March 2, 2025

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle C

Sirach 27:4-7; 1 Corinthians 15:54-58; Luke 6:39-45

When I was in the Navy, there was a term that we used to describe a certain type of person. Being that submarines have many piping systems throughout the boat, we all knew about a certain component used in these systems that allow flow in a pipe in one direction but will not allow it to flow back in the other direction. This device is called a check valve. Using this concept, this is also the term we used for people that always seemed to take from others but never gave back anything substantial; for instance, someone who was always needing people to take their watch or duty day but never was available to do that for anyone else. Someone labeled as a check valve was not being given a complement. I think we all know this type of person, sometimes called a fair-weather friend, although these types of people can be in other roles than just friends, such as a boss, coworker, even family members. Unfortunately, I suspect that everyone here knows what I am talking about because of encountering such people.

So now I’m going to ask a difficult question. What kind of relationship do you have with God? What do you ask of God, and what do you return to God? Is it one way, always asking for divine assistance but returning very little? If it is a two-way relationship, is it like that of a marriage or, maybe more appropriately, a parent and child, being with one another through good and bad, sickness and health, or is it transactional, like the one we have with a store, where we go when we need something, but otherwise it plays no part in our lives?

Today’s Second Reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is a test in this regard. For most of the passage, Paul is describing what God through Christ’s death and resurrection has done for us. And it is substantial: the victory over death, immortality, the Kingdom of God. Now the test is this: what was the rest of it? What’s our part in this, or was it just about God’s gifts to us? The last sentence of the reading was this: “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be firm, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” [1 Corinthians 15:58 NABRE]. So, if you passed the test and heard both the give and the take, the two-way relationship that God made us for, and have lived your life accordingly, congratulations. For the rest of us that are still working on it, we who are sinners, we have some work to do. We struggle on. I struggle on.

In the next few months, we will have the opportunity to take two journeys that can help us deepen our relationship to God. On Wednesday, we will begin Lent, our forty-day preparation to understand what God the Son did for us, what was won for us in the death and resurrection of our Savior. Paul, in the beginning of the Second Reading, talks about this, our inheritance for being Christians. But like I said, being Christian is not a passive thing, a one-way street, a prize we can claim based on our baptism. It is an active role that we must orient our life to. Lent, as a time of preparation, puts the Christian life on earth, the Lenten struggle, together with the Easter glory of eternal life.

We have a second journey that we are making this year in addition to the Lenten one that will also help us to build on our relationship with God. Being a jubilee year, we have been invited by the Church to make a pilgrimage as part of our active role in being members of Christ’s body, a pilgrimage of hope. Certainly many people will want to make a physical pilgrimage, if not to Rome then to one of the four churches in South Carolina that are designated by the bishop as pilgrimage destinations eligible for plenary indulgences – they are in Charleston, Columbia, Aiken, and Greenville [ https://charlestondiocese.org/jubilee2025/sc-pilgrimage-sites/ ]. But even if you cannot make a physical pilgrimage, you should make a spiritual pilgrimage. As pilgrims, we choose to make a journey to some destination that will bring us closer to God. And to get better, we always need to leave where we are now, not necessarily physically but at least in our approach to life. If we want a different, a better relationship with someone, we need to do something different that we are currently doing. If we want to deepen our relationship with God, we need to do something different, something new.

I was on retreat last weekend with many of the deacons throughout the state of South Carolina, and our retreat master said something that stuck with me. He said that we should not be satisfied with a “relationship with Jesus Christ,” as much as this phrase is used by various Christians, proudly declaring that they have a relationship with Jesus. Our retreat master noted that he had a relationship with his barber, he had a relationship with his mail carrier, he had a relationship with his next-door neighbor. What he wanted with God was something more than just a relationship: what he wanted was communion with God. If God offers us love, communion is returning that love in the fullest way that we can. That is the point of Saint Paul in the Second Reading. That is the point of our Lenten preparation. That is the point of a pilgrimage, physical or spiritual: to arrive at a deeper communion with God.

There is another initiative that we have taken on this year, this time at the urging of our bishop. Bishop Jaques has made it the priority of our diocese this year to evangelize to others, to bring them to the Church. As he said at our retreat last weekend, if the 300 thousand Catholics in the state of South Carolina could each bring one other person into our Church each year, in two years we would have over a million people in our diocese. How do we evangelize best? It is by demonstrating that we have a deep communal relationship with God that brings hope and joy to our lives. Why would anyone want to come to a church that is seen as some arbitrary demand of a distant deity, a need to punch a clock to put in enough, just enough, church time to achieve some far-away happiness at the end of life? The upshot of having communion with our God is that we find joy now in that relationship, and we want to bring that to others. But we cannot give to others something we don’t have. And so we set out to be who we were meant to be by God, and then we give it to others. That is the goal of our journeys this year, and really every year. If we are check valves, if we keep it all to ourselves, we really don’t understand something fundamental in our relationship to God. If there is any part of us that wants more out of life, we must leave our current state and journey to a better state, one where we both get more and give more.

As we continue with our Mass with the sacrament that Christ left us as a visible sign of our communion with him, let its graces guide our journey and propel us forward. May we be both a receiver of the love and hope of God as well as a giver of those same gifts back to God and our neighbors. Then we won’t be check valves but instead channel God’s love and mercy back out to all that we encounter.