Weekly Sunday Homilies

Fr. Joseph's Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year A)

There is an image burned into the American imagination — a colossal figure of a woman standing at the mouth of New York Harbor, her torch lifted high against the sky, her gaze fixed on the horizon.

The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, stands as a symbol of hope, freedom, and justice — particularly for those arriving by sea near Ellis Island.

Her history is an interesting one: because I think that the famous phrase at her base “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” that we all associate with the statue have a fascinating history of how they got onto this emblematic symbol of people who have lived and died in this nation whose 250th we celebrate this weekend.

The statue was unveiled in 1886 — yet it was not until 1903 that those famous words, by a New York poet named Emma Lazarus, became part of the Statue of Liberty. It was Lazarus's friend, Georgina Schuyler, who reunited the words and the statue in 1903 — and in honor of her friend who had died only a year after the Statue’s installation, she had a plaque inscribed with the poem installed inside the statue's base. You see, Lazarus was from a Jewish family who had faced persecution in her home country and her words initially were for a fundraising dinner for the sake of building the base for the statue, and yet she saw in the statue something more than its original meaning: which had been merely to signify friendship between to revolutionary republics of France and US. A friend of hers helped her to see that it could mean much more. And now, forever it has been because of her words.

The poem is called The New Colossus, and even in the title she is playing with renewal and redemption. The Colossus of Rhodes was an ancient Greek statue that arrogantly, to her mind, stood across the straits of an ancient seaport. But instead, here is a statue standing as a symbol of hope, hope for those she had seen in her own life, the faces of the desperate and the displaced — who know this great statue would watch for well beyond Emma’s lifetime. In her work, the statue is called "a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning," her name: "Mother of Exiles," her "beacon-hand" glowing with "world-wide welcome."

And then — the words:

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Tired? Poor? Cast-aside? I think that God’s providential hand is at work in our readings this weekend because does that not sound familiar?

Because on the shores of Galilee, another voice was crying out, not from the wilderness but from the heart of the city. Not a poet, but a prophet. Not a nation, but the true King of every nation: the Son of God Himself. And He said something remarkably similar: "Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28) Not a lamp beside a gilded door — but a Cross that leads to an eternal door. Not the promise of a better country — but the promise that Jesus will stand by us, tied together with Jesus in the same yoke, or to put it differently, Jesus doesn’t just promise change or a greater country but works in us and beside us no matter what.

The good people of this country have often aspired to be something more than a nation. The statue stands at one particular harbor that only some see and fewer read its inscription — but as the guardian of a gilded door opening to the USA, it is one part of a larger nation founded on the ideals of liberty, justice, and opportunity for all.

And that aspiration — noble, beautiful, worth honoring — is itself a dim reflection of a deeper truth: that every human heart was made for a freedom no earthly nation can provide. The tired don't ultimately need a new country. They need Christ. While needed in the short-term the poor don't ultimately need better wages. They need the inheritance of the saints. The "huddled masses yearning to breathe free” they yearn for the freedom that only the Holy Spirit can give. As St. Paul writes, " For if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live."

This nation — this remarkable, complicated, blood-bought, and grace-touched nation – is a door, that thankfully allows us to enter the greater Kingdom….the Kingdom of Heaven that is built here by Christ our head through you and I and the Pope and our Bishop and every Christian within the Catholic Church.

If we are to hold true to this Kingdom and fulfill the deeper Way of Life of Christ that the gesturing of Lady Liberty points us to, then what are we to do? I ask you? Do you find your rest in the Lord? When others are struggling, do you direct them to Him? Do we find ways to direct others to Christ through the gifts that we have as Americans no matter who they are?

Bring rest to your brother and sister, but you must first rest with the Lord to do so. Come now, take on the yoke of Christ in this Eucharist, say yes to the Lord whether you are receiving him physically in communion or as a spiritual communion. Rest with him at the altar of sacrifice where he takes all of our huddled worries, all those for whom we pray, the tiredness of our self-reliance, the refuse of our sin, and redeems every bit, and leads us through the gift of love to do the same for those that reach these Arkansan and American shores.