Homnification

A Homily for the 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time

The Christian path is neither a path of Domination nor a path of Subordination, but rather a path of Homnification. Today, in our second reading from Ephesians, we hear, what you might call, the infamous scripture passage instructing wives to be subordinate to their husbands. No matter how you feel about this particular Pauline text, it is important to remember that Jesus’ call to us is to engage in neither Domination nor Subordination but rather in Homnification. Both Domination and Subordination have the exact same objective: Dehumanization. But the Christian path is always fundamentally bent on Homnification… that is engaging in the art of becoming fully human and the practice of safeguarding the human dignity of both ourselves and others.

This particular passage from Ephesians is not just problematic because it harkens back to ancient gender roles and societal expectations placed both on women and men, but it is problematic primarily because it is stuck in what one scripture scholar calls the Domination System. A system based on the domination of some and the submission of everyone else. But again, Domination and Subordination always leads to one and the same thing: the dehumanization of both parties involved.

The call to Homnification, on the other hand, is the path of becoming fully human. And it is at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, where Jesus makes clear the Christian must not participate in domination or subordination but instead he or she must find a creative third way that can reclaim the humanity of both oppressor and the oppressed alike. A third way, that is neither submission nor domination, fight or flight, but rather a way that refuses to take up the world’s weapons in the cause of defending human dignity.

It is an invitation for Christians to learn how to be wildly creative in the cause of the full human flourishing of all our brothers and sisters. To do it by force, by domination, is not a creative or life-giving act. To give up and basically submit to the powers that be, because they just seem too deeply entangled in the workings of the world, is also not a creative or life-giving act. Our call is to create a new path forward that places human dignity at the center and calls us out of our indifference or fear to be creative forces for good in the world.

And this homnification process matters, this nurturing of others and ourselves into full humanity matters, because we follow an Incarnate God, the Word made Flesh: Jesus who is fully human and fully divine, which means by nurturing the full humanity of others we also nurture their deification… their becoming one with the Divine; one with God, which is the ultimate goal of every single human life. Homnification and Deification, since the coming of Christ, has become one single, seamless movement. It’s two sides to the same coin. The more fully human you become the more fully divine and vice versa.

But we cannot take up the weapons of the world and expect to further this most basic cause. So here’s an invitation to a little imaginative exercise: Let’s say you find yourself in a situation saturated by Domination and Subordination how would you envision creatively helping both dominator and the subordinated to reclaim their basic human dignity without wielding the weapons of domination yourself?

In the end the greatest problem with the Domination System and those who participate in it is that it is always the result of idolatry and primarily the idolization of both Power and the Exercise of Power.

This is why it is so important to listen to what Joshua says in our first reading today: “As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD!” And what Peter says in the gospel today: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life?” We live in a world where so many serve anything other than the Lord. So many go anywhere rather than to Christ. And so domination and subordination are not just common place in our church, our politics, our society, and even in our families, it becomes acceptable and even expected. So people routinely pick up its weapons just to get by day-to-day.

But it must be different with us. We are called by Jesus to be a creative people. A people with our hearts set on not just our own human flourishing, but the human flourishing of our brothers and sisters. Because we know we can never grow in our own humanity, or protect our own human dignity, if the means by which we do so are dependent on the dehumanization of anyone else.

So we are called to be radically creative in how we respond. The cause is the greatest cause there is: the homnification and deification of us all. Let us pray today: Lord, make me a wildly creative Christian in the cause of human flourishing. Amen!