We have been journeying through Lent with the theme "I confess...I
confess!" So, what was the first Sunday? ....pause.... I cannot hear
you! Let me help you. I confess that decision-making is difficult or
hard.

On our second Sunday, I confess the need to change. And then we had,
the Buzzard. Do you like the Buzzard? (gesturing toward a picture of
a buzzard on the front wall.) Does it look like your buzzard?
(Applause and laughter from the congregation!) I really wanted one
that would actually flap across the screen and do all that, but its
hard to get that type of graphic when your source is Google. (This
was referring to Father Dibble’s homily of 2/17 in which he referred
to his Buzzard.)

This Sunday our theme is "I confess I avoid strangers. I confess that
I avoid strangers." A number of years ago, I was eight years old and
my grandmother took us on a walk, my cousin Kevin and myself. My
grandmother was a wild extrovert who told it like it was. You wonder
where I got this from, huh? (Father is referring to his outgoing
personality here!) And so we went for a walk. We were eight years old
or so. My cousin Kevin is ten weeks older than I, but he was in a
higher grade the way our birthdays fell, and I was always jealous
about that, how he got in and I was bigger than he. He was shorter
and now he’s bald and I’m taller and.... We started out on a walk
which was five miles to our aunt’s house. As we were walking along,
it was the middle of summer, Ireland, not a rainy day like this. It
was kind of typical, beautiful summer, hot day for us, little country
roads where the grass runs right up the middle and only one car could
go past at a time. So, after about a couple of miles.... we said,
"Granny, we need to stop...we are thirsty." We were starting to yap a
little. You know how eight-year-olds can be when they are getting a
little fussy. Of course there is no store out in the middle of
little rural Ireland. And so, we came to this little cottage with a
half door, the windows all open and my granny rapped the door, "Are
you there, Missus?" ...”I’ll be right
out.” And so the lady of the house comes out to greet us. Granny
says, “Meet my two grandchildren here, Aidan and Kevin, and I'm Mary
Jane and I'm taking them on this walk and they're dying for a wee
drink. Could you give us a drink? The lady disappeared into the house
and a few seconds later she appears with three jelly jars. I never
understood why she couldnt give us real glasses, as if we were going
to nick them or something. But anyway, she gave us these glasses and
we had a drink of water and it was one of the most wonderful drinks
of water I think that I have ever had! Just the scene, being with one
of the people that I love most in the world and my cousin Kevin who
is now bald and so it was one of those moments that really satiated
that thirst and it was really a beautiful moment I thought.

The water that Jesus is talking about is the water that wells up and
satiates our very souls. It fills us up in a way that nothing else
can. And so, when he came to the well, he saw this woman. And you
know, the first moment, she saw him as a stranger. He was a man. You
never talked to men in that culture. And they are there in the middle
of the day on their own. There would have been sexual connotations of
him talking to her, but Jesus does not buy into all of those
stereotypes of the culture. He initiates, as he does with us, a
conversation, if we are open to hear. He sees her potential. He sees
the gift of who she is. And yet, if you look at this picture, you
could just see she has turned to him but there is a shadow side. Do
you see the shadowed face in the picture? ( Fr. Aidan was referring
to the attached picture that was presented to the congregation on
Powerpoint) See picture below!

Each of us has that stranger who is or can be our shadow side. We are
not prepared to acknowledge it all of the time, but when we look in
the mirror in the morning when we are cleaning our teeth or at the
end of the day or for anybody who looks in the mirror more often than
that, who do you see? Do you see all that God sees, every little tiny
part of who we are? Do we acknowledge who we are? Do we love who we are?
Because Jesus, in this moment, saw her coming from a distance and, in
the longer version of the Gospel, he tells her all of the things that
she ever did. She had six husbands and the one that is with her right
now, she acknowledges he is not her husband. She was looking for
herself in a way that was never going to satisfy. She was looking
outside of herself to acknowledge who she was. But Jesus communicates
in the second moment. First, he, a Jewish man. A Jewish man would
never talk to a Samaritan. Jesus breaks through that cultural
barrier. Then, she comes to realize he’s a prophet. And then, in the
final analysis, she realizes he is Jesus, the Christ. And the water
that he has to offer is the water that wells up within us to eternal
life. That is the gift that each of us are presented with today. And
that is the stranger that you and I have to acknowledge, in our
sinfulness and giftedness.

