Installation mass Homily

At the beginning of my ministry as a priest, I was obliged to meet with one of the auxiliary bishops of Detroit for a check-in. The bishop told me that it wasn’t until he was in his 40s that he finally ‘got it’—that is, he realized his life as a disciple and his priestly ministry was not about him. He realized that it was never about him, though perhaps he had at one time thought otherwise. He realized that no matter how he deceived himself, it would never be about him. It was always about Jesus. It was always about Jesus and it will always be about Jesus.
 
St. John put it this way in his Gospel: I am the vine and you are the branches and without me, you can do nothing (John 15:5). Surely this is a bracing antidote for today’s rampant and poisonous narcissism. Repent and believe! These are among Jesus’ first words and they must be our north star if we are to be disciples; if we are to pick up out cross and follow after him; if we are to love him and keep his commandments; if we are to leave behind the old man and embrace the new.
 
Repent and believe is inherent in our baptismal call; that is, the dying to self and the rising in Christ. It is the new pattern of resurrected living: the Eucharistic shape of post-resurrection life. It’s about Jesus: it’s about the high priest and his priestly people who are called from darkness to light, from futility to purpose, from the desuetude of sin to the grandeur of grace. From a people who had no future becoming a people whose future is no longer ransomed and circumscribed by the ponderous weight of death—a people sharing by grace in the identity and the mission of the risen one in the ever-new resurrected life of a disciple.
 
Some people are sadly unaware that God is love, that Jesus is love incarnate who desires to be incarnate in you and in me, in us, in all of creation. Jesus aches for you! Think about that. He aches for you and me, he aches for us to be with him. Discipleship is simply cultivating the gifts of the sacraments and the ‘yes’ of a life of virtue—about Jesus making his home in us and growing that ache for him. He has made the first move and it is up to you and me to respond—to respond to his proffered hand; to say with our lives ‘yes’ or ‘no’—‘I will follow’ or ‘I will return to my former ways.’ It’s about Jesus and allowing ourselves to be caught up in the mystery of Christ, in his incarnation, in his life, in his commandments, his teachings, his suffering and death, his resurrection—so that his life may be reproduced in us, borne in our person into the world. It’s about allowing ourselves to be enraptured by his love, to be vivified by his Holy Spirit, ordered to a sacramental and inexorable advance (but for sin), to confirmation to the Father’s most holy will, to the very person of the Word made flesh, so that, like Jesus himself, by his power in us, our very food will be to do the Father’s will and finish His work.
 
This is the Eucharistic shape of our journey, knowing that it is the Father’s plan to reestablish all creation in His son Jesus: that he must increase and we decrease, which is why he instituted the sacraments, buying us back from our enslavement, to make us, with every encounter with himself, with every affirmation we offer in our way of living, our fiat, most especially in Eucharistic communion, proclaiming as we do the lordship of Jesus in our lives. This journey is specifically apostolic. It is truly Catholic because it is Eucharistic and Marian, Christocentric, and Trinitarian, as Blessed Columba Marmion taught. We, my brothers and sisters, are on a journey, and it is not simply fortuitous that the Eucharistic renewal now rising in our nation is a simple coincidence: it is a prophetic sign for the Church, the Church in the United States, for the Church of La Crosse, to simply embrace anew the path of discipleship which is cruciform, sacramental, and essentially Eucharistic. It is Christ’s initiative which we offer our own ‘Amen.’ We are a Eucharistic people called to bear witness to resurrected love, called to be love in Jesus. This is our identity and mission. We are called to be a priestly and Eucharistic people on mission, to be, as St. Peter Chrysologus wrote, “both sacrifice to God and His priest.” He wrote: “Do not forfeit what Divine authority confers on you. Take up the sword of the Spirit. Let your heart be an altar, then with full confidence in God present your body for sacrifice. God desires not death but faith. God thirsts not for blood but for self-surrender. God is appeased not be slaughter but by the offering of your free will.” This is our way forward: to offer and become a living oblation poured out for many. It is a priestly journey for a priestly people. It is a journey that involves sacrifice: one primarily liturgical, sacramental, and fundamentally Eucharistic. It is our way of becoming the way for the bloom of our aching to grow to fulfillment.
 
My dear brothers and sisters, I am by grace your bishop and, by the grace of God, you are my priests and my people. Let us not in these coming days tarry in fallow fields, for time is far shorter than we might imagine. Let us not spend the time left to us in unworthy and undignified pursuits for a believer. Let us spend our days so that we might become singularly focused, allowing ourselves to be captivated anew by love. Let us repent and rise from the torpor of satiety. Let us believe again, pressing into the Truth with our flesh and blood, our future and past, as the apostles themselves did, following the resurrection, knowing in the depths of their souls and ours that he is risen and that the risen one is truly Lord and that wondrously so you and I are his witnesses, his ambassadors, who can know and do nothing without him. My brothers and sisters, let us ask the Holy Spirit to set this local church ablaze. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to bring resurrected life to you and me as he does in our own Eucharistic communion. Let us be set on fire so that his love might flow through us into the local community, into your families, into the world. Let us put aside lesser tasks and devote ourselves to the breaking of the bread and prayers, to being Christ’s ambassadors, to being Christ’s witnesses here and now. If not now, when? If not who, it is you. Let ourselves be fully devoted to the one who aches for us, that we, you and I, might ache for him. Amen.

---