Preserving Human Life

Third Sunday Ordinary A 7:30 AM MATT 4:12-23
A Protestant minister was greeting the people after the service. He was busy trying to give attention to each person. All of this was going on when he felt a tug. He turned around and looked down, and it was his 5-year-old son, Jeff. His first response was parental. He said, I thought to myself, “Jeff, couldn’t this wait till we get to the car? I’m doing big stuff up here! But Jeff was standing there with one hand behind his back and I realized that there was something special and precious about that tug. So I just closed everything else out and dropped down on one knee to get eye to eye with Jeff. Here’s what happened,” the minister said: “When I dropped down he just beamed! I will never forget that expression on his face. He pulled his hand from behind his back and he had a white paper cup with black dirt in it. A little green plant was shooting up from it. He said, ‘Daddy, this is a tomato plant. God and I had been growing it in Sunday School. We’ve been studying how God makes things grow and how we can help Him, and God and I have been working on this tomato plant. It’s my tomato plant but I want to give it to you and Mom this morning.’ He said, ‘You’re always giving me things, but I don’t have any money to get anything for you, so I want to give you my tomato plant this morning, because I love you so much.’” Jeff handed his father the tomato plant and his father hugged him tightly, and nothing else in the world mattered. In that moment time stood still.
Little 5 year old Jeff had successfully fished his father out of rumbling waters of his preoccupation with greeting his parishioners
And the parishioners didn’t mind. They were swept up in the waves of that loving exchange between father and son.
In our gospel story, Jesus tells you as he told his first disciples that he will make you fishers of men.
Being fishers of others sounds rather harmless almost romantic but fishing requires strength and perseverance, it entails stress and strain.
Fishing is hard work peppered with a great deal of patience, whether it’s deep sea fishing or fly casting.
Sometimes you can be so used to sound bites that you are impatient with a person’s story. Hurry up and get to the end.
As John Shea says in his book, On Earth as it is in Heaven, “You’re not interested in the process of the story which may be an adventure.”
And it is in the sea of a person’s story that you are able to hook the rare and unique fish of that person’s truth.
You can fail because you are impatient or self righteous. Actually self righteousness breeds impatience.
On the other hand Jesus frustrated by his disciples’ obtuseness realized that he was getting slim reward for the thick volume of his patience, yet he persevered.
Paula Ripple in her book, Growing Strong in Broken Places, says, “Dealing with others challenges us to be present to and patient with ourselves.” In other words, if you are frustrated and impatient with your own faults, how can you ever be patient and understanding of the faults of others?
Sadly, as Eugene Kennedy points out in his book, Free To Be Human, Patience is as dead and buried as the last casualty at Gettysburg.
To be patient fishers you need to be keenly aware that you and others are human therefore limited, therefore imperfect.
Where can you fish today?
This past Tuesday we observed a day of penance for the violation of the dignity of human life, especially the lives of the unborn.
Abortion, then, is the urgent place to do your fishing. Abortion is the ocean where you need to cast your net, to pull out the priceless value of human life, especially the lives of the unborn. To pull out a culture of life from what Pope John Paul called the culture of death.
Blessed Pope John XXIII wrote in his encyclical, Peace on Earth, “Every person has a right to life, to bodily integrity, and to the means necessary for the proper development of life.”
Our nation’s Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident… that all … are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Yet the majority of the Justices of the Supreme Court consistently maintain that life is not one of the inalienable rights for the unborn.
The Book of Sirach in the Hebrew Bible states, “I put before you life and death; whatever a person chooses shall be given to him.”
Life and death have been put before the Justices of the Supreme Court. And in the rancid grandeur of their self importance and their official indifference to our nation’s Declaration of Independence, they have chosen death for those who will never have the opportunity to enjoy liberty or the pursuit of happiness.
Today you need to renew your pledge, as fishers of others, to work for the preservation of all human life, but especially of the unborn.