Novena of Grace Day 9

I'm often accused of preaching very depressing wedding homilies. I always, and some of you have heard me use this line if you've come to me for confession, this wonderful line by the Russian author Dostoevsky. He says, Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing. So, my wedding homilies usually have to do something with that theme. Not very popular there. So today, on this joyful day, as we come to the end of this novena, I want to reflect with you a little bit today on failure. How nice it would be to tie this whole novena together with a nice, neat little bow and set it aside for next year. But like any retreat, God won't make it that simple for us. God has bigger dreams than what we have, and so God wants to do something else.

So, let's talk about failure. In 1549, Francis Xavier arrived on the shores of Japan, and he could not have picked a worse time in the history of that country to try to set up a mission. He got there; the whole country was basically engulfed in civil war. It was broken up into these small city-states And they weren't getting along, and they were fighting with one another. The emperor was just a puppet. He was pretty much useless. Xavier didn't know what to do. The language was incredibly difficult. Xavier couldn't pick it up at all. And to be honest, Xavier's understanding of theology was a bit rough. And it really didn't fit well with the people there. And so, he met rejection after rejection. And after three years, he left Japan, and he was not the least bit confident that Christianity would ever take a foothold. He left disappointed. Later on, that same year in 1552, he thought, okay, you know, maybe Japan doesn't work, but I'm going to go for China. That's the big goal.

So, he lands on this little island about six miles off the coast of China in 1552. I'm going to say this wrong. I think it's pronounced Shang Chuan. He lands on this island, hoping to get into China. Now, as I mentioned previously, China was closed to foreigners. They were not open to having any foreigners there. And in fact, if you were a foreigner and you were caught, or if you were a Chinese person smuggling in foreigners and you get caught, you'd be locked up and you'd be tortured, and your last days would be pretty horrible. But Xavier didn't care, so he kept trying to find Chinese merchants who would smuggle him in. And they kept saying, Nope, nope, no thanks. Not willing to take that risk. Not for you, buddy. He found one who said, Sure, I'll do it. And then he never showed up. So, there's Francis: it's November of 1552. He's alone on this island, except for two of his friends. One is a Chinese convert named Antonio. The other one was a convert from Malabar named Christopher. He's there, just the three of them. Maybe a couple of Portuguese ships in the harbour, but that was about it. He was staying in a hut made out of branches. It wasn't nearly enough to keep the cold winds out. And he comes down with a fever. And they run out of food. And that's where Francis died, with his goal in sight. six miles away, but it might have been six million miles away. And all he had to eat, a handful of almonds. That was it, virtually by himself. Anybody on the outside looking in at that scene might be tempted to say: ‘What a failure!’. What a disappointment. All the work, all the energy that goes into this, and there he was. He died by himself with a handful of almonds in his hand. What's it all worth? He was only forty-six years old. Can you believe that? Only forty-six years old.

Maybe sisters and brothers, maybe you and I can empathize with him a little bit. I don't know if you've ever had experiences in your life of failure or great disappointment. Maybe you tried to start a business, and it failed. Maybe you tried to start a family, and you got married and that marriage failed. Maybe you've watched it after a parent dies and your family splinters and nobody gets along and all the resentments come up and family fails. Or maybe one of your children, or more than one of your children, maybe their lives haven't turned out as you had hoped and again you feel that disappointment start to creep in. Maybe you've tried to get sober, hundred times, and a hundred times you've failed, and you just don't know what to do. Failure is a part of our lives of the disappointment and discouragement that come with it. Those haunt us each and every day. But you know what? If that's you, if you've ever experienced that, then you're in good company. Because Jesus also failed. Now, this might, I know I'm going to hear about this. I know I'm going to hear about this from some of you. So, hang on, hang on. Hear me out to the end. I do think Jesus died of failure. Look at it this way. Jesus spent three years traveling around the Judean countryside, preaching, healing, and all the rest. He did everything that he could to help people believe. But he never gathered a group of followers as big, perhaps, as he had hoped. reading the gospels, we would think that the masses were out following him. But there was a historian later on who said, Nah, gee, the Jesus movement was pretty small back in the day. And his closest friends, his 12, it's not even like they didn't even understand him. And at his hour of greatest need, they all took off. They abandoned him. And so, there's Jesus hanging on the cross, and what's his dying prayer? My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

I can only imagine that the thought crept into his head. Was this a waste? Did I do something wrong? Did I fail? Of course, we know what happened. We know what God did with that failure, don't we? That three days later, Jesus rose again. That somehow God was able to take this violent death and he transformed it, and he was able to use Jesus' very death to defeat death itself. And then that three days later, we find out that love actually won the day. The violence that was perpetrated against Jesus, that would not have the last word, but love would have the last word. But it took those three days to get there, and in the meantime, Jesus's disciples, and perhaps even his own mother, were absolutely distraught, perhaps even despairing, feeling discouraged. But God transformed all of it. God is able to use failure, or what appears to be failure, God's able to use it to do something spectacular. God's able to use it to bring about life. Sisters and brothers, when we experience failure or disappointment in our lives, we face a choice. Either we can go the path of discouragement and say, Ah, what's the use? Or we can go the path of surrender, and we say, Lord, it's in your hands.

