Homiletic Diakonia

Epiphany

2012-01-08T10:31:00.000-08:00

Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2:1-12

When God made the covenant with Abraham

and established the Israelites as God’s people,

God made clear that this was not simply

for the benefit ofAbraham

or of the nation that his descendants would become,

but it was for the blessing

of “all the families of nations”(Genesis 12:3).

Over the centuries the Jewish people

came to think of this

in terms of the “pilgrimage of the nations”

that we hear spoken of in our first reading:

“Nations shall walk by your light,

and kings by your shining radiance.

Raise your eyes and look about;

they all gather and come to you. . . .

the riches of the sea

shall be emptied out before you,

the wealth of nations

shall be brought to you. . . .

all from Sheba shall come

bearing gold and frankincense,

and proclaiming the praises of the Lord.”

In other words, if the descendants of Abraham

are faithful to their covenant with God

then they shall be a light to the “nations” –

the Gentiles –

who shall see that light and come in pilgrimage,

bringing with them all the riches of their cultures,

to worship and serve the God of Israel,

the one true God,

under whose rule all the nations of the earth

shall become one people of God and live in peace.

This was the hope.

This was the dream.

This was what the Jewish people

looked for God’s anointedone,

God’s messiah,

to do.

When the messiah came,

he would make Israel

a light to the nations,

to draw all the families of nations

into God’s family.

The nineteenth century Jesuit poet,

Gerard Manley Hopkins,

in a journal that he kept while on retreat,

remarked, after spending a day

meditating on the events ofthe Epiphany –

the story we have just heard in today’s Gospel –

that the Jewish people had looked

for the pilgrimage of thenations,

but, “when it came it brought

an unexpected circumstancewith it,

as God’s works always do”

(Sermons and Devotional Writings, 269).

This is something worth pausing over, for just a moment:

when what they had been hoping for from God

came to pass:

“it brought an unexpected circumstance withit,

as God’s works always do.”

As God’s works always do:

isn’t this always the way?

What we hope for,

what we wait for,

what we pray for,

never arrives

in quite the way that we expect it to.

In the case of the story of the Epiphany,

the pilgrimage of the nations

is represented by the three Magi

who come from the east

seeking “the newborn king of theJews.”

But they do not find him in King Herod’s palace,

but in the humble dwelling place of Mary and Joseph;

the savior does not arrive with the splendor of a king,

but with the humility of a child;

his parents are not powerful and secure,

but weak and threatened,

and soon enough in flight for theirlives.

“It brought an unexpected circumstance with it,

as God’s works always do.”

The one who summons the world’s nations

to bring their gifts to the God of Israel

and to become part of God’s people

appears among us as what St. Augustine called

the verbum infans– which we might translate as

“the infant Word, unable to speak a word.”

He is offered gold and incense,

because he is king and God,

but he is also offered myrrh,

a spice used in burial,

because he is a king who will rule

and a God who will save

by living among us as one of us

and by giving his very life for us.

Unexpected circumstances indeed –

circumstances that should drive home for us

that truly it is God who is at work here,

in that typically unexpected way that God has.

It should remind us also that,

while the work of God in our lives

is also a part of these unexpected circumstances,

God’s work in us is not a puzzle to be solved

but a mystery to be pondered and celebrated:

the mystery of God’s Word found in a speechless infant,

the mystery of life found in death,

the mystery of power found in weakness,

the mystery of the love that unites us as one people of God.

Advent 2

2011-12-04T11:27:00.000-08:00

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11; 2 Peter3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

Advent is, ofcourse, a time of expectation –

expectationof the birth of Christ

but also ofhis second coming –

and intoday’s first and second readings

we have voicesthat present us with images

of the coming salvation of God

that involvea cosmic transformation

of the very fabric of the universe.

Isaiah tellsus that, “Every valley shall be filled in,

everymountain and hill shall be made low,”

and, evenmore strikingly,

the Second Letter of Peter says that,

“the day ofthe Lord will come like a thief,

and then theheavens will pass away with a mighty roar

and theelements will be dissolved by fire,

and theearth and everything done on it will be found out.”

These voicesremind us that world as we know it

is merelytemporary, not eternal,

and that thevery fabric of reality will be transformed

in themarriage of heaven and earth –

transformedby God in a way that we cannot even imagine

and so we mustspeak of it in metaphors

of valleysbeing filled in and mountains being laid low,

of heavensroaring and the elements being dissolved in fire.

