Advent 2

Readings: Is 11:1-10; Rm 15:4-9; Mt 3:1-12

VIDEO

I heard two different things this past week.
I heard, “We’re going to go the wrong way 
if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”
I also heard, and you heard a few minutes ago,
“Welcome one another, then, 
as Christ welcomed you,
for the glory of God.”
The first was said our President at a cabinet meeting,
speaking of people from Somalia living in the U.S.
The second was said St. Paul in his letter to the Romans,
speaking of how Jewish Christians
ought to welcome Gentiles who turned to Christ.

I’m tempted simply to say that for Christians
the choice between the mindsets embodied
in these two statements—
one rooted in fear and the other in faith—
is so clear that no commentary is needed,
and then sit down and treat you all 
to an extremely short homily.
But lest I be misunderstood as offering 
political commentary rather than a homily,
and because the choice does not 
seem to be so clear to some people,
let me take a few more minutes of your time
to explain why this is about theology
and not about politics.

While we think of Advent as the time 
when we prepare to welcome Christ—
and indeed today’s Gospel quotes Isaiah:
“prepare the way of the Lord!”—
it is really these words from Paul 
that capture what the coming of Christ 
into the world is all about:
“Welcome one another, then, 
as Christ welcomed you,
for the glory of God.”

When Paul speaks of being welcomed by Christ,
he knew firsthand that being a Christian 
is not about anything we can do for Christ,
if only we prepare carefully enough;
it is about what Christ does for us,
often when we are least prepared.
For Paul had been unexpectedly welcomed by Christ,
when he was a persecutor of Christians.
Even as he was breathing out
murderous threats against Christians, 
the risen Christ appeared to him in his glory,
welcoming him into a new life.

But Paul was not simply welcomed;
he was also given a mission.
He was given the mission of welcoming others
even as he himself had been welcomed.
He was given the mission of preaching to the Gentiles—
the non-Jewish pagans who were outside 
of the covenant God had made with Abraham,
who were considered idolaters and demon worshippers,
who were, as he describes them in his letter to the Ephesians,
“without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12).
He was called to welcome those whom he says 
were separated from God’s chosen people 
by a “dividing wall of enmity” (Eph 2:14).
He was called, in short, to welcome those
whom he had up to that time thought of as garbage,
who could only pollute the purity of God’s people.
Now, just as Paul had been welcomed in mercy
while he was still the enemy of Christ,
he in turn was to welcome the Gentiles.

Many, who also feared the defilement
that the Gentiles might bring into God’s people, 
thought that Paul was taking the Church 
in the wrong direction.
But Paul knew with the blinding clarity of faith
that the coming of Christ into the world
was, as Isaiah prophesied long before,
meant to draw in all people,
Jew and Gentile alike,
so that the earth might be filled 
with knowledge of the Lord,
as water covers the sea.
Jew and Gentile living together was, for Paul,
the dawning light of God’s peaceable kingdom 
in which “the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the young lion shall browse together.”
Those who had been enemies now dwelled together—
the wild welcomed fearlessly by the tame,
who know themselves to have been welcomed
by the God who does not judge by appearance
but judges “the poor with justice,
and decide[s] aright for the land’s afflicted.”

The contrast between a fearful mindset 
that declares the land’s afflicted to be rejected garbage
and a faith-filled mindset that seeks to welcome others
is not a matter of partisan politics.
Alas, the range of those afflicted ones
who are seen as garbage to be cast out 
rather than brothers and sisters to be welcomed
is large enough to indict both of our major parties:
the unborn, the disabled, the mentally ill, 
the incarcerated, the poor, the unemployed,
the migrant, the elderly, the dying.
The call to welcome 
even as we have been welcomed
is a call that cannot be answered simply
by voting for the correct political party,
as important as voting might be.
It is a call that confronts us every day.

A few weeks ago, at this Mass,
we were honored by the presence of 
not one but two of God’s children
who were experiencing evident mental distress.
Though the situation was uncomfortable,
and perhaps distracted us from our prayers,
I didn’t notice anyone fleeing the church
or trying forcibly to expel our visitors.
In other words, I didn’t see anyone 
treating them like garbage.
What I did see was a couple of people 
stepping up to sit with them,
to calm them,
to welcome them.
What I did see was Christians acting
as those who knew themselves
to have been welcomed by Christ.
What I did see was just a glimmer 
of the dawning of that peaceable kingdom
foreseen by Isaiah.

Perhaps the best way to prepare ourselves 
to welcome Christ this Advent
it to reflect on how we 
have been welcomed by Christ
and to ask ourselves how we 
can extend that welcome to others.
Do we, in our fear of those different from us,
those whose presence might distress us,
dismiss people as “garbage,”
or do we see in them the face of Christ?
John the Baptist says that 

the Messiah, when he comes 

will not care about our family lineage 

or our ethnic identity,
for God can raise up children of Abraham 
from the lifeless stones themselves.
He will look rather for the fruit of repentance,
the reorientation of our lives around the kingdom
into which he welcomes all people.
Jesus says that at the final judgment,
when he will clear his threshing floor
and gather his wheat into his barn,
he will say to those on his right,
“Come, you who are blessed by my Father. 
Inherit the kingdom prepared for you 
from the foundation of the world.
For I was… a stranger and your welcomed me…
[for] whatever you did 
for one of these least… 
you did for me” (Mt 24: 34, 35, 40).

So let this Advent be for us 
the end of fear and the birth of faith;
let us welcome Christ 
by welcoming others 
as we ourselves have been welcomed
so that all people together
“might glorify God for his mercy.”
And may God in his mercy
have mercy on us all.

