HOMILY WEEK 16 06 – Year II

Our Sin Never Confessed

(Jer 7:1-11; Ps 84; Mt 13:24-30)

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What sins do you think are never or rarely confessed?

Pray we might be aware of our complicity in social structural sin.

On Saturday, June 17, 2022, the Aurora Living program wrapped up its first year at the Star of the North with the participants both in person and on-line.

Our presenter in the morning was Joe Gunn, director of Centre Oblat in Ottawa, which carries out the social justice aspect of the ministry of OMI Lacombe Canada.

In his talk, he pointed out that our society has a blind spot and a sin that it has never faced nor confessed. It has to do with the first commandment about having other gods before the one God of all. No one thinks of confessing that in our country, the economy rules all. There is even a bronze bull on Wall Street, our own graven image, and everyone takes it for granted.

This is a social sin that is never talked about. Joe quoted theologian Gregory Baum, who taught, “Personal sin is freely chosen; social sin is a collective blindness. There is sin as deed and sin as illness.”

Yet Jesus in Lk 4, speaking for the first time in public, and certainly speaking what the Father would want him to say, reveals God’s priority: the release of captives, sight to the blind, liberation of the oppressed. This is what the core of our faith is all about, and you would think should be much more often the matter of our confession of sin.

Perhaps that is the deeper meaning of the parable Jesus highlights today – how both weeds and wheat end up growing up together, because it is so difficult to tell them apart. I know that I refrain from weeding my carrots until they have grown bigger and it is possible to distinguish them from the weeds, and safer to pull the weeds out. So, we remain blind to our own social sin, even up to our deaths, and to the detriment of the quality of life for especially the poor among us.

It seems that it was much the same in the time of the prophet Jeremiah. The Israelites then were also guilty of that sin they never confessed – placing false gods before the one God of Israel. They would routinely take advantage of others, mistreat them, defraud them, put money, prestige and power ahead of humble caring for others, then go to the temple blissfully unaware of their complicity in sinful structures, offer their sacrifices and think they were holy. It was the task of the prophets like Jeremiah to call out their blindness to their own sinfulness and need to repent and change. Whenever Israel tolerated oppression of the poor, or orphans, widows and immigrants, the prophets accused the people of collective infidelity to God.

In our own day, we have had our share of blindness to structural sin. Even the word “solidarity” was frowned on in the Church until the 80’s. The Polish Solidarity movement helped change that, with JP II, who taught that the structures of sin must be purified and transformed into structures of solidarity. In Latin America the Medellin conference in 1968 spoke of “Institutionalized violence. The 1971 Synod of Bishops on Justice in the World, finally spoke of social sin. Our own CCCB published a booklet of Ethical reflections on moral evil and systematic moral disorder. Saint Pope JP II helped produce a Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church in 2004, and Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, spoke of the presence of social sin. We are becoming more aware, and less blind, of the social sin that is never confessed, and that is good.

In the afternoon of our wrap-up day, we watched a video Sr. Joan Chittister OSB produced exclusively for Aurora Living. She spoke of the common good, and pointed out a bit of blindness even in the work of Pope Francis in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti – a gender-blindness that exists in the church which marginalizes women’s voices. For her, this magnificent work by Pope Francis is unfinished, and gave us the task of finishing it with our lives.

The Eucharist we celebrate is a great equalizer – no one present is greater than anyone else, whether movie star or famous politician. May our celebration help us be aware of the weeds of social sin in our lives and in our society, and to do what we can to weed them out even before the harvest of our lives.