One Chapter a Day: Homily for the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

Many of you know that Les Misérables is one of my favorite books,
but it’s a long one, almost 1500 pages, so reading it takes a while.
Last year I found out that it has exactly 365 chapters,
so I decided that in 2018 I would read one chapter a day,
starting on January 1st and going to December 31st.
They’re short chapters, about 5 pages or so,
and I I thought it would be kind of a meditation and exercise
in patience and delayed gratification to read it so slowly.
I also thought I would stay motivated if I read it with others,
so I sent word out through the Internet and invited anyone to join me.
So far there are almost fifty people reading it,
including some of you, and some former students of mine.
There are also readers from California, Texas, Illinois, New Hampshire,
and even as far away as The Netherlands and Australia.
And we’re all reading one chapter a day.

As the book begins, the first main character is the Bishop of Digne.
The first fourteen chapters describe what a good man he is
and how he spends his days,
how he takes care of the poor, the sick, the suffering.
He’s a saint, really, and we get fourteen chapters to tell us that.
For the first two weeks of January, reading one chapter a day,
nothing really happens to advance the plot.
But finally, in the fifteenth chapter, something does happen.

A stranger comes to town,
a wanderer, a traveler, a scruffy-looking vagrant named Jean Valjean.
He enters the town of Digne, where the bishop lives,
and everything begins.

Sometimes life is like that.
We go on living ten, twelve, fourteen chapters of our lives,
with nothing really new, nothing really dramatic.

And then suddenly a stranger comes to town, a stranger enters our lives.
Maybe we meet the person we end up marrying.
Maybe we have a baby.
Maybe we get a new coworker or neighbor.

When a stranger comes to town
life gets interesting and dramatic for awhile.
There’s no telling what might happen.
A stranger is mysterious, a stranger catches everyone’s attention,
a stranger breaks the monotony of ordinary life.

Jonah is a stranger to the Ninevites.
The Ninevites are living their lives as usual,
living their chapters one day at a time,
which for Nineveh means they’re living in sin and wickedness.
Suddenly here comes Jonah,
walking from one end of the city to the other,
announcing that Nineveh is going to be destroyed.
He’s a catalyst, a trigger for change.
The Ninevites listen to Jonah, they repent and believe in God.
A stranger comes to town and their lives are forever changed.

Jesus is a stranger to the Galileans,
a stranger to Simon, Andrew, James and John.
They’re living their lives as usual, living their chapters one day at a time,
catching fish, doing their daily work.
Suddenly here comes Jesus saying,
“Repent and believe in the gospel.”
“Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
Jesus, too, is a catalyst, a trigger for change.
The apostles listen to Jesus, they abandon their nets,
they follow him.
A stranger comes to town and their lives are forever changed.

And here we are,
living our lives as usual, living our chapters one day at a time,
doing laundry, paying bills, raising children,
going to our jobs.
Suddenly here comes Jesus,
saying in today’s Scripture readings,
“Repent, and believe in the gospel.”
“Come after me.”

But Jesus isn’t a stranger to us
the way he was to the fishermen, to the Galileans.
We know who Jesus is.
For most of us,
as far back as we can remember,
we’ve known the name of Jesus.
We’ve been raised with him.
We’ve heard this story before, many times.

And that can be a problem.
Maybe this story isn’t as dramatic for us as it used to be.
We’re in Ordinary Time now,
and maybe this story is too ordinary to move us
because we’ve heard it so often.

It’s so easy for the new or the strange to become the familiar,
to lose its ability to move us.

It’s like when a house you live in
or a place you go to for a long time
doesn’t seem special anymore.

Do you remember walking into this church building for the very first time?
Maybe you just moved to into the neighborhood,
or maybe you started going back to Mass after being away for awhile.
For some of us, the first time we came into this building
was right after it was built.
Remember how we used to have Mass in what is now the gym,
when the parish hall was just a big empty space in the back,
separated by that folding accordion wall divider?

And then we built this church building.
How fresh, how new, how inspiring it was!
Does it still feel that way?
It doesn’t take long for something new to become so familiar
that it doesn’t affect us in the same way,
even if you keep changing it and adding to it.

We’ve painted the walls, added tile in the narthex,
and finished the parish hall.
We have a beautiful new statue of John the Baptist
in the baptismal font
and an icon of the Ascension.
But after awhile we get used to them,
and they all become ordinary, part of the background.
It takes deliberate effort to notice and appreciate them.

The same thing can happen with Scripture.
This weekend we begin reading from the Gospel of Mark,
the gospel that we’ll be reading all year,
the same words we heard three years ago,
when we last read it,
the same familiar stories we’ve heard for most of our lives.
How can we make them fresh again?
How can we recapture the newness of the Good News?

One thing we might do is read a different translation,
and hear the same stories and events, but with slightly different words.
Or maybe when we read the Bible at home we could read out loud.

We could shake things up a bit when we come to Mass, too.
We could play musical pews.
Everybody seems to have their own spot in the pews,
but have you ever wondered what Mass looks like from a different seat?
You’re probably used to looking across the sanctuary
and seeing the same people sit there week after week,
the same people in front of you, the same people behind you.
What if you moved to a different part of the church for Mass?
That would be strange.

Or what if you came to Mass at a different time?
The 4:30 Mass goers could wake up early on Sunday
and see what the church looks like in the morning sunlight.
The 8:00 crowd could come to 10:30
and meet people they didn’t even know went to St. Peter’s.
Or the 10:30 Mass goers could come Saturday night
and find out what kind of mischief Fr. George is up to.

Each of these things could help us to see things from a different angle,
and make the familiar seem new again.

But after awhile they become ordinary, they become the new status quo.
We can’t live that way all the time, constantly trying new things
simply to make our lives interesting.
Life is interesting enough!

This is what Catholic author G.K. Chesterton meant when he said,
“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man
and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”

The challenge is to see the events of our ordinary days
as moments of grace-filled strangeness,
to see the Mystery that lies behind each moment of our lives.

Washing dishes, the daily commute, grocery shopping,
weekly Mass with stories we’ve heard dozens of times,
these are the chapters of our lives.
These are the moments in which Jesus says to us,
“Repent and believe in the gospel.”
“Come after me.”

There’s enough grace in our ordinary lives
to give us all the opportunity we need to change our hearts
and follow Jesus.

We don’t need to wait for the dramatic to happen.
Each day the drama of salvation unfolds again and again,
if we would only notice it.

But it does take time and a conscious effort.

Even though it took fifteen days
to get to the real beginning of Les Misérables,
those two weeks where nothing seemed to happen
were important in their own way.
By slowing down,
reading the chapters deliberately and meditating on them each day
we were able to savor the beautiful language
and get to know the character of the Bishop.
Even though I have read Les Misérables several times before,
there were sentences in those chapters I had never really read.

We can do the same thing with our lives,
by slowing down and reading the chapters of our lives
and meditating on them.
With time and conscious effort
we can better recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives
and be moved by Jesus’ invitation to change our hearts and follow him,
so that today and tomorrow and the next day
will be the beginning of a brand new story for our lives,
a story that leads to the happiest of all possible endings,
eternal life.

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