A homily for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
I was helping out in a parish, and the sacristant, a guy named Lou, was always grumpy, and every time he’d come in there, he’d be grumping at this or grumping at that one time early in the morning at morning mass. I came in, took my coat off, put it on the counter, and he grabbed it and said, “were you born in a barn? Don’t you know how to hang up a coat?” And I looked at him because I did not have my coffee yet and said, Lou, what is a short for Lucifer? And I thought, oh, I’m going to get it now. And he started to laugh, and he said, no one’s ever called him Lucifer before. And he thought it was funny.
So he said, we’re going out for breakfast. He had a very interesting history. How he got that name was he was left at the doorstep of a convent as a newborn, and he was crying. The garbageman heard him, woke up the nuns. They brought him in. It was the feast of Saint Lucy in December. So the nuns gave him the name, Lou.
That’s how he got it. Kind of interesting. And from then on, he always was friendly with me. And, But my. That’s my thinking is Lucifer. Lucifer means to carry light. And Lucifer is the chief of the archangels. He was brilliant and light, and he carried light. But what light did he carry? His own light. And that’s, that’s the problem.
He wanted to promote himself and promote, He would be the chief. He would be the center. He would be the Lucifer. And that’s not what we’re Christians to be. We’re not to be Lucifer. We’re to be like Christopher. Christopher means to carry Christ. Lucifer means to carry light or the feminine. Christine or Christopher is the call here.
in today’s gospel, James and John come to Jesus and say we want to be first and second. We want to sit on your first. So that’s putting themselves forward, making their light. They want their light to shine forth. And I think that’s always a problem we end up being when we promote our own light, we end up being Lucifer. We need to promote Christ’s light to be Christ in the world today.
Saint John of the cross, his best known poem is called The Dark Night and it begins with these words. “One dark night, fired by love’s urgent longings. Ah the sheer grace I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled.” What he’s getting at there is. His house is stilled. It’s that promoting one’s self, promoting one’s light.
Promoting is still now. And he can go out to promote Christ, to do the work of Christ, to be Christ in the world today. That’s where I think James and John went awry. Why Jesus wouldn’t give them that position. Their job is not to be Johniffer or Jamesiffer or Lucifer. It’s to be Christopher or the feminine Christine to promote Christ.
It’s our job. Thanks, Christopher.