Afterpresenting such dramatic images Second Peter asks,

“Sinceeverything is to be dissolved in this way,

what sort ofpersons ought you to be?”

In otherwords. . . so what?

If this isall true, how does it affect my life now?

Peteranswers his own question,

saying thatif this is true we should be,

“conducting[our]selves in holiness and devotion,

waiting forand hastening the coming of the day of God.”

Waiting andhastening.

These twothings might seem incompatible.

How is itthat we can patiently wait for something

and yetstill impatiently seek to hasten its arrival?

Even more,how can we,

by acting with holiness and devotion,

do boththings at the same time:

both waitingand hastening?

In answer tohis own question

of what people we ought to be

in the faceof God’s coming transformation of the world,

Peter saysour lives should be a hastening that waits

and awaiting that hastens.

We needsomehow to work for the world’s transformation

while at thesame time waiting for that transformation,

which onlyGod can bring about in God’s own time.

That daywe work to hasten

is whatSecond Peter calls “the day of God” –

the daywhose coming belongs entirely to God and not to us.

A hasteningthat waits and a waiting that hastens:

what Petersays about the kind of people we ought to be

might atfirst sound quite strange and paradoxical

but perhapsit is not so unfamiliar as it first appears.

Think of theprocess of growing from a child into an adult.

Of coursefor me this was a long time ago,

so I thinkof this in terms of my more recent experience

as the parent of teenagers.

I know that,as a parent, I want my children

to work atdeveloping into adults
and to act like the adults they are becoming,

How manytimes have I said,

“you’re too old to act this way”?

At the sametime,

I want them to be patient with themselves,

not to rushtoo quickly into adulthood,

but to letit arrive in its own good time.

How oftenhave I said,

“Sorry, you’re too young for this”?

I want themboth to wait for adulthood

and tohasten toward it.

And this isnot, I hope,

simply one more unreasonable parental demand

because,oddly enough,

these two things often occur simultaneously

in ahastening that waits and a waiting that hastens.

Sometimes itis a step toward maturity to recognize

that you are not yet mature enough for something

and that themost adult thing you can do

is to letyourself be a child for a little while longer.

At othertimes maturity involves stepping forward in faith

into a riskynew experience,

despite allhesitation,

trustingthat, whether your succeed or you fail,

it is allpart of your becoming an adult
though it may require patient waiting before youcan see that.

Maybe ifthose of us who are adults

can recallhow it was that we became adults

we can havesome idea

of the sort of persons we ought to be

as “we awaitnew heavens and a new earth
in which righteousness dwells.”

If we listento the voice of the apostle Peter

calling usto cultivate lives

of holy waiting and devoted hastening,

then theAdvent season can be for us

a time both ofanxious yearning for the world’s redemption

and of patient waiting to receive it as God’sgift.

Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

2011-11-06T12:10:00.000-08:00

Readings: Wisdom 6:12-16; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13

I recently heard the current Eurozone crisis
compared to Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper,
with the Germans compared to the ant,
who worked hard all summer to provide for the winter,
and the Greeks compared to the grasshopper,
who frittered away the warm days playing music
and when winter arrived came begging to the ant,
only to be turned away,
with the concluding moral:
“Beware of winter before it comes.”

Maybe because the Greek debt crisis has been so much in the news
this fable immediately came to mind
when I read the parable in today’s Gospel
of the wise and foolish virgins.
The foolish virgins, who forget to bring extra oil,
are the grasshoppers who take no thought for the future,
while the wise virgins are the ants who plan ahead
and make sure they have enough oil
to keep their lamps burning
until the bridegroom arrives.

But in fact the message of Jesus’ parable
of the wise and foolish virgins
is not the same as that of Aesop’s fable
of the ant and the grasshopper.
For in Aesop’s fable the wisdom of the ant
is about calculating the times and seasons –
of knowing how to put the right amount of effort in
at the right time –
and the foolishness of the grasshopper
is a matter of not grasping the obvious fact that winter arrives
more or less reliably at more or less the same time every year.
For Aesop, wisdom and foolishness
is a matter of understanding or failing to understand
a calculable reality
so as to be ready at some fixed point in the future
for the arrival of winter.

