This was my sermon a week ago, given at St. Joan of Arc Parish.  It served to "kick-off" the "Christ the King Bowl".  The purpose of the bowl was to bring guys together for fraternity and prayer.

JMJ

The starvation bunker under block 13 was certainly a very dismal place. Block 13 was a barrack in the prison camp of Auschwitz, and the starvation bunker was the place of execution for "select prisoners" who were condemned to be an example to all the rest. Indeed, most of the men who were sentenced to this bunker were just the example the Nazis wanted them to be. They often died fighting each other after having gone insane with hunger and thirst. In at least one instance, however, the result was quite different. This was the case of Fr. Maximilian Kolbe.

In Fr. Kolbe’s case, he and nine others descended into this wretched hole as a punishment for the escape of a fellow prisoner. But instead of engaging in the fighting and insanity, Fr. Kolbe lead the group in prayers and songs. Instead of dying like wild animals, they died like men. Their witness was so great that one of the workers who looked after the bunker said, "It doesn’t even seem like the Starvation Bunker…. When I go down there, it’s like descending into the crypt of a church." Fr. Kolbe and a few others were the last of the group to die. They survived two full weeks in the bunker with no food or water, and in the end they died not from starvation but from a final lethal injection of acid into their veins. As it turned out, Fr. Kolbe was an example for the rest of the camp, but it wasn’t quite the example the Nazis wanted him to be.

I bring up Fr. Kolbe’s story this morning as an example of the power of God’s grace working through friendships in Christ. The men Fr. Kolbe befriended as he went with them into the starvation bunker met their death bravely and even with joy due to their faith in the Lord Who conquers all things. No doubt there was a great need for healthy friendship in Christ at that terrible moment in history, but, in fact, every moment of history has such a need, and that need most certainly exists today.

Young people today do not face the evils of a Nazi prison camp which threatens to destroy their bodies, but they do face great temptations which, if indulged, will destroy their very souls. These are temptations to sexual impurity, to materialism, and to despair—and in my mind these temptations find their roots in one predominant problem. That problem is the problem of loneliness.

Loneliness is the feeling that no one cares about us. When we experience it, it can even cause us to doubt whether or not God cares about us. If He really cared, we may think to ourselves, why would He abandon me—"Why would He let my parents get divorced?", or "Why would He leave me with this ache in my heart?" Many of the sins of today are simply false bandages placed over this basic wound of loneliness.

The answer to the problem of loneliness is found in the mission of the members of the Body of Christ. Ours is a mission to make present the love of God in the world—not just in a general and vague kind of way, as if love can be general and vague, but in a concrete and specific kind of way—like prayers and songs offered in a starvation bunker. Friendship in Christ is just such a concrete and specific way.

Friendship in Christ is a very great good. In natural friendship we love our friend for who he is, but in friendship in Christ, we love our friend also as God loves him, and this means several things. First, it means that we love our friend all the time, through thick and thin. Natural friendships often end when troubles come about, but friendships in Christ never end because God’s love never ends. Second, friendship in Christ means that we are always looking to help our friend to become better. Natural friendships can become satisfied with the status quo of our friend’s personality, but friendship in Christ is never satisfied until our friend becomes the best he can be in both happiness and holiness.

As our Gospel today reminds us, each of us, as believers, has been given talents to use for the glory of God. Fr. Kolbe used his talents of faith and hope to bring love into the middle of a starvation bunker at Auschwitz. Today, the starvation bunker many young people find themselves in is that of loneliness. Our desire as believers in Christ is to meet the pain of loneliness by establishing deep friendships in His love. When we do so, we can trust that one day Our Lord will say to us just what He has said to the two good servants in the Gospel (and also to Fr. Kolbe), "Well done.… Come share in your master’s joy."

--Fr. Adam Hertzfeld