Homily for Closing Mass for Sacred Heart Parish, Flint, July 31, 2008

Sacred Heart, Flint, was founded in 1928 by the local Slovak community. This was the beginning of a rich, booming, vibrant, and glorious history of service to the faith in this area of Flint. We celebrate that past today and give thanks to God for his many blessings on us over these 80 years. I thank all of you who have lived and promoted our holy faith in this area of Flint. I am especially grateful for the untiring and wonderful service of Ethel Hooker over these many years; she has been mother to this community. Thanks also to Deacon Anthony Verdun especially for his work with Angels Outreach along with your wife. My thanks to the priests who have assisted you over the years and especially those most recently, Frs. Phil Gallagher and Phil Schmitter. I am also grateful for the gift to the Diocese of Lansing which you, the parish of Sacred Heart, has made with vocations. I am also mindful of the many years of service of Dr. Connie McClanahan as Pastoral Coordinator. I am also mindful of the Oxford Dominican Sisters who taught in your school from 1942-1970; they were the same sisters who taught me. I am finally mindful of the wonderful Black and White Catholics who are currently worshipping here as a sign that we all must fight the stigma and sin of racism. I know that your new pastor Fr. Tom Firestone is also fully committed to this and that your new parish located at St. John Vianney has a school which is 1/3 white, 1/3 black, and 1/3 Hispanic and that the parish too his representative of the diversity of our city.

But today is not just a day of thanks for the past. It is also a day to pledge to God our faith and the witness of that faith in the present and the future. And we make such a pledge within the very heart of Jesus Christ. But mostly we make our pledge as an imitation of Christ’s own fidelity to the will of his Father.

Jesus again asks us, as he so often does, are you willing to pay the cost involved in being my disciple. At other times he tells us not to look back once we put our hand to the plow. Here he tells us that we must be willing to part with all that is most precious to us, our families, our possessions. This is a great reading upon which the Church asks us to reflect as we remember St. Ignatius Loyola. One of his key principles in the discernment of God’s will was that we need to become wholly indifferent to any of our own desires and seek only the will of God. I have often told seminarians in the past who have struggled about whether God is calling them to the priesthood, that they must begin with this kind of indifference. They cannot start out by saying, well God what do you want of me and then I will think about it. No, that never works and God will not let us know his will. Rather, we have to get to the point of saying, Lord I want to do whatever it is that you want of me with nothing held back; just let me know and I am yours. Then God will tell us and then we simply must do it. That will make us happy in the long run. Ignatius knew this and gave up his whole life to follow Jesus.

Our first reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians hits upon another theme of St. Ignatius. He believed that we should do everything for the glory of God, not for our own glory or that of anyone else. In fact, Ignatius went a step further. He said that even when this is a choice of doing two different good things, we should do that thing which gives the greatest glory to God.

We are being called to a deeper discipleship in Jesus Christ. The closing of this parish is a painful event; our memories here are deep and our love of one another in community is strong. These are good things. But now we are being asked to sacrifice all that we are for the greater glory of God. It is not our will we seek but his as we move one and together seek to strengthen our new parish at St. John Vianney Parish.

My brothers and sisters, today we remember and celebrate our past, but today we also pledge anew our faith in God, seeking no other task than to be like Christ, who gave his Sacred Heart and his all for us.

GOD BLESS YOU ALL