Advent 1

Readings: Is 2:1-5; Rom 13:11-14; Mt 24:37-44

VIDEO

St. Paul gives what seems like reasonable advice:
if you believe a day of judgment is coming,
even if you don’t know exactly when,
it is probably a good idea 
to quit the orgies and drunkenness,
the promiscuity and lust,
the rivalry and jealousy.
In light of coming judgment, it is simply prudent 
to stop acting like a self-indulgent spoiled brat
and start acting like a responsible adult.
As the bumper sticker says,
“Jesus is coming. Look busy.”

But Jesus paints a picture 
that is slightly less reasonable;
Jesus paints a picture in which 
the day of judgment comes unexpectedly 
upon those who are acting
like responsible and respectable adults:
eating and drinking,
marrying and giving in marriage,
planting fields and grinding flour.
Everyone is responsibly and respectably 
engaged in the concerns of daily life,
and yet one is taken and the other left.
Which suggests that being his follower
is about something more 
than being a respectable and responsible adult.

Don’t get me wrong,
for the most part I am in favor
of people acting like responsible adults,
at least when they are actually adults,
chronologically speaking.
I want the adults in my life to act the part:
I want my students, young though they are,
to begin to take on adult responsibilities;
I want elected officials and other public figures
to speak and act like adults;
I want the grown-ups at Thanksgiving
not to air their childishly petty gripes,
whether personal or political.
And I think the notion of “respectability”
is not some invention of “the man”
to keep people in their place…
well, at least not entirely.
In general, I think that things
like marriage and employment,
moderate consumption
and mutually beneficial collaboration,
are better for society 
than orgies and drunkenness,
promiscuity and lust,
rivalry and jealousy.

But let’s not confuse respectability
with following Jesus,
because following Jesus  
is something wild and dangerous,
something strange and unsettling.
We follow Jesus out of the conviction 
that God has lived among us in the flesh, 
has come to share in our fallen human condition
in what Bishop Eric Varden calls
the “incursion of glory into trauma.”
We should strip ourselves of orgies and drunkenness,
promiscuity and lust, rivalry and jealousy
not in order to don a cloak of respectability,
but in order to clothe ourselves in Christ,
the crucified and risen savior:
a garment far more outlandish and implausible
than anything human ingenuity can devise.
Respectability tells you 
to plan prudently for the future;
Jesus tells you that the future is unplannable,
and that the day of the Lord will come
like a thief in the night.
Respectability tells you 
to get a good night’s sleep;
Jesus tells you to stay up late
awaiting his arrival.
Respectability tells you
to eat and drink in moderation;
Jesus invites you to feast 
on the bread of immortality
and become drunk
with the wine of the Spirit.

From the perspective of Jesus,
the respectable are no more likely 
than the disreputable
to be ready for the eruption 
of the reign of God into their lives.
Indeed, during Jesus’ earthly ministry
it was often the disreputable,
the sinners and tax collectors,
the prostitutes and lepers,
who were most responsive to him,
most anxious to welcome him.
Perhaps, unlike the respectable,
they were free from the illusion
that being a responsible adult
would secure them a place in God’s kingdom.
Perhaps it was easier for them,
who could make no claim to righteousness, 
to become like the children
to whom Jesus says the kingdom belongs.
Perhaps they were readier to be surprised,
readier for the wildness and danger that comes
with following Jesus,
readier to lose their lives for his sake
so that they might find them again.

Respectable responsibility, 
on the other hand,
has a stake in the world as it is.
Even if we want the world to be a better place,
we tend to think of ways in which we might work
to gradually improve things over time,
ways in which we might rationally arrange things
so that human foibles might be mitigated,
ways in which others might be brought into
the circle of our respectable responsibility.
And, again, there is really nothing wrong with this,
unless we think that it somehow gives us
mastery over our fate,
control over our destiny,
a plan for building God’s kingdom.
Because Jesus comes to tell us
that however much you plan,
however meticulously you game out scenarios,
“you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”
The kingdom of God does not arise 
from respectable responsibility,
but comes crashing into our lives,
and all we can do in the end
is to remain expectantly awake
so as not to miss its arrival.

We do not know on which day our Lord will come.
What we do know, as John Henry Newman put it, is that
“Time is short, death is certain, and eternity long” (Serm. VIII.10).
This is true for both the respectable and the disreputable.
So let us love the world as God loves the world,
who sent his Son to be its savior,
but let us hold loosely to our worldly plans and hopes,
so that we might be ready to greet the Lord
when he appears in glory,
ready to cast aside our cloaks of respectability
and clothe ourselves in him and him alone.
And on that day, 
may God, who is merciful,
have mercy on us all.

 

Christ the King

VIDEO
Readings: 2 Sam 5:1-3; Col 1:12-20; Luke 23:35-43

Each of us who is baptized,
whether we remember it or not,
was marked with the sign of the cross,
just as we saw our catechumens, Chad and Sarah,
marked with the cross at the beginning of Mass. 
Each of us who is baptized,
whether we remember it or not,
has received this sign of his love
and been called to know and follow him.
Each of us who is baptized,
whether we remember it or not,
bears the mark of Christ our king,
to whose service our lives have been pledged.

The cross, if you think about it,
is a strange sign for a king.
When the Romans placed the words
“This is the King of the Jews”
above the head of Jesus 
as he hung on the cross,
they saw themselves engaged 
in a clever act of irony, inviting derision—
as if to say, “Get a load of this guy.
He thought he was all that,
but see what the power of Rome can do
to this so-called king.”
For crucifixion was intended 
not only to be physically excruciating
but to be socially discrediting 
and psychologically humiliating.

