"WHAT WAS ONCE LOST CAN BE FOUND AGAIN"

 

Ezra the priest read plainly from the book of the law of God interpreting it so that all could understand what was read. All the people were weeping as they heard the law read.

Book of Nehemiah 8-10

 

When was the last time you cried when you “heard the Scriptures read aloud” in church? When was the last time you cried during a homily when you heard the Scriptures “interpreted by the priest so people could understand?” When was the last time you cried because you were so happy to be able to attend Mass again? Maybe for that to happen around here, it would take having this whole community being carried off into slavery by foreigners, this church being burned to the ground and there being no one left who even remembered hearing the Scriptures read here fifty years ago!

Fifty years later, imagine your great grandchildren finally being able to return here to rebuild this church, to celebrate Mass again and to hear a homily for the first time in fifty years. Imagine them being so filled with joy that they all started to cry when they heard the Scriptures read aloud here once again!

That is exactly what our first reading is all about today – the return of the Jewish people to Jerusalem after having been hauled away in slavery by invaders, having their Temple completely destroyed and their descendants forgetting their own religious history.  

This is what happened to the Jewish people between the years 587-537 BC! The Babylonians had destroyed the city of Jerusalem, burned its Temple and had sent the Jewish people into slavery. Fifty years later, they were freed by the Persians to return home to rebuild Jerusalem, restore its Temple and reclaim its religious traditions. This practice of resettling conquered people on a large scale in another country was common in the Middle East in ancient times. This policy of deportation was devised to detach people from their land in order to cripple their resistance and suppress their sense of national identity, with the hopes they would forget their religious traditions.   

In today’s reading they are coming home to their ancestral lands from a fifty-year exile. The Prophet, Jeremiah, had urged them to learn from their exile experience because he believed that God had allowed it as the result of their own infidelity. Jeremiah saw their exile very much as a case of “if you snooze, you lose!” He reminded them that they had not valued what they once had, so they had to lose it so as to be able to appreciate it once again!  

As I reflected on today’s first reading, it occurred to me that we too are being “conquered,” but this time not by an invading army of foreigners out to burn our churches to the ground, carry us off into slavery and make us forget our religious roots, but a rotting culture determined to close our churches, entice us into the slavery of materialism and make sure we forget our religious heritage. Our “enemy” is not “invading” us. We are “inviting” it in! Our faith is not being attacked from without, as much as it is being starved to death from within! 

If more of our small parishes close, we will not be able to blame the archdiocese for closing them, it will be our own neglect, our own lack of determination to keep them life-giving, that will cause them to be closed!  It’s just like the Prophet Jeremiah, told the Jewish people who were forced into exile because of their infidelity to their religious traditions, we are “losing” because we are “snoozing!”

Like a spreading “virus,” helped along by modern social media, the sins of big cities have now infected small rural communities like these! Blaming others is tempting, but the real solution lies with us stepping up to the plate to reclaim our religious traditions before it is too late! In the end, the crisis facing us is not about saving our “parishes,” as much as it is about saving our “faith.” If our faith dies, we won’t need these parishes!

Present statistics tell us that only 33% of all Catholics attend church once a week or almost every week compared to Protestants at 44%. Those statistics report a decline among all religious groups in general in the US, but Catholics show one of the larger drops in attendance, just in the last 20 years from 45% twenty years ago to 33% today. Church attendance will likely continue to decline in the future, along with the growing decline of available priests.

The statistics are depressing and we are indeed on a downhill slide, but I don’t believe our situation is “hopeless” and obviously neither does Pope Francis! He has declared 2025 as a “Jubilee Year of Hope,” calling the church to action and challenging it to seize this opportunity for renewal, not just in Rome, but in local congregations like these.

Personally, I believe the words of Henry Ford who once said, “There are two kinds of people: those who think they can, and those who think they can’t! And they are both right!”  

I believe that, not because I am naïve, but because of my personal experience. When I was called to be pastor of our cathedral in Louisville, I was told by the former pastor, “Don’t get your hopes up! Nothing can be done downtown!” The cathedral had been in decline since it’s “golden age” of 1870-1910. When I arrived there in 1983, I knew my biggest task was to change parishioner’s minds about what was possible for their own future. I began asking them in multiple ways and at multiple times, “Who said we only get one “golden age?” I am here to lead you into a “new golden age!”  In the following 14 years, we rebuilt our historic ministries, added some new ones, renovated all our buildings and grew from 110 parishioners to 2100 parishioners. I did not do it by myself. It happened because they believed they could! My role was to get them to believe that it was possible!  

My friends, proclaiming a situation “hopeless,” and believing that those depressing “statistics” determine our futures, is very useful. Once we do that, we don’t have to do anything! We can just sit back then and wait for it to happen! I firmly believe that some of what we did at the cathedral, can be done in other places because our “enemy” is not “out there,” it’s “in here!” (Point to your head, your heart and your arms – making the sign of the cross.) It’s in our heads, hearts and arms! It’s about what we “believe,” what we “love” and what we are willing to “do!”

I, for one, will not give into hopelessness! I will fight for our futures as long as I am alive and I will keep doing all I can do to prove it! I thank all of you who have stepped up and have worked so hard to keep these two parishes going! I ask everyone of you to join them and do something! If you can’t help, at least encourage and thank those who do! As our second reading today pus it, “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all parts share its joy”