In Jesus’ parable, however,
neither the wise virgins nor the foolish virgins
are able to calculate in advance the time of the bridegroom’s arrival.
The wise virgins, though they have brought extra oil with them,
had no way of knowing if it would be enough to last
until the bridegroom showed up.
If he were delayed another few hours,
perhaps they too would run out of oil.
In other words, the wise virgins simply were lucky
that the oil they had brought was enough.
So they are not really like the ant,
who knows more or less when winter is arriving
and who knows more or less how much food she needs
to make it through the winter until the return of summer.

I think a key to understanding the parable
is that the difference between the wise and foolish virgins
does not manifest itself
until the immanent arrival of the bridegroom is announced.
It is only at that point,
when the bridegroom’s arrival has been announced,
that the foolish virgins run off looking for more oil,
rather than staying to greet the bridegroom.
It is as if they can think only of how unwise they will look
if their lamps are not burning brightly,
if they are dark and empty of oil,
and so they leave to buy more oil
and miss the arrival of the bridegroom.
In other words, their foolishness lies in thinking
that it is more important to appear as if they had properly calculated
the arrival of the bridegroom
and had secured beforehand a sufficient amount of oil
than it is actually to be present at the joyful arrival of the bridegroom.
They preferred the appearance of wisdom to wisdom herself,
and in doing so show themselves to be most unwise,
missing the moment for which they should have been longing,
all for the sake of securing a little bit of oil.

How often do we ourselves prefer
the appearance of wisdom to wisdom herself?
How often do we get so wrapped up
in wanting to seem prepared, competent, or clever
that we focus on trivialities and miss the main event?
How often do we forget to ask ourselves
about what it is that really matters
and give ourselves whole-heartedly to that,
the way that the wise virgins gave themselves whole-heartedly
to welcoming the bridegroom?

Next week we will be asking you to consider
your level of financial support to our parish.
I’d like to say that this isn’t really about money,
but actually it is about money.
At least, it is about money to the degree that we need money
to keep the lights on and the heat going,
to pay the salaries of staff members
and to provide programs for the parish.
But your support of the parish is not just about money.
It is about time and talent and, more than anything else,
it is about discerning what it is that really matters to you
and about how to give yourself whole-heartedly to that.

When we gather on Sunday, we are doing nothing less
than joining together to receive Christ joyfully
and to celebrate his arrival in our lives.
This is either the main event, as it was for the wise virgins,
or we are just fooling ourselves that it has any importance at all.
Financial times are hard,
and maybe you don’t have any more money to give.
Life is busy,
and maybe you don’t have an extra hour to give.
Maybe you feel as if you are like the foolish virgins
who lamps were empty and dark
or maybe like the grasshopper
who had not planned ahead.

But that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that the bridegroom is arriving.
What matters is the wisdom of knowing that,
however much or little we have to give,
we give it joyfully in thanksgiving
for the great gift of God in Christ.

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2011-10-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10a; Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-14

At this point in my ministry as a deacon –
four and a half years after my ordination –
I have performed a fair number of wedding ceremonies
and I realize that wedding can be times of high tension
for everybody involved.
But even so, the characters in the parable
that Jesus tells in today’s Gospel
seem unusually stressed-out.
We’ve all received invitations
to weddings we did not particularly want to attend,
but it seems a bit extreme
to kill the person delivering the invitation.
And while it might hurt our feelings
to have our invitation rejected,
it hardly seems a fitting response
to burn down the city where the invitee lives.
And though an underdressed guest
might raise a few eyebrows,
we would probably not tie up his hands and feet
and cast him “into the darkness outside,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth”
(presumably the wailing and grinding of teeth
of those who cannot get into this joyous celebration).

Matthew’s version of Jesus’ parable
is hardly a realistic depiction
of even the most emotionally fraught wedding.
But of course it’s not really a parable about wedding etiquette
and the deadly consequences of breaching that etiquitte.
Jesus’ parable trades upon the imagery
of the great feast at the end of time
that God, our first reading tells us,
“will provide for all peoples,”
a feast of “rich food and choice wines,
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.”
At this feast, “The Lord God will wipe away
the tears from every face.”
It is this feast that fulfills the promise in our second reading
that “God will fully supply whatever you need,
in accord with his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”

The book of Revelation presents a particularly striking image
of this great feast at the end of time
in which Christ the lamb is united to his spouse, the Church.
At this feast the joyous guests sing, “Alleluia!
The Lord has established his reign,
God, the almighty.
Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory.
For the wedding day of the Lamb has come,
his bride has made herself ready. . .
Blessed are those who have been called
to the wedding feast of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:6-7, 9a).