And the bystanders were happy to oblige:
the Jewish leaders sneered;
the Roman soldiers jeered;
and even one of the criminals 
crucified alongside him
mockingly asked Jesus to save him.
Where is your kingdom of God now,
you pitiful, weak, carpenter from Nazareth?

But the other criminal crucified with Jesus
did not join in the sneering and jeering and mocking.
He saw something different.
Where is God’s Kingdom now?
The good thief sees it
hanging beside him on the cross.
With eyes opened by the gift of faith,
the good thief sees in the man of sorrows
“the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation,”
the one who is “before all things,”
and in whom “all things hold together.”
He sees in the agony of Jesus 
the king who is “making peace 
by the blood of his cross.”
What his killers meant for mockery
the good thief sees as the revelation
of Christ’s Kingdom of love and mercy.

But the cross also reveals God’s judgment 
upon the kingdoms of this world,
unveiling the cruelty of the power of Rome,
casting light upon the darkness 
of human hearts that delight in suffering
and in the destruction of their enemies.
We see revealed and judged
the counter-kingdoms of this world,
in which false peace is maintained
through terror and torture.
In the death of Jesus, light of the world,
we see the working of the darkness
from which he comes to deliver us.

Seeing all this, the good thief asks sincerely
what the other thief asked mockingly:
Jesus, save me.
He does not ask to be spared his fate;
he does not ask to be taken from the cross; 
he asks instead, “remember me 
when you come into your kingdom.”
Death is closing in upon me,
but I believe that you are light itself
in the midst of darkness,
life in the midst of death.
Death seeks to dissolve me
but in you all things hold together.
And if you remember me, 
if you hold me in your heart,
then I will live eternally in you.
I have shared in your cross;
let me share your resurrection.

Remember me in your kingdom of life.
This should be our prayer as well—
we who have been marked with his cross,
the sign of his kingdom of love and mercy.
Perhaps we received this sign as an adult, 
perhaps we received it as a tiny child
and have no memory of that day.
But whether or not we remember is unimportant.
What is important is that he remembers us
and that he journeys with us
as we have sought to know him and follow him,
as we have journeyed through a world 
of false peace and cruelty.
He remembers us
not because we deserve it,
but because he is love and light and life.

At every Mass, we good thieves ask 
to be remembered in Christ’s kingdom,
praying in our Eucharistic Prayer:
“Remember, Lord, your Church,
spread throughout the world…
Remember…all who have died in your mercy.”
Jesus, remember them, 
remember us,
hold us together in your heart 
so that we might belong 
to your kingdom of mercy
and share in the inheritance 
of your saints in light.
O Christ our king, who mark us 
with the sign of your love,
grant us your peace
and have mercy on us all.

 

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

VIDEO

Readings: Mal 3:19-20a; 2 Thess 3:7-12; Lk 21:5-19

The words of the prophet Malachi
presents a striking, 
and perhaps terrifying,
picture of the world’s end:
“the day is coming, blazing like an oven,
when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble,
and the day that is coming will set them on fire.”
But this blazing day that is to come
is not simply one of fiery judgment 
on proud evildoers;
for those who fear God’s name, 
that same dawn will bring
“the sun of justice with its healing rays.”
The day to come is the same dawning
for both the proud and the humble:
the same sun of Justice that rises,
the same light that lights up God’s creation,
the same warming rays that stream upon the world, 
but with two very different outcomes:
some will burn and some will shine.

The sun of justice reveals the difference
between those souls grown dry through sin
and those that have been watered by grace.
For the arid and brittle hearts of the proud, 
the sun of justice will be a threat,
but for those hearts that honor God 
as the very source of their existence—
those who have drunk in 
the living waters of God’s love—
the rays of the sun of justice 
are the source of light and life,
lighting them up and making them live,
like the morning sun falling 
on the fresh green leaves of spring.

We refer to this sort of biblical writing,
as well as Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel,
as “apocalyptic.”
And they certainly offer what we today
typically associate with the word “apocalypse”:
fires blazing, buildings collapsing,
wars and insurrections,
earthquakes, famines, and plagues.
But all these things are, we might say, 
apocalyptically incidental,
for the word “apocalypse” in Greek
means not “disaster” but “unveiling.”
An apocalypse is the unveiling 
of events to come
in which the truth of our lives 
will itself be unveiled to ourselves and others.
As St. Paul says of the return of Christ,
“He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness 
and will manifest the motives of our hearts” (1 Cor 4:5).
Or, to quote the band the Mountain Goats:

When the last days come

We shall see visions

More vivid than sunsets

Brighter than stars

We will recognize each other

And see ourselves for the first time

The way we really are (“Against Pollution”).

The words of Jesus and the prophet Malachi 
are apocalyptic not simply because they speak 
of the coming day of God’s consuming fire,
but also because they speak of the day 
when the dawning sun of justice 
will unveil our hearts and reveal
who it is that we really are,
who it is that we have made ourselves.
The apocalypse—the bringing to light
of what was hidden in darkness—
is disaster for the dry and brittle
but healing for those who 
have immersed themselves in God’s love.

But the apocalypse doesn’t wait 
for some future cataclysm.
The truth of our lives is unveiled 
in the midst of those lives.
While Jesus speaks of how 
“awesome sights and mighty signs 
will come from the sky,”
he goes on to say that “before all this happens
they will seize and persecute you.”
Those who claim the name Christian
will be led before the public authorities
to give “testimony”—
those who claim the name Christian
will be called to unveil their hearts.
And in this unveiling, as in the final judgment,
the truth will be made manifest,
and the line will be drawn.