What would it be like to go that path of surrender? Knowing darn well that God can take all of our frustrations and all of our disappointments and failures and do something great. Many times, we think that we failed at something, but what we're not seeing in those moments is we're not seeing the seeds that we're actually planting. And here's the thing with seeds. You can put them in the ground, and you can water them, but it's not you and me who makes those seeds grow. It's God who has to make those seeds grow. God has to do it. And so, often I'll get parents who come to me and they'll say, Oh, Father, my son doesn't go to church anymore. And I'll always ask, I say, Well, did you teach him to be a loving young man? I say, Oh, yes, Father, yes. Okay. Then you've planted the seeds. Now you got to wait. Now you've got to surrender. Now you've got to leave it in God's hands and let God make those seeds grow.

And with Francis Xavier's life, God did make the seeds grow. Not long after Xavier’s death, when they brought his body back to Goa, the people lined the streets. It was a huge celebration of his life. People were so moved, they said at his funeral. that you couldn't even hear the preacher talk because of the wails, the crying of the people there. Xavier was, he could be a tough guy, sometimes he could be kind of harsh with people, but the people of Goa knew that he loved them, and they remembered that love, and they grieved his loss. Xavier was not a failure. He touched people's hearts. In Japan, the mission continued, the Jesuit mission continued. Nine years after Xavier died, a young man named Paul Miki entered the Society of Jesus. He was Japanese. He was the first Japanese Jesuit. And he was martyred later on with a group of 26, again during all the civil wars. And Japan closed up again. But here's what's amazing. In the early 1800s, when Japan finally opened up to foreigners, and missionaries came once again to Japan, they were amazed to find the Christian communities were still intact and still practicing their faith. Xavier planted that seed, sisters and brothers. He wasn't around to see that seed grow, but he planted the seed in China. Not long after Xavier died, a man named Matteo Ricci was born, entered the Jesuits, and went to China. And if you know anything about his story, Matteo Ricci totally changed the way we think about evangelization. He revolutionized the way that we think about evangelization. That we could go to foreign cultures, we can dialogue with those cultures, we can talk about Christ in those cultures, and we don't have to go killing people in order to do it. Revolutionary. You wouldn't have had a Matteo Ricci, though, without a Francis Xavier. Xavier opened the door. Xavier's failure, or what appeared as failure, opened the door.

And so, it is for us sisters and brothers. When those times come in our lives, when we feel the failure, when we feel disappointment, when we're tempted to discouragement, that's exactly the time that we need to surrender to God. And say thank you to God for those moments. Because at those moments of failure, we reach the very limit of what our strength and our intelligence can do. And we're forced to our knees, and we're forced to surrender to God whose dreams are always bigger. And that's when God's power really reaches its fullness. And God is able to take those seeds that we planted and he's able to do things so far beyond what we could ever imagine. Those moments of failure are important. Those moments of failure only seem like failure. But if we can surrender them to God, God does so much more with them. Look, I'm going to say this and then I promise I'll be quiet. I hope these nine days have been fruitful for you. I hope it's been a good time of reflecting on the life of Saint Francis Xavier. And I hope you heard something that maybe you can apply to your own life. But if you hear nothing else, take this, the lesson of failure. That it's our job to plant the seeds. It's not our job to make them grow. As Bishop Kenneth Untener once wrote in a beautiful, beautiful prayer, he said this. He said, ‘We are ministers, not messiahs’. We do the best we can each and every day, and we leave the outcomes to God. My friends, I think that's what true holiness looks like. Amen?

NOW LET US PRAY THE NOVENA PRAYER.

O most kind and loving saint, in union with you I adore the Divine Majesty. The remembrance of the favours with which God blessed you during life, and of your glory after death, fills me with joy; and I unite with you in offering to Him my humble tribute of thanksgiving and of praise, I implore of you to secure for me through your powerful intercession the all-important blessing of living and dying in the state of grace. I also beseech you to obtain the favour I ask in this Novena …...here ask for the favour you wish to obtain…. but if what I ask is not for the glory of God or for the good of my soul, obtain for me what is most conducive to both. Amen.

Let us pray…

O God, who was pleased to gather into your Church the peoples of the East by the preaching and miracles of blessed Francis, mercifully grant that we, who honour his glorious merits, may also imitate the example of his virtues, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.