In all these texts the joy of a wedding feast
at which two lives are joined together
becomes an image of the joyous event
of the union of our life with God’s life,
when God will consummate human history,
wipe away all its tears,
and fill every cup to overflowing.

In the Eucharist that we celebrate every Sunday
we share already in the wedding feast of the Lamb.
I have heard the Eucharist described
as the rehearsal dinner for the Lamb’s wedding feast
but I believe it is something more than that
because in the Eucharist the Lamb is truly present with us
and the wedding feast is already begun.
We come, week after week,
to have our lives joined to the life of God,
to have our tears wiped away,
to have our cups filled to overflowing.

In the new translation of the Mass
that, as I mentioned last week, we will soon be using
the invitation to communion will now be,
“Behold the Lamb of God,
behold him who takes away the sins of the world.
Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.”
This is not only a more literal translation of the Latin,
but it makes just a bit clearer the connection of our Eucharist
with the wedding supper of the Lamb –
the great feast that God provides for all people
at the consummation of history.

We have been called, like the guests in the parable,
to the wedding supper of the Lamb
who has taken away our sins,
and we are indeed truly blessed
to have received this call.
But the parable is also a warning
not to take lightly so great a call.
Though the actions of the characters in the parable
seem extreme,
the very exaggeration of those actions
drives home the point
that this is a call to the feast of life itself
and to decline that invitation
is to reject the gift of life that is offered.
At the same time,
the invitation is not to be accepted lightly;
we are to adorn our souls
with the wedding garment of love,
a garment that, as St. Gregory the Great put it,
is woven of two strands of wool:
love of God and love of neighbor (Homily 37).

In the Church we sometimes speak of the “Sunday obligation” –
that is, the obligation of all Catholics
to be present at Mass each Sunday.
But if we understand what the Eucharist is –
that it is our sharing in the wedding feast of the Lamb –
then the language of obligation,
which we might associate
with something we do grudgingly and under duress,
might seems to miss the mark a bit.
At the same time, as our parable reminds us,
how we respond to this invitation
is a matter of life and death,
and our weekly presence
at the wedding feast of the Lamb
is an obligation,
but not an obligation that we owe to God
or to the Church
but to ourselves:
the obligation
to let our lives be joined to God’s,
to let our tears be wiped away,
to let our cup be filled to overflowing.

Blessed indeed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2011-09-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

Readings: Isaiah 55:6-9; Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a; Matthew 20:1-16a

The prophet Isaiah commands us,
“Seek the LORD while he may be found.”
But how do we fulfill this command?
On this weekend when our religious education programs resume
it is worth asking ourselves what it means to seek the Lord,
and who this God is whom we are seeking.

In his homily a couple of weeks ago,
Fr. Jerry Lardner mentioned the Baltimore Catechism.
Who remembers the Baltimore Catechism?
I don’t mean, “who remembers that there was a Baltimore Catechism?”
but rather, who remembers what they learned from the Baltimore Catechism?
As those who were taught from the Baltimore Catechism will know,
it consisted of set questions and answers concerning the faith
that children memorized and repeated back.

Let’s try a test:
Who made you?
God made me.
Why did God make you?
God made me to know Him, to love Him,
and to serve Him in this world,
and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

Though the fact might have been lost, at least at first,
on the children who were made to memorize them,
these are profound words.

“Who made you?”
I have been made by God,
the supreme, infinitely perfect maker of the universe.
You might think that, as important as God is,
this task might have been delegated to someone else,
such as an angel or a demi-god.
But the Baltimore Catechism tells us
that each and every one of us
has been brought into existence directly by God,
who shapes our lives
with the intimacy of the potter shaping the clay vessel.

But there is more. . .

“Why did God make you?”
God has not simply brought me into being,
but God has given my life a purpose,
a meaning,
a “why.”
God says to us through the prophet Isaiah,
“As high as the heavens are above the earth,
so high are my ways above your ways
and my thoughts above your thoughts.”
And yet the Baltimore Catechism tells us that that even so
God has made each and every one of us
to know, love and serve God in this life.
We are made by God so that we might seek God out.
Though God’s ways are unfathomable to us,
God has made us so that
we can know God, however imperfectly,
we can love God, however falteringly,
we can serve God, however unworthily.

