Homily for the Annual Police-Fire-Sheriffs Mass
23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year “C”
St. Cecilia Church; September 7, 2025
Introduction
Dietrich Bohnhoeffer, the German theologian and pastor of the early and mid-20th century, is renown for his involvement in the resistance movement against Adolph Hitler in his home country at that time, an involvement for which he paid the ultimate cost. The “Cost of Discipleship,” as he would call it, and the title he gave to the book which he wrote that was a very personal as well as theological reflection on his own life’s experience. He has a chapter in that book which he entitles, “Cheap Grace.”
By “cheap grace” he means the attitude according to which one thinks, “I can do whatever I want. Even if it’s not really ethical or moral, I can indulge myself, because God will forgive me, anyway.” He risked, and lost, his life for doing that which his conscience compelled him to do in response to the greatest evil that anyone at that time had ever seen. For him God’s grace was precious, and worth all that he could give.
Moral Heroism
Cheap grace allows a believer to live comfortably and conveniently in a world at odds with what is true and good. It is the old-fashioned sin of complacency: becoming lazy with the demands a well-formed conscience necessarily places on one, slipping little-by-little into compromises with what is right until eventually one loses all sense of a moral compass. Cheap grace is not the response of faith to the challenges of paying a personal price for doing what is right. An authentic response of faith will, in fact, not infrequently cause one to be very uncomfortable.
Just think of those whom you esteem as moral heroes: do they not attain that status for you precisely because they have borne courageous witness to what is true and just under such circumstances? Society needs a conscience, and it is the calling of people of faith to be that conscience – a calling, though, which can only be answered by preserving integrity, no matter the cost.
Which brings us to what might seem to be the troubling question of St. Paul’s reaction to receiving his friend Philemon’s run-away slave, Onesimus: why does Paul not set Onesimus free and condemn the institution of slavery, but rather send him back to his master? It may even seem as if this passage could be interpreted as the Bible giving approval to the moral legitimacy of the institution of slavery.
The Conscience of a Society
Let us recall, first of all, that all throughout the ancient world slavery was an accepted institution, even by the most enlightened thinkers; it was woven into the very fabric of society. Thus, a simple decree of condemnation at the time would have fallen on deaf ears. St. Paul, instead, does something different, radically different: he first encounters Onesimus after he had run away from his master and then receives him into the family of faith, apparently while Paul was in prison suffering for his faith; only after that does Paul return Onesimus to his friend Philemon, and with this exhortation: “Perhaps this is why he was away from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother, … So if you regard me as a partner, welcome him as you would me.”
A brother, not a slave. Who, legally, is a slave and who is free is now irrelevant, as their brotherhood in Christ transcends such questions of legal status. How much we can learn today from this lesson! Listen again to the lesson: in a true human encounter, when each encounters the other as a brother or sister in the human family, one’s legal status is irrelevant. The transformation of the human heart, of human relationships, is the necessary groundwork to begin the work of transforming a society.
Just think of our experience here in our own country. The legal abolition of slavery was not enough: the legal designation of freepersons rather than slaves did not guarantee that they and their descendants would be truly free from oppression. Instead, they continued to be subjected to unjust laws aimed at oppressing and marginalizing them, to discrimination and even persecution. It would take another 100 years for us finally to rid our nation of such laws. In that long march to justice and freedom many people suffered, some even to the point of paying the ultimate price, in order to get us there.
This is no cheap grace! Rather, it is the cost of true discipleship, living with discomfort, hardship and maybe even the threat of death for the sake of integrity in doing what is right and the peace of conscience that comes with it, a peace that no one and no force of this world can take away.
Witness of the Saints
Sadly, slavery is still with us, in fact even on the rise in the literal form of human trafficking, as well as in its many other forms figuratively speaking, such as addictions of all kinds, crippling cyclical poverty, and violence in our homes, in our neighborhoods, and all over the globe. It is the power of encounter that has the capacity to heal these deep societal and personal wounds.
All saints understand this. One of our own who understood well the power of personal encounter was Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She was well aware of all of these types of enslavement, and always looked for the encounter with the one who suffers in order to find her Lord hiding behind that disguise. As Pope Francis said in his homily at her Mass of Canonization: “It takes a certain daring and courage to recognize the divine Master in the poorest of the poor and to give oneself in their service,” and those who do so do it “because they have discovered true love.”
Yes, encountering the poorest of the poor with true love brings about a personal transformation. Of countless examples in Mother Teresa’s own life is one which she shared right here in our own city, when she visited here in 1982 and delivered a speech in St. Mary’s Cathedral:
I’ll never forget one day I was walking down the street in London and I saw a man looking so terribly lonely, sitting there all alone. So I walked up to him and I took his hand. And I shook his hand and my hand is always very warm. And he said, ‘Oh, after so long, it’s the first time I feel the warmth of a human hand.’ And then his face brightened up. He was a different being. A small action. The warmth of a human hand. He felt that there was somebody who really wanted him, somebody who really cared. This I never realized before, that such a small action could bring so much love.