Do we, as Americans, buy into this idea that I have to be perfect? I
have to pray perfectly every day and I have to do all of these
perfect things because all our role models are perfect? And because I
don’t pray correctly and I don’t pray on time and I don’t do this,
that.... Sometimes we just give up.... because we’re not perfect.
But, you know, many days you just have to keep coming back and keep
showing up and keep sort of just plodding along and doing the very
best that you can. And God provides us the water, the life, to be
able to do that.

This week, or most mornings of the week, I go down to the Donut King on
Contra Costa Blvd. There is a group of us parishoners who meet there
after the 8am Mass. On Thursday morning, there were twenty. So Christ
the King basically takes over the place. It’s a small little donut
shop. And so we put all the chairs together, and we all sit around
and talk, and chat and
criticize this, that and the other, and then they elaborate and
criticize me for my homily. Anyway, Joan Severetti is a parishoner.
She’s a doctor. She’s a woman of means. She’s bright. She’s
intelligent, and she was sitting there, and she was relating the end
of a story, and I asked her to tell it to me again. Now, there’s a
phone tree at Christ the King. I can’t believe this, but a woman came
to me this morning and said, “Father, did you say Joan Severetti’s
name and tell that story from the other day at the coffee shop?
I said, “How do you know?” She said, “Well, somebody called me,
Father.” I said, “Really? Isn’t that lovely? All that love and
concern for Joan.” I never, ever tell stories without connecting with
someone first. So, she’s OK and this is OK.

So, Joan was going off to New York a couple of weeks ago, New York,
that strange place on the other coast. And she gets there to stay
with her cousins. The cousins were outside of New York itself, a
little town of about five thousand people, and she was going to visit
this other cousin. Her cousin John was driving her to the little
town. I can’t remember the name of it. It’s not important. But
anyway, she gets there. John has a touch of the flu and he is
driving, sniveling in the car, and then she stops off at the Safeway
for the cousin she was going to visit and got a bag of groceries that
she thought her cousin might need. She gets to the door. John drives
off, says he’ll be back in five or six hours, and her cousin lets her
into the house. She says, “What are you coming here for, bringing the
flu into my house? And why are you bringing a bag of groceries?
Wouldn’t you call and ask me what I wanted?Isn’t that cheeky?” (After
the homily Joan informed Fr. Aidan that her cousin was very
sick....and has since passed away.) And so Joan looked at her, and
basically she put her out. It was thirty-two degrees and raining. And
Joan was stuck in this place with no bars on her cell phone. So she
walks off to the library where there would be an internet connec tion
to see if there’s a way to get out of town on the next bus to get
back to New York. Well, guess what? No train. No bus. The bus is
going to leave that night and her cousin would be back then anyway.
So she is feeling a little disgruntled and she said she had no makeup
on and she had a big rough coat on and she had her bag of groceries.
So, outside of the library, she starts nibbling through the
groceries, as one does when you are a little hungry, lost, lonely and
all that stuff. And so the next thing, she danders over (“Dander” is
an Irish word for walking.) to the park. A police cruiser pulls up.
And I said, “What were you doing, Joan?” She said, “Well, I wasn’t
doing anything. I was just sort of being myself.” She’s only a slight
little woman, you know. And so the cop gets out of the car and says
to her, ”M’am could I help you?” She said, “No” with a “What have I
done?” sort of a look. And the cop said, “Can you tell me why you are
out on this cold day?”So she just decided to tell the truth. So she
tells about this strange cousin of hers who had just sort of thrown
her out and the cop was sort of nodding yes but you could tell by his
face that he was like “I don’t believe her.” So he was semi-satisfied
and drove off. And then she thought she would go back and try to stay
warm in the library and wander around a few stores. Then after a
little while, she just started feeling sorry for herself because her
sister died
five weeks ago of cancer and she didn’t get back home in time to be
with her sister. You know when you are feeling a little down on
yourself, when there is something else heavy in your heart, it
doesn’t take much to trigger your being real with your grief or your
heart. And so Joan stood there at the edge of the park and just burst
into tears, as one would do when you had lost your sister and you
wished she were here and with the situation and everything.

