Homily: Signing Off

This is the final homily I preached at the 2018 Lasallian Buttimer Institute Summer Programme.

Graduation Mass for Buttimer Class 2018

Readings: Acts 12.1-11/ Psalm 33.2-4,4-5, 6-7, 8-9 (R/v cf. 5) / 2 Timothy 4.6-8, 17-18 / Matthew 16.13-19

Dear sisters and brothers, have you ever considered what gives you the confidence to sign off on a student’s report card, on a colleague’s year-end appraisal, on the school budget, on a job well done, or on the right person you think you’ve found to hire?

As we end our time at Buttimer, I would like to invite us to consider the signatures we make.

Signatures because these are associated with graduation certificates that mark the end of a time of learning, even as one begins a new phase in life. And this evening we celebrate the graduation of my classmates and I in Buttimer 3.

Signatures too because our gospel reading has to do with Jesus sending his disciples  to go forth to teach the nations, to baptise them, and to make them his own.  Here is Jesus signing off on his disciples – signing off on their worthiness, their readiness for mission. 

Signatures, I suggest, then, because we must consider how our time in this year’s Buttimer has indeed been one of preparing all of us better for our own Lasallian mission, especially those of us in Buttimer 3 who began the programme in Moraga, California, three years ago.

Let us consider our time at Buttimer using today’s readings that are about how God works in humankind. They offer us three thoughts to help us appreciate how God has been labouring in our lives throughout Buttimer.

First, Buttimer called us into God’s holy presence.

We began each morning, each class, each prayer with John Baptist de la Salle’s call to remember that we are in the holy presence of God.  What our Founder asked of his Brothers, he asked of his students and teachers since the work of the Institute began, and we, like all Lasallians today, continue doing the same when we gather to work, to pray and to play.

Our response to de la Salle’s call echo Jesus’ disciples.  From the very first time he called them, and in each time he revealed God’s presence to them, they said “yes” to Jesus’ invitation to enter into God’s holy presence.  God’s holy presence that they experienced when he healed the sick and preached to the seekers, when he forgave the sinner and reconciled the lost, when he lifted up the downtrodden and transformed the lives of all the abandoned. 

God’s holy presence that they experienced most of all when Jesus died to save us all. This is who God is in our lives and how he acts for us. We hear this truth in our first reading: “God is my salvation,” Isaiah proclaims. 

This is the same God de la Salle wanted his Brothers then and now, and  all Lasallians, to know. But, more than know, to enter more deeply into presence with. To enter and be more intimate with. To enter and to live more fully with. To enter, and in this presence to grow in confidence that we are loved. 

To be in the holy presence of God is not to be displaced from one space to another,  as it is always to enter in the ever present relationship with a God who I can trust is my strength and defense, and so I do not have to be afraid. Haven’t everything we learnt, experienced and prayed about in Buttimer revealed this God to us too?

Second, Buttimer helped us to contemplate the mystery of God in our lives.

The Gospels tell the story of Jesus forming his disciples to love, to live, to serve, and to be saved. By washing feet at the Last Supper he showed them the humble, selfless way to love God and love neighbour. By dying on the cross, he manifest the fullness of this love: to be sacrificed totally and to be lived fully to the end.

This is the kind of love the Good Shepherd of our Psalm has.  Everything the Good Shepherd does speak of this love. Leading the weary to green pastures and quiet waters to renew and refresh. Guiding lost along right paths. Encouraging the fearful and ashamed through dark valleys. Providing a banquet for the persecuted and outcast. Anointing the beloved with oil. Gathering all into his home, not house. All these speak of love divine and love excelling, love to care and love to save. 

De la Salle calls us to share this kind of love with our students, our colleagues and all we meet. He calls us to shepherd to them, to be older brothers and sisters to our students, to be guardian angels for all.  But we can  only give the love we have. 

Hasn’t Buttimer blessed us with such love?  Such love through friendships made, through learning that has enlightened, through faith lives that are transformed, through the challenges that make us better, through unexpected goodness that has blessed us and surprising hopes gleaned that encourage us onward.

If we have, and I believe we have, then we are richer to share.  And richer most of all because we have glimpsed more clearly who God was to de la Salle and how God worked in his life:

• God, who led he forward in stages, but surely to unite himself Godself and Jesus’ saving mission of making children whole again through education.

• God, who his pedagogy called teacher to proclaim and the students to know.

• God, who his spirituality invites all to embrace it so as to procure the salvation of all souls.

Third, Buttimer convicted, or formed us, better for our Lasallian mission.

Jesus formed his disciples for life with God through lives of service. He accompanied them to know him, to love him and to follow him. He formed their hearts, made it big-hearted for God and for all. Even when they failed Jesus in death, he returned to them as their risen Christ with peace that forgave and love that counted them still good enough and ready for mission.

I’d like to think that de la Salle learnt to see the first Brothers with the same love. Though not educated and skilled teachers and though they challenged him to sacrifice his riches to be like them and with them for the work, they taught him to value them as God’s providence for the mission. And because de la Salle did so, loving them as a father and inspiring them as a brother, he attracted and convicted more to join the mission.

I’d like to think something like what happened to Jesus’ disciples and de la Salle’s brothers, has happened to us in Buttimer. Our conviction for the mission has grown stronger. Let us then depart to serve with joy, to minister with gentleness, to work without anxiety, to pray always to God as our second reading encourages us to do.

So what has happened to us in Buttimer?  We have been transformed. Transformed because our time here has called us into God’s holy presence, allowed us to contemplate God’s mystery at work, and convicted us even more for the mission. 

Transformed because three thoughts are really movements that echo de la Salle’s dynamics of interior prayer. If this prayer forms us from within for God and for the work of salvation all of us are called to, then, these movements are the graced ways Buttimer has blessed us to know God working in de la Salle’s more clearly, to love this God more intimately, and to follow this God more closely. This is our transformation; we are better for it and for the mission ahead of us. And so, we go home transformed in some way. 

Jesus saw transformation in his disciples, as de la Salle saw it in his first Brothers

Our transformation is what gives Jesus, more than anyone else, the confidence to sign off on our lives, like he did with de la Salle once, and that he wishes to do today. Sign off because we have been better formed in his image and to continue his work. Formed most distinctly as Lasallian because here at Buttimer he has formed in the spirit of de la Salle.

A signature is in fact an imprint. The tip of the pen presses into the paper as one signs on it. Today we hear again so clearly what we know so dearly: the truth of Jesus’ imprint on our lives:  “I am with you always, to the end”

This how he signs off on us today. With his promise to abide in us and with us always. With his hope in all the good we will do with Jesus to save the world.

There is then no other human response we can be properly make as Lasallians than this and only this: “yes, live Jesus in our hearts, forever.”

Preached at Buttimer Institute, Manhattan College, New York City

Photo: from Internet: www.affinityonefcu.org