Encountering the Poor
This was an encounter with the materially poor. But those who are poor to us are often not only those who lack temporal goods. In reality, anyone toward whom we feel repugnance, disgust, toward whom we are naturally inclined to feel hate because of their race, nationality, language, political views or religious beliefs, is poor to us – poor in the sense of someone whom we are tempted to think of as not worthy of our time, our attention, and maybe even human dignity. These are the ones we are called to encounter and embrace.
I often think of the famous incident in the life of the patron of our city, St. Francis of Assisi: it was precisely that kind of repugnance that he felt toward lepers; then one day, instead passing the leper by, he decided to dismount his horse, kiss the leper’s hand, and give him an alms. This marked a pivotal moment in St. Francis’ conversion, transforming him into the “little poor man of Assisi,” giving his whole life to serving the poor and outcast. And not only serving them, but actually being poor and outcast with them. What today we would call a heroic example of “solidarity.”
This is the transformative power of encounter. The transformation, though, comes at a cost, a personal cost; it requires a death to the ego. It is in this sense that we can understand the meaning of Jesus’ command to us in today’s Gospel: to count the cost before choosing to follow the way of truth. And the cost is not cheap: it requires carrying one’s own cross – own cross, not anyone else’s, the cross that God has uniquely prepared for each one, so that each one may arrive at eternal salvation. This cost, then, is that of self-renunciation, but that is how we build a tower to heaven, dissolving the alienation of poverty and building bonds of communion.
Building a Tower to Heaven
Jesus also speaks in this passage from the Gospel of St. Luke about building a tower: “‘Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion?’” To construct an earthly tower one has to have a lot of money, that is, one must gather earthly goods; but to construct a heavenly tower, one must give away earthly goods: our time, talent and treasure; our energy, attention and affection. This is how we reach the heights of heaven.
Perhaps Jesus had in mind here the teaching of rabbinic wisdom which I learned from a wise rabbi well-seasoned in the pastoral care of God’s people after a long life of dedication to his calling. The teaching tells the story of a wealthy man who, in accordance with his stated will, was buried with all of his money when he died. As the story goes, he thought this would gain security for him in the afterlife, only to be told when he arrived at the gates of heaven: “No, nothing of what you brought with you has any currency here. Here we don’t look for money, we look only for receipts.”
In the Lives of Our First Responders
With this in mind I wish to take this opportunity to thank all of our police officers, firefighters, sheriff deputies and all first responders for what you do to collect receipts for heaven by protecting us. You are generous not only with the temporal goods that God has given you, but with your very lives, laying them on the line every day for us to ensure our safety. By doing your jobs faithfully and well, you are already collecting receipts to show at the gates of heaven!
The thanks I extend to you today are more than just a formality. As a Catholic, it has now become very personal, after our community has taken its turn in suffering horrendous violence and death inflicted upon the innocent by yet another mass shooting, and this one inside of a house of worship. The fact that this is not an isolated incident is a clarion call to all people of faith of the need for a societal cleansing of conscience. Rather than the “cost of discipleship,” which requires death to the ego, one might call this the “cost of the worship of ego,” a cost of the most horrific suffering.
It is, sadly, a cost being paid in seemingly all sectors of society. We have seen attacks on other Christian congregations. Extremely disturbing is the rise in anti-Semitism in our country (and elsewhere), with our Jewish brothers and sisters being subject to violence of all kinds in their own houses of worship and other points of gathering all over the country, as such the embassy in Washington, D.C. Something that I, and I’m sure all us, thought we would never see again after the horrors of the last century. Then, of course, there is the perennial scourge of Islamophobia, and attacks perpetrated on other places of assembly such as schools and entertainment venues, so often based on stereotyped ideas of those who gather there.
We, who have faith, have the high calling to kill this hate with love, to defeat the treatment of others based on stereotypes with a culture of encounter, understanding and fellowship. And you, our dear first responders, help to make this happen. The fact that we know that we can rely on you to protect us and that you will come to our aid in times of threat and danger gives us the sense of security we need to do what our faith calls us to do. The temptation in the face of possible threat is to retreat into a cocoon, remaining safely ensconced there, turned in on oneself. You who answer the call to protect our communities provide us the safety net we need to build up that culture of encounter.
Conclusion
Cheap grace may make for a comfortable life, but not one of authentic freedom, for it keeps one trapped in a troubled conscience and locked within a self-referential world. We are not called to be comfortable; we are called to be courageous. You, our first responders, show us what that means every day when you put on your uniforms and your badges. I pray that we may all learn from you, and that each of us, in the way God calls us in accordance with our vocation and particular circumstances in life, embrace the poor and the far off, melting away animosity and building bridges of unity all throughout our diverse communities. May God grant us this grace. Amen.