Then, as she is kind of finishing off with her little moment, the cop
car pulls back again with two cops in it this time. I said, “You must
have looked
really bad for two to show up!” She says, “Well, it was really
interesting because the cop got out and said, ‘Could you tell me the
story again because I really am not buying it. Could you give me the
address of the lady that you said you were visiting?’ “ So at this
stage, she started to get really angry, and she said to herself, “
Well, I’ll just comply but this is ridiculous!” So she hands the
policeman the address. He writes it down and gets his buddy to check
it out on the computer in the car. Then, he asks for her ID, and she
gives her California driving license. They run it, and then they come
back to her and say, “Have a nice day.” So, what was going on in
Joan’s mind was “Oh, my God! I am a doctor. I am a woman of means. I
have a home to go to. I have a cell phone. I have a life. But what if
I were a homeless person? What if I were a homeless person with no
where to go, with no means, with nothing, only what you’d have on
your back?” And she started to feel really angry and then she started
to feel a level of compassion and care for people that are different
from herself, the stranger. Sometimes we would make the stranger, the
people we are afraid of, that are not like us so they don’t
understand. And the gospel is calling us not to do that. God’s
inclusive love, the water of life, is for everyone even the stranger!

We had our men’s retreat a couple of weeks ago. A lot of the guys
were married which is wonderful, but the guys kept going on and on
about marriage, their wives, their wives, their wives.... Imagine
that! Going on a men’s retreat and talking about your wife the whole
time! So anyway, there we are and I overheard this conversation and I
thought, “Oh-h...”So this young guy said, “I don’t have a wife. I
have a partner.” And my heart dropped because I was afraid of what
was going to come next. Not about him, but what the guys were going
to say that were talking to him because they were sort of macho dudes
and you know they’re very Catholic and maybe even a slight wee bit
right of center. Or so I thought. But the group leader turned to him
and said, “You know, we’re really sorry. That was very presumptuous
of us to assume....” You don’t know what was going on in that guy’s
head. You don’t know what his relationship is like. You don’t know
who he was related to. You don’t know any of the things about him.
And we make huge generalizations and presumptions that I don’t think
we can do. And so those guys were really loving and caring and sort
of just embraced him, not literally but just embraced him in a very
powerful sort of way. And it was a great learning moment for me.

And the third movement of this idea (You all had three things to
think about in terms of people we avoid.) .... I was at a funeral
yesterday, and it was for a forty-seven-year-old young woman and she
had never spoken in her life. She had never been able to really
clothe herself. She had never been able to feed herself, and she’d
never really been able to communicate in a way that you and I would
understand. But when her parents and her friends got up to talk about
her, she was physically and mentally challenged through a birth
problem. Janet lived forty-seven years, and it occurred to me that I
had never seen so much love expressed about one person. There were
two hundred people in that church who loved this woman, a women who
did not know how to communicate in the ordinary sense of the word.
And if you met her in her wheel chair you would be inclined to kind
of avoid her because it would make you feel uncomfortable. But here
were people who really loved her and saw her
in a light that you and I might not have. And if you had gotten to
know Janet she would have lit up your heart as sometimes people with
challenges do in a very special way, when we open ourselves to that
experience. So God’s inclusive love is about loving all people, all
people no matter what side of the aisle. If you are on one side of
the aisle politically that you can look over at the other and see the
good and vica versa, and that you just don’t look at one channel that
is always about what you are about, that you look at the others and
inform yourself about how people think and how people feel. There are
big challenges. I am sure if I were to see Father Dibble’s little
bubble that’s on everybody’s head, I would love to see all of the
bubbles on your heads that are thinking about all of the people that
you thought would be challenging to you or be strangers. There would
be a lot of estrangement. But the gospel calls us not to be
strangers. That’s the challenge that Jesus is offering.