Jesus tells us that when we are called 
to give testimony,
we should not recite 
some carefully crafted statement
that is sufficiently nuanced 
to offend no one,
to deflect the potential ire
that threatens to fall upon us,
to talk our way out of speaking the truth.
Rather, he says that he himself 
“shall give you a wisdom in speaking.”
He will put the words in our mouth
that will bear witness to him
and to the truth of our lives.
He will tear away the nuance and evasion 
of words with which we veil our hearts,
and the world will see who we really are.

The day is coming 
when we will be called to bear witness,
and none of us knows the day or the hour,
so we must live our lives and bear our witness
as if that day is this day.
And it is this day.
The day on which the sun of justice dawns
to ignite those grown dry and brittle in their pride,
and to illuminate those who fear the Lord,
making them radiant with his healing light,
is this day.
Every word we say this day, 
every work we do this day,
every encounter we have this day
ought to bear witness to the truth,
ought to give testimony to Christ.

Often the best indication that the words we speak
have been put into our mouths by God
is the degree of discomfort 
we feel in speaking them.
When we tell others 
of the love of Jesus that is in our hearts,
even in the face of scorn and ridicule,
God’s wisdom is in our mouths.
When we speak through actions
that show the Spirit’s fruits
of love, joy, peace, patience, 
kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 
gentleness, and self-control,
amid a world that prizes 
bluster and self-seeking,
anger and domination,
God’s wisdom is in our mouths.
When we the Church speak up 
for the human dignity
of the unborn and the dying,
or of the poor and the outcast,
or, as the US bishops did this week, 
of those threatened by government policies 
of indiscriminate mass deportation,
God’s wisdom is in our mouths.
This wisdom may make us squirm,
but the truth we speak will be our salvation.

The apocalypse is here.
The truth is even now being unveiled.
If we are to feel the healing rays
of the sun of justice 
and not the fire that consumes,
we must let God’s wisdom water our hearts,
so that we may speak it before the watching world.
And may God, who is our merciful judge,
have mercy on us all. 

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

VIDEO

Readings: Hab 1:2-3; 2:2-4; 2 Tim 1:6-8, 13-14; Lk 17:5-10

“Destruction and violence are before me;
there is strife, and clamorous discord.”
So said the prophet Habakkuk 
nearly three millennia ago.
But he certainly could be writing today:
war and destruction from Gaza to Ukraine,
political turmoil and violence in our own land,
the federal government shut down 
amid strife and clamorous discord,
our anxieties stoked and manipulated 
to make us fearful of our neighbors.

We know little of Habakkuk, 
but still he is familiar,
for we hear in his words 
the cries of a multitude 
stretching down to our own day,
all those who call out to God:
“How long, O Lord?  
I cry for help
but you do not listen!
I cry out to you, ‘Violence!’
but you do not intervene.”

And we hear as well in his words
the reply of God: 
“the vision still has its time…
if it delays, wait for it.”
The vision is of the unfolding of God’s reign,
the ongoing divine work that somehow heals
destruction and violence, strife and clamor,
through the power, wisdom, and goodness 
of the God who loves us,
a vision that presses on to fulfillment
and will not disappoint
if only we can wait for it in faith.

I’ve been thinking about this word “wait.”
We use it for sitting around as time passes,
anticipating the arrival of someone or something,
doing nothing, it seems, except, perhaps,
growing ever more agitated. 
Because we’re not very good at waiting.
The impatient foot-tapping
as we stand in line:
“How long is this going to take?”
The reiterated question 
emanating from the back seat:
“How long until we get there?”
“Are we there yet?”
“How many more minutes?”
Waiting for the light to change.
Waiting for a guest to arrive.
Waiting in enforced inactivity,
suffering the slow passage of time
that we are helpless to control
but must simply let wash over us 
as we lament, “how long?”

But we also use the word “wait” in another way,
as it is used in today’s puzzling parable:
the master says to the servant,
“Put on your apron and wait on me 
while I eat and drink.”
This is “waiting on,”
not “waiting for.”
Those who work in restaurants will tell you,
waiting on people does not involve
standing around tapping your foot
or repeatedly asking, 
“how many more minutes?”
There is more than enough to do,
and, if anything, the passage of time
is accelerated as one moves from task to task.
The “waiting on” that occurs in Jesus’s parable
is not enforced inactivity but tireless labor: 
from plowing and tending sheep
to serving at the master’s table.

Waiting in faith as we suffer time’s passage 
amid violence and clamorous discord
somehow involves both these kinds of waiting:
we wait on God as we wait for God.
It somehow involves actively serving God and neighbor
while at the same time recognizing that all our labor
does not hasten the fulfillment of the vision
that we must await in faith.
We declare ourselves unprofitable servants
because we know that the vision’s fulfillment
belongs to God, not to us mere mortals,
and yet we are still called in love 
to wait upon God and our neighbor, 
to bear, as Paul writes to Timothy,
our share “of hardship for the gospel
with the strength that comes from God.”

This might be a recipe 
either for frustration or for freedom.
We might find it immensely frustrating
that all our labors cannot shorten 
our time of waiting.
Or we might find it freeing to know 
that our service of God and neighbor
will not be measured in terms of success
but of the love with which we do it.
I am liberated to undertake 
the seemingly impossible,
for, as St. Paul says,
“God did not give us a spirit of cowardice
but rather of power and love and self-control.”
And what makes the difference 
between frustration and freedom is faith,
even faith the size of a mustard seed.
As St. Theresa of Calcutta put it,
“God doesn’t ask that we succeed in everything, 
but that we are faithful. 
However beautiful our work may be, 
let us not become attached to it….
The work doesn’t belong to you but to Jesus.” 