And even more than this,
our imperfect knowledge,
our faltering love,
our unworthy service
can, through the grace of God
that comes to us in Jesus Christ,
be transformed into a path
to eternal happiness with God
when this life is done.

Though it may have been lost on them at the time,
those who were made to memorize
these words of the Baltimore Catechism
were given a profound truth,
a life-changing truth,
a saving truth.
They were given the truth
that each and every human life
is of infinite significance
because it is a gift from God
that can blossom forth into eternal joy.

Our methods of catechesis have changed over the decades,
but our goal is the same.
We may emphasize memorization less
and understanding more,
but our desire is still
to help the children of our community
to seek the Lord while he may be found.
Our desire is to communicate to them the saving truth
that they have been made by God
and that their purpose in this world
is knowing God with their minds,
loving God with their hearts,
and serving God in their daily lives,
so that their lives can be of eternal significance.

As any parent knows,
we live in a world that increasingly pressures children
to polish their résumés
with a dizzying array of activities and accomplishments.
We Christians, however, have a counter-cultural message
to hand on to our children:
that their lives are significant and important
not because of what they have accomplished,
not because of what they have done,
not because of awards they have won,
but, as in the parable in today’s Gospel,
because of what God has done for them
in calling them into life and redeeming them through Christ,
and that therefore their lives should be lives of gratitude and service.
This saving truth is what our catechists seek to give our children
and what we who are parents must reinforce for them every day
in our deeds and in our words.

And this is true not simply for our children,
but for all of us.

St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote:
"Do you want to know the opportune time to seek the Lord?
The simple answer is: all your life."
Our lives are lives of continual seeking and continual finding.
So we should all seek the Lord while he may be found.
We should seek the Lord who made us
to know, to love and to serve him in this life
and to be happy with him forever in the next.

A Wedding Homily

2011-08-13T05:31:00.000-07:00

Readings: Ruth 1:1-11, 14-18; Romans 12:3-18; John 15:9-17

A wise friend of mine once said

that marriage is not about standing face-to-face

gazing into each other’s eyes,

but rather is about standing side-by-side,

facing the world together.

This idea runs somewhat counter

to popular, romantic notions of marriage

that focus exclusively on the love of the spouses for each other.

Don’t get me wrong; this love is important;

C___ and G___ would not be here today

if they did not love each other.

But marriage does not simply link two people together.

Rather it places the couple

within a much wider network of relationships

that can be extremely complicated.

When you marry, you are marrying not just your spouse,

but also his or her family, friends, colleagues,

sports teams, favorite musicians, and even ethnicity.

Indeed, one of the challenges of marriage

is learning to negotiate that complexity.

But it is also part of the richness:

when I got married, I acquired not only a wife,

and eventually children,

but what was to my mind

an extraordinarily large Irish Catholic family,

a set of expectations about how and where

holidays should be celebrated,

and a professional football team I was expected to root for.

This has always been the nature of marriage,

as we can see in our first reading,

which tells the first part of the story of Ruth

from the Old Testament.

She is a foreigner, a Gentile,

who marries into a Jewish family

and as a part of all this

becomes a worshiper of the God of Israel.

When her husband, her original link to that family, dies,

she is offered by her mother in law, Naomi,

the chance to cut her ties to them

and go her own way,

back to her own people

and her own gods.

In what to our ears

sounds like something one might speak to a spouse,

Ruth tells Naomi, “Wherever you go I will go;

wherever you lodge I will lodge.

Your people shall be my people

and your God, my God.

Where you die I will die,

and there be buried.”

For Ruth, her marriage had placed her

within a web of relationships, traditions and beliefs

that permanently altered who she was as a person.

Marriage calls us not simply to be faithful to our spouse,

but into a wider faithfulness,

a faithfulness to family, friends, sports teams,

and even to God.

This is why in the Catholic tradition

we call marriage a sacrament:

it is a sign that points beyond itself

to an ultimate reality –

the reality of God’s love.

It points to the reality that,

as St. Paul said in our second reading,

“we, though many, are one body in Christ

and individually parts of one another.”

But in order to be a true sign,

it is not enough for C___ and G___

to love one another,

or even to love

each other’s family and friends and sports teams,

but they must love in a particular way.

