A couple of weeks back you all might remember me preaching about how physical our Catholic faith is…in other words this is not an academic project…it’s a physical encounter with God. We know there’s just no way to understand completely the fact that the bread becomes the body and the wine becomes the blood. How can we ever fully grasp the idea of the Holy Spirit making Mary pregnant and then Mary herself never ever sinning? The Resurrection itself…if it weren’t for the Post Resurrection stories of Jesus appearing to the Disciples…it would be completely implausible. And yet…amidst this uncertainty…our Catholic faith is marked by physically touching God…not symbolically or metaphorically or spiritually…although there is a lot of that in what we do here. What makes all of this so meaningful is that we actually…really…literally come into contact with God who cannot be completely explained or totally understood. I think that’s interesting.

This is what I continued to come back to over and over this week as I was considering our gospel from Luke…this story of healing the young man at Nain. Yes it’s another miracle of Jesus…a precursor to the raising of Lazarus…certainly a foreshadowing of Jesus’ own resurrection to come. There were the large crowds following him…common in gospel scenes. There was the typical sadness that Jesus so desperately wanted to assuage…throughout the gospels Jesus is moved by pity for his people. There’s the fact that Jesus…again…seeks out someone who is poor…not the elite. The woman was a widow and would have had no one to care for her had the boy not come back to life. I could preach on any of these themes.

But today I want to concentrate on just one line of the gospel…a line that fully engages this physicality of what we’re doing here. It’s the very point of this lovely little story from this…really unremarkable totally out of the way…little town of Nain. The line is this: Fear seized them all and they glorified God exclaiming, a great prophet has arisen in our midst, and God has visited his people.

Beyond all of the really important lessons from the life of Jesus…the Beatitudes…the Parables…the Miracles…the Resurrection itself…beyond all of these really important signposts of the Christ event…maybe the most valuable is the fact that God who needs nothing…God who is perfect and without deficiency…God who already has relationships (Father Son Holy Spirit)…chooses to come among his people…He chooses to visit…to meet…to touch…to be with his People. This is it…if there was no other compelling reason to come to Mass…if this was the only thing we could ever get here at Mass it would be enough. God coming to visit us is why we are here today and it’s the very foundation of all of Salvation history. This gospel story is our story in miniature. God appears…a great crowd takes note and follows him…a tragedy happens (we bring all of our big and little tragedies here just like that mother in Nain)...they’re sad…Jesus sees this and is moved with pity because he loves them…He heals the boy and then they notice Him and are a bit fearful but rejoice at the mystery of it all…then they acknowledge his greatness…for God has visited his people. This little known gospel…it’s Salvation History in miniature…it’s what happens here at Mass every Sunday with you and me.

The fact remains…God is ineffable…there are no words to describe Him. Anything the human mind can come up with to explain God is still left wanting…still trying to apprehend His fullness. We can kind of know Him…certain windows into God’s perfection…a masterpiece oil painting so beautiful that we can’t take our eyes of off it…a piece of music so compelling that we replay it over and over again because it’s so good…a math equation that balances out perfectly. These are windows into God that we peer through and…for a moment…feel reasonably sure of God’s existence because they help us to see him. But our gospel today takes it one step further…many gospels take us through the window…Mass itself takes us through the window to where God literally visits His people. Fr. Barron in his Catholicism series puts it this way…he says in the Incarnation God moves among his People. What a beautiful line…God moves among his people. gods don’t normally deign themselves to be with the people…let alone poor people…they rule them from far away like puppet masters knowing nothing of what the people are actually going through. God is just the opposite…he wants to visit us…literally…then he wants to move among us.
Friday I gave a talk to a group of men in Waco who are members of the Central Texas Fellowship of Catholic Men…some of our men are members of this group. They asked me to speak at their luncheon on Catholic Spirituality. I spoke of this…God visiting us…God moving among his people…literally. This is what makes us Catholic. More than just memorizing scripture passages…more than doing good deeds…more than even preaching the gospel…all incredibly important tasks in the life of a Disciple…coming into the physical presence of God is the most important.

We talked about this last week on the Feast of Corpus Christi…encountering The Word beneath the words. In fact all of scripture…all of science…all of history…all of poetry and art and music and mathematics…all of it could be said to be pointing to God…to Jesus…on this Altar. God visiting his People…moving among His people. How else could masterpieces be painted…or mathematic equations solved…or symphonies be composed if God wasn’t involved?

The reason this is so important…God visiting His people…God moving among His people…is that it takes the need for us to create Him out of the mix. God knows what He is about…He keeps us a bit at bay…peering in through the windows…and then visits us at various times…reveals himself…comes in and out of our midst…literally…purifying our perspective and clarifying the fact that He is God and we are not. So…God visiting that mother and son that day in Nain…God visiting humanity those 33 years 2 millennia ago…God visiting you and me every Sunday serves us in two very important ways…he shows himself to us so that we will know a little bit about him…and he does so on His terms so that we might not presume to know everything about him. This is why it’s OK to not fully understand transubstantiation or any of the other mysteries of God. And this keeps us going in our difficult lives…but also in check amidst our willfulness. This why we’ve come here today.

So often with our twenty and thirty something’s church attendance wanes. They say…why do we need to go to Mass anyway? I always explain…because God wants to visit you and he wants you to visit Him. He wants to move among his people. And when we let him to this…we come to know him and ourselves more profoundly. In the end…this is the very best argument for coming to Mass every Sunday…not necessarily because we want to…but because we desperately need to. We come here so that we might know Him and ourselves a little better…it’s so basic and so profound.