The work of God in Christ through the Spirit 
is what drives our world forward 
through days of destruction and violence, 
days of strife and clamor,
toward the fulfillment 
of the vision of God’s reign. 
And as we wait, we throw 
our mustard-seed-sized faith into the mix
by serving God and neighbor out of love.
And if we think God ought to be 
grateful to us for this
we have failed to understand 
how the whole God thing works.
For all that we are,
all that we have,
all that we do,
is always already God’s gift to us.
Even our efforts are given us by God
so that we might be caught up 
in the great work of God,
so that God might labor 
in us and through us—
we who on our own 
are mere unprofitable servants,
but who through faith
can shine with the fire of the Spirit.

And so, we wait for God 
as we wait on God.
We cry out “how long?” 
amid violence and destruction 
even as we work as servants 
of God’s reign of peace and healing.
And as we wait, 
we pray that God who is merciful
will have mercy on us all.

 

A Wedding Homily

Readings: Tobit 8:4b-8; 1 Jn 3:18-24; Mt 19:3-6

“Call down your mercy on me and on her,
and allow us to live together to a happy old age.”
Tobiah’s prayer, uttered back in the 8th century BC,
gives voice to what I suppose every couple wants:
a long and happy life together.
And, like every couple, 
Tobiah and his new wife Sarah,
had obstacles to overcome.

Well… maybe their obstacles
were not exactly like every couple.
Sarah was hounded by a demon named Asmodeus,
who had killed her seven previous husbands
on their wedding night.
She prayed to God to die,
but God in his love had a better plan,
and sent the angel Raphael 
to make sure that she met Tobiah,
whom she married immediately.
Sarah’s parents delayed the wedding feast
until the next day,
since they suspect that Tobiah would meet 
the same fate as her previous husbands;
in fact, they went ahead and dug a grave for him.
But that night, instructed by the angel, 
Tobiah drove away the demon 
by burning a fish’s heart and liver,
which created a stench so bad 
that Asmodeus fled
(and who can blame him).

I know Karlie and Mason 
have faced some challenges
getting to this day,
but I’m hoping they didn’t involve
husband-murdering demons.
Also, I believe Mason and Karlie 
met via a dating app,
not through the intervention of an angel.
Still, I am confident that God has had a hand 
in bringing them together
no less than he did 
in the case of Tobiah and Sarah.
And I believe that God 
will answer their prayer
for a long and happy life together
no less than he answered the prayer
of Tobiah and Sarah.
And it probably won’t involve
burning a fish’s heart and liver.

But it will involve work on their part.
The key to this work is summed up
in our reading from the first letter of John:
“Children, let us love not in word or speech
but in deed and truth.”
Of course, words of love are important,
but the words ring hollow 
without deeds of love.
And in marriage these deeds of love 
are many and varied:
each day brings an opportunity
to show your love for each other:
grand romantic gestures,
but also mundane things
like taking out the garbage
or watching some television show
that you hate but know
the other one loves.

In the vows that they will take
in just a few minutes,
Mason and Karlie will promise
to be faithful to each other
in good times and in bad.
These vows have 
a bracing realism to them.

As beautiful as it is,

this event we celebrate today is not 

some sugar-coated fantasy.

In their promises today, 

Karlie and Mason acknowledge

that there will be both good times and bad—

perhaps not husband-murdering-demon bad,
but bad times all the same.
Despite this realism, 
this wedding is a joyous 
and a hope-filled event,
because God is here,
the God who is greater than our hearts 
and knows everything.

Mason and Karlie,
your deeds of love will carry you
through good times and bad,
because in those deeds God will be at work,
the God who loves you in your love for each other
with a love that surpasses all human love.
Lean on that love.
Find ways to grow together in that love,
for the love of God will make you one flesh,
that no human power can separate.
May God bless your love,
and through your love bring blessings
to your family, your friends,
and all whom you meet.

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Amos 6:1a, 4-7; 1 Tim 6:11-16; Lk 16:19-31

VIDEO

Where did the rich man go wrong?
How did he end up in torment?
It doesn’t seem to be simply that he was rich.
It doesn’t even seem to be that he 
was self-indulgent and gluttonous,
dressing in purple and fine linen 
and feasting sumptuously every day.
And, at the root of things, 
it doesn’t even seem to be
that he failed in his duty to help Lazarus,
for behind this duty was a deeper call
and so a deeper failure:
a call to imagine himself as Lazarus,
to imagine himself out of his luxury
and into Lazarus’s poverty,
to imagine himself as hungry and helpless.
Though Lazarus lay at his gate,
he failed to imagine his way across
the seeming chasm that stretched between them.

We tend to associate imagination with unreality:
flights of fancy that relieve the pressure
of the drudgery of the real world.
And sometimes imagining ourselves as another
can be to indulge in a fantasy:
myself as someone
fabulously wealthy
or twenty pounds lighter,
or with a full head of hair.
This sort of imagining can be either
an innocuous diversion from reality
or a dangerous delusion.

But there is another way of imagining
of ourselves as another:
to imagine myself as that co-worker
that I and everyone else finds annoying,
or to imagine myself as someone 
whose life and experiences have led them
to a set of religious or political convictions
that I find odious,
or to imagine myself as a person 
who must live with a series of bad choices
and who cannot seem to get their life together,
or to imagine myself as one
whom fortune has not favored
and whose life is scarred by tragedy,
or to imagine myself as someone
of a different race or class or gender.
Here I imagine myself as another
from whom I am separated by some gap,
a stranger who stands on the opposite side 
of a yawning chasm of separation.