Lastly, I have to put my hat on for this one. What are you laughing
at? (Fr. Aidan put on a St. Patrick's day fun hat.) Mia Farrow stood
up before the United Nations, a woman who was in “Rosemary’s Baby”
and married to Woodie Allen. That’s all I’ve ever known about her.
Always very shy, very retiring, she has never done much with her
notoriety. But when she stood up before all of the people of the
world and said, “There’s genocide in Darfur,” We are a human family,
a human family irrespective of what or where we come from, creed,
color, sexual orientation, whatever, God loves us all. And she stood
up and said, “There is genocide.” We stood up as a nation, as a
people, as a human race after the Nazis killed the Jews and other
people in the concentration camps, and we said, “Never again! Never
again, as a human family would we let this happen” And my dear
friends, it has happened a couple of times since then. So here you
have this little part of Sudan where you have conservatively speaking
two hundred thousand to half a million men, women (mostly women) and
children murdered and hacked to death, and that’s happening in our
own time. And you are sitting in Pleasant Hill and you are thinking,
“What can I do about any of these things?” You feel powerless and
with an inability to do anything. I was watching this PBS special the
other day and I was thinking, “There’s a stranger, but what can I do
about the stranger all the way over there?” But our country stood up
to the plate in this instance and
put through seventeen resolutions at the United Nations to protect
the people of Dafur. I pray for the day when the United Nations is
what we want it to be, a steward of all of humanity without self
serving political maneuverings. I don’t know how that will ever get
fixed, but every time that these resolutions went through there is a
complicating factor why the people were still dying with each
resolution. The Communist Chinese
government owns the oil company in Sudan and Khartoum has a close
relationship with Bejing. China is hungry for oil. And they are
limited in their natural resources, so they want the oil. So it is a
symbiotic relationship between the two, and Khartoum and Bejing are
working
together. So when the last resolution went through, what happened was
the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations said, “OK. We’ll go
along with a force going in there to stop the genocide, the killing
of these people in Darfur, but we will only sign off on it if
Khartoum agrees to it. Khartoum didn’t want them to come in. So it
didn’t happen.

But Mia Farrow used her voice loudly and clearly. We can use our
voices too. We have purchasing power. Now here’s a hat from the
Dollar Store and guess where it’s made? Where?.... “China” from the
congregation. I went to Mexico last year and bought a Virgin of
Guadalupe. Where was it made? “China!” Do we have anything against
Chinese people? Absolutely not! Absolutley not! That is not the
issue. There are two people not coming back to Mass from the eight
o’clock Mass, they told Father Brian, because we talked about this.
You know, folks, these are real people’s lives and this is what
happened. China wants that oil and they want this thing to work, but
when Mia Farrow stood up, a woman, a simple woman, and stepped out of
her comfort zone and said, “The Olympics in China are going to be the
Genocide Olympics,” wow, did the Communist Chinese government stand
up and they listened because this is their coming-out party. They
want to put their best foot forward before the entire world that
Communist China can be this huge power house as it is. It affects us.
We owe them one Trillion dollars for the Iraq war. We buy everything
from them.We have purchasing power. We are a democracy. We can vote
with our feet, minds and hearts. We have investments and you could go
on and on and on. When good people do nothing, the strangers will be
hurt. When good people do nothing.... You and I can do little things
for these strangers. Mia Farrow did something. And the Chinese
government, the next time the USA introduced the resolution, the
Chinese government said, “Back off. We want these troops in.” And now
a half a million people are dead but the genocide has stopped. We
don’t want that to happen again to any of our brothers or sisters
anywhere on the planet. And I think that is our gift as a Catholic
community of faith and love, looking to the strangers.

But who is a stranger? Is it the stranger within myself? Is it the
stranger and the people around us, the homeless, the handicapped, the
physically challenged, the emotionally challenged? Who is it? Or the
people in another place? God’s universal love is calling each of us
to drink that glass of water but not the glass of water that is going
to make us thirsty again. It’s to keep that and fill our souls and
give us the promise of everlasting life. Amen.