Weekly HOMILY for June 5, 2011: Baking Cookies: The Kingdom in Our Midst

Ascension of the Lord, Cycle A
St. Mark, Fallston
St. Margaret, Bel Air
June 5, 2011

Baking Cookies: The Kingdom in Our Midst
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato


DOUGHJANGLES

Aaron and Eric Ware were not only twin brothers, but also best friends. They did everything together.

Four years ago, Eric died from brain cancer. Eleven-year-old Aaron was at a loss. Unable to accept his twin’s death, Aaron sunk into depression. His worried parents made an appointment with his pediatrician.

During the exam, the doctor noticed something. When she asked Aaron what he liked to do, Aaron smiled for the first time.

“Bake,” he said. “Well, then, that’s what we’re going to do,” the doctor told Aaron. Her prescription: “Start a baking company. Come up with a name for the company.”

She then handed her young patient a $20-dollar bill. “I’m going to be your first investor. You report back to me and we’ll see how it goes.”

Aaron threw himself into the challenge. With the help of his mom and his older brother, Aaron started “Doughjangles. “

He bakes hundreds of cookies each week and sells them to family and friends. Half the proceeds go to the charities that helped Eric. Doughjangles is still going strong.

Says Aaron, “Instead of just watching TV trying to forget, Eric would want me to do something I love doing.” In baking cookies, young Aaron found a way to continue the “work” of goodness and happiness he knew with his brother.


SCRIPTURE

Today is the Ascension of the Lord. It is about the followers of Jesus having a new kind of relationship with him, one beyond the merely physical one of two bodies in the same space together. It’s a new kind of presence to one another.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all place the Ascension as an event on Easter Sunday. For John and his gospel, the Ascension is not an event, but a new existence, a new relationship with God that is built on the former physical one.

So it is not so much Jesus having ascended “up there,” but of God’s greater more intense involvement in human life. It is God’s overcoming all that hinders his involvement with us.

There they are on the mountaintop and as Jesus takes leave of them his final words are, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all, baptizing them and teaching them all that I have told you.”

It is about their confidence and their willingness to act in the name of Jesus and that new life which God is bringing into existence through the death and resurrection of his son.

Aaron was an 11-year old with no hope, his dreams dashed by the death of Eric. But he was open to the words of his pediatrician who spoke to him of (1) His love of Eric and (2) His love of baking.

She, like Jesus, motivated him to act out of that two-fold love (Eric and baking) and he was transformed. In using a talent – baking cookies – and – motivated by his love of his brother – young Aaron found a way to continue the “work” of goodness and happiness he knew with his brother.


APPLICATION

The two men dressed in white who stood atop the mountain, while Jesus was taken from their sight, speak to us as well when they ask, “Men, women, and children of St. Mark’s (St. Margaret’s) why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”

What they will learn, as will we, is that Jesus will return through (1) Our love of him and (2) The use of our talents and gifts for the good of others.

Thus for example the gift of listening, grounded in love of Jesus, can give someone who’s lost his job hope or a teen a sense of direction for her life.

Or a monetary gift, again, grounded in the love of Jesus, can put a smile on a single parent struggling to put food on the table.

Or the gift of time, grounded in the love of Jesus, can assist our parish as a volunteer or sitting with the elderly person can bring a smile to one who has been forgotten by family and friends.

Or the gift of a car ride, grounded in the love of Jesus, can get a very appreciative senior to a doctor.


CONCLUSION

In baptism, the Gospel preached by Jesus is passed on to us – we become witnesses of the great Easter event and accept responsibility for the “work” of telling the people in our lives the good news of the empty tomb and that Jesus is alive and alive in us.

The question that is left for us is, “Where is my relationship with Jesus in the midst of my own loss, pain, longing, unsettlement and to what is that relationship calling me?”