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch 
wrote, “We use our imagination 
not to escape the world but to join it.” 
She distinguished between 
the kind of fantasy
that takes me out of the real world
and into a world in which 
I am rich, skinny, and hirsute,
and a use of the imagination
that opens me up to what is real,
an imagination that breaks me out 
of the confines of what Murdoch calls
“the fat, relentless ego,”
and reconnects me to those 
whom I would see as other.
Imagination is what makes love possible,
for, as Murdoch says,
“Love is the extremely difficult realization 
that something other than oneself is real.”

The rich man cannot love Lazarus 
because he cannot see Lazarus,
even though he lies at his gate;
and he cannot see Lazarus
because he cannot imagine himself 
standing where Lazarus stands—
one perhaps who has made bad choices
or whom fortune has not favored,
one who longs to eat mere scraps,
one who stands on the opposite side
of what the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar
calls “the screaming chasm between rich and poor.”

St. John Chrysostom, in the fourth century,
said regarding this parable of Lazarus and the rich man
that the rich man “had within his grasp so great a treasure, 
such an opportunity to win salvation,
[but] he ignored the poor man day after day.”
We might at first think that Chrysostom is speaking
of the rich man’s wealth as the treasure
with which he might have purchased salvation 
by using it for good.
But in fact, it is Lazarus himself 
who is the treasure.
The treasure is the other 
who stands across the chasm—
the chasm between rich and poor,
between white and black,
between citizen and stranger,
between Jew and Greek,
slave and free,
male and female—
beckoning me to come out of my self
and into the mystery of love,
if only I can imagine myself
on the other side of that chasm,
if I can only see the treasure 
who lies at my gate.

But, alas, the rich man’s imagination fails,
and he finds himself in eternal torment. 
His torment is eternal because he remains locked
within the confines of his fat, relentless ego.
Even now he can’t see Lazarus as anything more
than an extension of himself:
one who might quench his thirst
or carry a message to his family,
a family whom he probably also sees 
as just one more extension of himself.
And so he hears, “between you and us 
a great chasm has been fixed.”
The rich man’s fate gives narrative form 
to Luke’s version of the Beatitudes,
which come with accompanying woes.
In the afterlife the chasms of our world—
between the rich and the poor,
the hungry and the full,
the weeping and the laughing—
are eternally fixed and the poles are reversed,
so that the poor are rich and the rich are poor,
the hungry are full and the full are hungry,
the weeping laugh and the laughing weep.
And those who have failed to find themselves
in the poor and hungry and weeping
are left to dwell eternally in their separation.

Of course, the depiction of the afterlife in the parable
is not a prediction, but a warning and an invitation—
an invitation to imagine 
not simply what might lie beyond death,
but what it might be like to be someone else,
to break out of the confines of our ego,
to be saved from our separation.
The conclusion of the parable suggests
that Moses and the Prophets are given to us
to expand our imaginations.
Their words are given to us an invitation
to see ourselves in the stranger and alien,
the poor and the weak,
the annoying and the odious.

But how can we do this?
The ego is a prison we ourselves construct,
but which we are powerless to deconstruct.
Its construction is the work of sin in us,
but its deconstruction is the work of grace.
The Holy Spirit comes to us as the fire 
that enlightens our imaginations,
melts the boundaries of our ego,
and shows to us the reality 
of the other who lies at our gate. 
The Spirit knits us together into one body,
giving us imaginations that are the ligaments
binding us together across chasms of difference.
The Spirit illuminates our hearts so that we may love
those who seem to us most unworthy of love.

Come Holy Spirit,
fill the heart of your faithful,
and kindle in us the fire of your love,
so that God, who is merciful,
might have mercy on us all.

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Readings: Num 21:4b-9; Phil 2:6-11; Jn 3:13-17

I don’t think couples 
generally get married
because they want to suffer.
They get married because love 
has moved each of them 
to join their life 
to the life of another.
And this is a joyous thing.
But the very vows by which
a couple joins their lives
speak of suffering that will come
intertwined and entangled with joy:
the worse with the better,
poverty with riches
sickness with health.
And this suffering is not something
incidental to their joining.
It is suffering they experience
precisely because of their joining:
for the poverty of the one 
becomes the poverty of the other;
and the sickness of the one
becomes the sickness of the other.
No one marries because they want to suffer,
but they know that suffering will come
because they have opened their hearts
to one another.

And it is the same way with Jesus.
Jesus did not join himself to our humanity
because he wanted to suffer,
but he knew that suffering would come,
because he had opened his heart
to suffering, sinful humanity.
He made himself vulnerable,
just as we are vulnerable,
knowing that in a world of sin,
in which our fear of each other
turns us into predators,
the vulnerable are preyed upon.
He could have come 
as the kind of king who reigns
by being the apex predator,
but instead he became a king
whose throne was the cross.
Because God so loved the world
he sent his only son,
who emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave.
He became “obedient to death,
even death on a cross”—
because he had bound himself to us,
and even the torment of the Cross
could not separate him from us:
what God had joined together,
no human being could put asunder.

But, of course, that is not the end of the story.
We call this feast the Exaltation of the Holy Cross,
not the degradation of the Cross;
because it is about the joy of triumph,
not the sorrow of defeat.
It is about how through the Cross
that Jesus bears for our sake out of love,
God has exalted him above all creatures,
so that he is worshipped 
as Lord of the universe.
Even on the Cross 
God is raising Jesus up 
as the sign of his love for us.
Sorrow and joy,
poverty and riches,
pain and healing 
are intertwined in the Cross,
but after the Cross and tomb
there is resurrection,
when sorrow and joy are untangled,
when poverty and pain are banished,
when the richness of God’s healing love
rises again in the person of Jesus.

