Turning from Idols to Serve the Living and True God, 21st Monday (I), August 28, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 21st Week of Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor
August 28, 2023
1 Thess 1:1-5.8-10, Ps 149, Mt 23:13-22

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today, on the feast of one of the second most famous convert in the history of the Church, the readings focus on conversion.
• St. Paul, the most famous convert in Church annals, in today’s first reading, praises the Christians in Thessalonika for having “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.” His words unmask a key truth: we’re always worshipping someone or something. They were turning, first, from pagan idols, but they were also turning from the three-fold concupiscence of materialism, hedonism and individualism (the lust of the eyes, of the flesh and the pride of life). But when they heard the kerygma through St. Paul, they turned away from sin, turned toward God and began to turn with God, serving him.
• St. Paul used to be a Pharisee and himself once needed to turn from the idol he had made of his and the Pharisaical interpretation of the Mosaic Law in order to come to know the true God made man, Jesus Christ. As soon as he met him, he began to serve him, and he served him throughout the rest of his life. In the Gospel, Jesus was trying to bring other Pharisees to conversion, by exposing their hypocrisy, their pretending to serve God by serving their own idea of God. He accused them of being “blind guides”; of not entering the Kingdom of Heaven Jesus was proclaiming and seeking to lock the door for others trying to enter; of zealously trying to make converts only to set them under the sway of the same evil one they themselves were serving, as we would see when they would conspire to have Jesus fraudulently tried and executed; of creating a series of silly man-made rules about swearing oaths by invoking the temple, or the gold of the temple, or the altar, or the gift on the altar, in order to find loopholes in the duty to tell the truth and become, as Jesus complimented St. Bartholomew last Thursday, for being “without guile.” They were living a lie, but had convinced themselves they were living the truth, and Truth incarnate was trying to set them free, to turn from their idols, and learn how to serve rather than be served in the kingdom he had come to establish.
• Turning from idols to serve the living and true God encapsulates the life of St. Augustine. He wrote at the beginning of his famous Confessions that God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless, without peace, until they rest in Him, and his youthful escapes from the death of his father at 17 through his baptism at 32 were attempts to serve the idol of his ego, of his libido, and ultimately of the gods of his own making. But having discovered the true God after resisting him for long, he sought to make up for lost time. He described his idol worship in Book X of his Confessions, in a passage that I think is one of the most eloquent in the history of writing. He penned, “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.” He describes how he was looking for God in an idol outside, when God was inside. He had made the “lovely things” created by God his absolutes. His eyes, his ears, his smell, his taste were all addicted to the things of this world, but God eventually broke through, and when his restless heart discovered the true God so “late,” he desired to make up for lost time.
•  When we think about St. Augustine’s conversion, many of us can think about the dramatic circumstances that occurred in his life in Milan, after 15 years of sorrowful prayer by his mother. But as Pope Benedict, perhaps the most famous student of Augustine in history, said at St. Augustine’s tomb in 2007, Augustine’s conversion was continuous and can be mentioned in three phases.
• The first phase is the one most known, after he had rejected the faith of his mother and sought it in worldly wisdom, in Manichean philosophy and in the art of rhetoric. One day in Milan, when he was 32, as he was weeping over his state in the back yard of a friend, he heard what sounded like kids singing from a neighboring yard saying, “Tolle et legge,” “Take and read.” He thought it was a strange game for kids to play, but finding no kids, he thought it was a message perhaps from an angel. So he took up the Sacred Scriptures and began to read what his eyes found first. It was a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans that helped him to realize that he needed to stay awake perpetually in God’s presence.  “It is the hour now for you to awake from sleep. For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed;  the night is advanced, the day is at hand. Let us then throw off the works of darkness [and] put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh” (Rom 13:11-14).  That passage seemed like it was written precisely for him — as it indeed it was, for him and for us! — and it gave him the courage from God finally to leave the long night of spiritual sleep and the darkness of the flesh behind and live with the Lord in the day. He received that word “not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God,” and it went to work in him through faith and his interiorization of God’s word was so great that he became one of the greatest commentators of it, in word and witness, in the history of the Church.
• But that was only the first stage of his conversion. When he returned to Africa after his mother’s death, he founded a monastery for which he wrote the rule and where he began to write some of his great theological works. It was a perfect situation for him, it seemed, and he was cranking. One day when he had gone to visit a friend in the small city of Hippo, he was attending Mass and the elderly bishop asked the people to pray that the Lord would send him someone who could help him with his preaching duties in Latin, because he had become too infirm to preach. The people looked around and saw in the crowd Augustine, once the greatest rhetoric professor in the empire and now a monk, and proposed him. Augustine didn’t want to have anything to do with that work, which would require giving up a lot of his writing in order to care for ordinary people with ordinary concerns. But he sensed that it was the Lord calling him to be humble and, like the Lord, begin to live for others. “Christ died for all,” he read in St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, “so that those who live should not live for themselves, but for him who died for them” (2 Cor 5:15). And so he made the great sacrifice, being ordained a deacon and a priest and eventually, after the bishop’s death, bishop and successor. And it was from that point that he took on the paternal and maternal love of God as he loved God’s people.
• The third stage of his conversion, according to Pope Benedict XVI, was when he recognized, very late in life, that everything flows from God’s mercy, not from his own works. It happened when he was making his “retractions” of everything he had written, to correct what he now saw as his errors. And when he looked back at his famous commentary on the Beatitudes — perhaps the most famous commentary of all time — he saw that one of its major flaws was that he focused too much on our actions to become poor in spirit, meek, pure of heart, peacemaking, compassionate, hungry and thirsty for holiness, and willing to suffer for the faith. He focused too little, he recognized, on how without God we can’t live the beatitudes as they’re meant to be lived, that it’s all a grace of God’s mercy. Everything in our life is meant to be a response to God’s mercy, but he gives us the help he knows we need to do what he asks and commands. That discovery of mercy is part of how St. Augustine grew to recognize the “Beauty ever ancient, ever new.” The merciful God is indeed beautiful and we ask for the grace today not to defer discovering just how beautiful, but rather to recognize how God from within is seeking to give us the gift of a total conversion, that he’s calling, shouting, breaking through our deafness, flashing, shining and dispelling our blindness, breathing his fragrance upon us, allowing us to taste him so that we can hunger and thirst for more, touching us so that we can burn for his peace, the only peace that can satisfy our restless hearts.
• Today, as we with the help of God’s mercy turn away from idols to serve the living and true God, we approach the altar. We don’t treat the altar, or the gold, or the gifts of bread and wine as idols, but focus on the one, true God, who in his mercy comes to make us his throne, so that from within he can reign within us and bring us one day to that place where, with St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Monica and all the ways, our restless hearts will find eternal peace.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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