problem for us, because at least we can estimate the time for the harvest in advance; in other areas of human life, however, it is often the case that all we can do is plant and water, without having any clear idea of when the time of harvest will come, while yet trusting that one day the harvest will indeed come.

Then there is the grain of mustard seed that is so small in the beginning and so big in the end. The challenge of the day to day sort of courage of perseverance is that our day to day actions can seem so insignificant and ineffective. It requires a sort of courage, walking by faith not by sight, to do what is right, in small seemingly insignificant matters, day by day, confident that one day the harvest will come, that one day the mustard seed will become a great bush. This is a courage that does not face the death of the body, but the death of the ego. This courage does not draw attention to itself and win applause like the rodeo champion, but it does win the applause of the cloud of witnesses (Heb 12:1), the saints and angels in heaven.

This sort of courage is needed in raising children, in cultivating a marriage relationship, in cultivating one’s own soul by uprooting vices and planting virtues, in working to spread the Gospel in the world, and in order to persevere through the whole time of our earthly sojourn so as to reap the harvest of eternal life. This sort of courage is not rooted in a bold temperament, but in a love that is strong, deep, and farsighted. This is the sort of courage that the father of a family needs; it is the sort of courage that will make a father a real hero to his children. Though there is little glamour in such courage, it is the sort of courage that builds the strength of character needed to face more dramatic dangers and difficulties when they come.

The just man shall flourish like the palm tree. (Ps 92[91]:12) The palm tree is lofty, but has no low branches; all the frond, flower, and fruit is at the top; so the just man is by no means a man who blooms early and burns out; rather he still bears fruit in old age; he is vigorous and sturdy like the cedar of Lebanon, an evergreen that is not daunted by the snows of winter and able to endure the passing tempests of this world. (Ps 92[91]:14)