And it is the same way with marriage.
In their vows, a couple acknowledges
the reality of the sorrows they will face,
the poverty and sickness intertwined
with richness and health,
the worse with the better.
But they make their vows in faith
that sorrow and joy will one day be untangled
and there will be nothing but the joy
of the wedding feast of the Lamb.
And even now, as they share in Christ’s cross,
they, like him, are a sign of God’s love for the world.
They, like him, are a sign 
of fidelity to the bond that love creates.
They, like him, are a sign
of the joy that awaits 
our sorrowing world.

Typically, at a wedding, 
I say these kinds of thing
presuming that the couple has no idea 
what it is that they are getting into,
or what it is that I’m trying to say.
In the case of Justin and Gabriela,
who this past week celebrated 
the tenth anniversary of their civil wedding,
I know that they know 
exactly what I am talking about.
I know that they know because they have lived it:
how the worse and better are always entangled,
sickness with health,
sorrow with joy.
I also know that they have faith
that the great untangling awaits us all,
because they have glimpsed it 
over their past ten years together:
in their own baptisms 
into Christ’s death and resurrection, 
in the birth of their daughter,
in the slow spreading forth
of faith, hope, and love in their lives.
They have seen the sorrow of the Cross,
but they have also seen its exaltation.
And in coming today to have their vows to each other
recognized and blessed by the Church,
they become for us all 
a sign of the triumph that awaits us
at the wedding feast of the Lamb.

Gabriela and Justin,
may God bless your family this day,
and may God bless us all 
through your love for each other,
and may God in his mercy
have mercy on us all.

 

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Wisdom 9:13-18b; Philemon 9-10, 12-17; Lk 14:25-33

VIDEO

What should we make of
the words of our Lord in today’s Gospel?
His examples of the builder and the general
would seem to counsel prudent calculation:
don’t start projects you can’t finish;
don’t get into fights you can’t win.
But when he tells his listeners
that to be his disciple you must
hate your family and even your own life,
take up your cross and follow after him,
renounce all of your possessions…
well, this sounds pretty reckless 
and imprudent.

But what if our sense of what is prudent,
our capacity to calculate,
changes when being Jesus’ disciple
comes into the equation?
I’m not any sort of mathematician,
but it seems to me a bit like trying 
to introduce infinity into basic math
(those of you with math-phobia 
might want to tune out for a minute
and read the bulletin or something).
For example, since the value 
of five-plus-one is larger than five
and a thousand-plus-one 
is larger than a thousand
and a billion-plus-one
is larger than a billion,
you might think that the value
of infinity-plus-one 
would be larger than infinity.
But it’s not, since “infinity” is, by definition,
that than which nothing can be larger. 
So infinity-plus-one would still be infinity—
indeed, infinity-plus-infinity
would still be infinity.
You can’t treat infinity
like a number in making basic calculations,
because it is not a value among other values
but rather it is the concept of limitlessness.
As someone once put it, “infinity”
is a shorthand way of saying
“what would happen if we kept going?”

(Those of you who are math-phobic
can now tune back in,
because the math is over.)
The point is that being Jesus’s disciple,
following him on the way of the cross,
entering the kingdom he proclaims,
is not a value among other values,
something that can be a factor 
in calculating our life plans.
Rather, it is an invitation to live a life
that hurls us beyond the limited horizon
that the world offers us.
It is an invitation to step into 
the wild world of God’s limitless love,
the God whose counsel
no mortal can comprehend
and whose intentions are beyond conception.
It is an invitation that makes us ask,
“what would happen if we kept going?”

The book of Wisdom says,
“the deliberations of mortals are timid,
and unsure are our plans.”
Our problem as humans
is that we believe too little;
in our calculations, we underestimate
the limitlessness of the journey
that Jesus is inviting us to join.
We want to weigh the value of following him
against things of real but finite value,
like family and possessions 
and our own lives.
Jesus invites us to count the cost
of being his disciple
not so that we can put a number on it,
but only so that we can realize
that it is beyond calculation;
it costs both everything and nothing;
it demands the totality of our life,
it demands that we keep going
beyond the limits 
of what we have to give, 
but only so that we can realize 
that everything is already given us, 
everything is already gift.
And realizing this will change our lives.

Our second reading gives us 
a bit of the letter Paul wrote 
to a Christian named Philemon,
a letter that was borne to him by Onesimus, 
who had been one of Philemon’s slaves.
Onesimus had fled the household of Philemon
and encountered Paul and his preaching 
and had been baptized as a Christian.
He desires to remain with Paul, 
but Paul sends him back to Philemon,
telling him to receive Onesimus
“no longer as a slave
but more than a slave, a brother.”
Onesimus is not exactly freed—
he is to return to be a part 
of Philemon’s household—
but neither is he a slave.
Now that they are both Christians,
now that they have both taken up the cross,
now that they have joined Jesus 
on the journey without limits,
the relationship of Onesimus and Philemon
is radically changed:

Philemon can no longer 
be master of Onesimus
but must become his brother.
Think what this might mean 
in their social context,
in which slaves and brothers were people
of quite different kinds of value.
However useful your slave might be to you,
the value of a brother or a sister
would always be more.
To treat one who had been a slave 
as a family member
could be seen as a gross insult
to other members of the household;
as if the elevation of the slave’s status
were a reduction of everyone else’s.
Some might even see Philemon’s act as
“hating his father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters.”
Were Philemon to calculate the cost,
he might well decide that welcoming Onesimus
back into the household as a brother
is simply not worth it.

But Paul is inviting Philemon 
to be not timid in his deliberations,
to calculate not in the terms 
of the values of his world
but to open himself up
to the limitless love of God,
to look at Onesimus, 
who has become his spiritual equal 
in the waters of Baptism,
and ask himself,
“what would happen if we kept going?”
What would happen if we pressed forward
with our newfound brotherhood in Christ?
Can the call to be Jesus’ disciple
lead us to places of love and communion
that we cannot even now imagine?
Can it lead to a life together
where there are no slaves and masters?
Who can conceive what the Lord intends?

And for us too,
what might happen if we kept going,
if we let the infinite kingdom 
disrupt our calculations?
What love and communion might await us
if we let go of everything to follow Jesus?
What impassible borders could be crossed?
What irreparable harms could be healed?
What unimaginable gifts could be received?
We should pray that being a disciple of Jesus
would hurl us beyond the limits
of what we think possible,
and tune our hearts to God’s intentions.
We should pray that God, in his mercy,
might have mercy on us all.

 

The Queenship of Mary

Readings: Is 9:1-6; Rv 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab; Lk 1:26-38

VIDEO

A couple of years ago
a new faculty colleague at Loyola,
who came from a background 
of non-denominational Christianity,
commented that he and his wife 
had noticed the Cathedral here on Charles Street
and were wondering about the name:
Mary Our Queen.
They wondered, he said, 
to whom it referred,
which Queen Mary.
They thought it might be Mary, Queen of Scots,
the Catholic monarch of a Protestant nation
whom Queen Elizabeth I had executed,
lest she usurp Elizabeth 
as rightful queen of Great Britan.
I found this somewhat strange and amusing,
and I helpfully explained 
that the “Mary” in question
was the mother of Jesus,
not the 16th-century Scottish queen.

Of course, in defense of this colleague,

I would note that this 

would not be entirely off-brand for us:
after all, King Louis IX of France
is among our saints,
as is good king Wenceslaus,
and we name churches after them,
so maybe Mary Queen of Scots
is not too much of a stretch.

And if you think about human history,
it’s not all that strange to dedicate 
a massive building like this one
to an earthly monarch or ruler:
the great pyramids of Egypt
are mausoleums to the Pharaohs,
and we Americans have plastered 
sixty-foot-tall sculptures of the faces
of four of our presidents on Mt. Rushmore.
So a cathedral named after a Scottish queen
might not be strange at all.

What really is strange
is to dedicate such 

an impressive edifice
to a nobody Jewish girl
from a nowhere village
in an out of the way corner
of the Roman Empire.
What’s really strange
is to celebrate someone
whose only seeming achievement
was to give birth to someone 
who ended up nailed to a Roman cross 
as a failed revolutionary.
What’s really strange
is to acclaim such a person as “queen”—
not just of Scotland or Great Britan,
but of the entire universe.
But we Catholics
really are just that strange 
and, at our best,
we swim strongly against the tide
of the sane and the sensible.

We’re strange because the world 
thinks that it is only sensible
that greatness is found in having servants,
whereas we honor Mary for declaring herself
“the handmaid of the Lord.”
We’re strange because the world thinks
that power is being able to point to yourself
and say, “do whatever I tell you,”
whereas we honor Mary because she points to Jesus
and says, “do whatever he tells you.”
We’re strange because the world thinks
that the goal of life is security through strength,
whereas we honor Mary because she took the risk
of saying yes to God, 
of being humble and weak,
of exposing herself to shame and ridicule,
of believing that God would cast the mighty
from their thrones
and lift up those
who are lowly.

Mary’s queenship places her in conflict 
with the powers of a world that has 
a very different idea of greatness:
one rooted in burdensome yokes,
and boots that tramp in battle,
and cloaks rolled in blood.
The Book of Revelation speaks
of a woman clothed with the sun
who is hunted by a monstrous red dragon, 
with seven heads and ten horns,
who represents the powers of this world.
The dragon hunts her because she bears a child
whose very being threatens that power—
a child who is “destined to rule 
all the nations with an iron rod”—
and so as the child is taken up into heaven 

she flees and takes refuge in the desert,
in a place of lowliness and humility.

We who in Christ have not only
become children of the Father
but also have been given
Mary as our Mother,
are called to join her there in the desert,
in the place of lowliness and humility
and total dependence upon God.
In a world of conflict and division
God calls us to imitate her
in bearing Christ to the world,
he whose dominion is vast
and forever peaceful.
We are called to fight in the army
of the Queen of Peace
with the weapons of our witness,
through lives that lift yokes of burden
place upon those who are oppressed,
lives that reject 
the boots that tramp in battle
and the cloak rolled in blood,
lives that are lived in faith
that the dragon has been defeated
by the blood of the Lamb,
and that even now 
the Queen of Peace
reigns with the Lamb in heaven.

We who acclaim 
the handmaid of Nazareth
as Queen of Heaven
are just strange enough,
just weird enough,
to believe in the peace of Christ
that passes all human understanding,
and, in the face of seemingly ceaseless war—
war in Ukraine, 
war in Gaza,
war in Myanmar,
war in Sudan—
to hope and pray and work for peace, 
embracing the truth of the angel’s words to Mary:
“nothing will be impossible for God.”

Mary our Queen, 
Queen of Heaven,
Queen of Peace,
pray for us your children
that we too might believe
that the Prince of Peace is with us,
and that God in his mercy
might have mercy on us all.