What St. Paul writes to the Romans

is a pretty good description

of the love that married couples

ought to have for each other:

“Let love be sincere. . . .

love one another with mutual affection;

anticipate one another in showing honor. . . .

Rejoice in hope,

endure in affliction,

persevere in prayer. . . .

Rejoice with those who rejoice,

weep with those who weep. . . .

If possible, on your part, live at peace with all.”

In John’s Gospel, Jesus puts it even more succinctly:

“love one another as I have loved you.

No one has greater love than this,

to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

C___ and G___,

that is what you are doing here today:

laying down your lives for each other,

entrusting your lives to each other,

saying, “wherever you go, I will go.”

Your lives now belong to each other,

and in belonging to each other

you belong to the whole world.

In loving each other sincerely and faithfully,

you will be a sign to the world

that true happiness is found

not in power

or in prestige

or in possessions,

but in the kind of love

that will lay itself down for another,

in the love that seeks

to live in peace with all.

What you do here today is, I know,

important to you.

It is important to your families.

it is important to your friend.

But even more than that,

it is important to the world:

a world that desperately needs a sign

that love can overcome hate,

that generosity is more powerful than greed,

that peace can prevail over violence.

You can be that sign.

In what you do together here today,

in what you do tomorrow,

in what you do for the rest of your lives,

you become,

in what will often be small

and undramatic ways,

a sign from God,

a sign of hope.

As Jesus said to his disciples, I say now to you:

“Go and bear fruit that will remain.”

May God bless you.

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2011-08-07T08:16:00.000-07:00

Readings: 1 Kings 19:9a, 11-13a; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14: 22-33

Somehow, somewhere people came up with the idea

that the chief motivation behind the belief of Christians

was a sense of comfort in this life

and the promise of even more comfort in the next.

In this view, Christianity is for those who cannot face

the harsh realities of this world

and so hope for a better life in another world.

Christians are smug and complacent in their faith,

sure that they know all the answers

and have a firm footing in life.

I can speak only for myself,

but this is not my experience of being a Christian.

For me, the Christian faith seems at times

to make my life

much more complicated,

much more of an effort,

and, in a way, much more uncertain.

Faith places an infinite demand upon me

because it is assent to the truth of the infinite God,

a God whom we can never comprehend or control.

As the twentieth-century theologian Karl Rahner once said,

Christians are those

before whom the abyss of existence opens up –

those who know that they have not thought enough,

have not loved enough,

have not suffered enough.

So do not let anyone tell you otherwise:

to step out in faith

is to step into that abyss of existence.

Think of Peter in today’s Gospel:

Jesus had made the whole walking-on-the-water thing

look pretty easy

and this seemed like a good opportunity

to demonstrate that he,

alone among the apostles,

really had faith;

so Peter succumbed to his impetuous nature

and stepped out of the boat.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

And for a while, it continued to seem like a good idea;

as Peter began to walk across the water toward Jesus.

But then he began to focus more on the wind and the waves

and the watery abyss beneath his feet

and he began to doubt

and he began to sink.

And suddenly the idea of stepping out of the boat

and into the abyss

began to seem like not so much of a good idea.

When I read this passage earlier this week

I thought, “yes, that’s exactly what it’s like.”

When I think about my life as a Christian,

I sometimes feel as if I have foolishly, impulsively,

climbed out of the boat,

inspired by God-knows-what impulse,

and I realize

that the waves are much higher than I thought

and the wind is much stronger than I thought

and the water is much deeper than I thought.

And I realize that I cannot think deeply enough

to grasp the mystery of God.

I realize that I cannot love passionately enough

to be worthy of the love that has been shown to me.

I realize that I cannot suffer willingly enough

to take upon myself the pain of others,

the pain of our world.

I stand suspended

over the infinite depth of divine mystery

and, as my fear takes control,

I begin to sink

and the only prayer I can utter

is to cry out, like Peter, “Lord, save me.”

And then there is Jesus

who grasps our hand and says,

“Take courage, it is I;

do not be afraid.”

As with Elijah in our first reading,

God comes to us not in a strong and heavy wind

or an earthquake

or a fire

but in a tiny whispering sound

that says “do not be afraid.”

God comes to us in the person of Jesus.

In Jesus Christ,

God has reached out to us with a human hand,

amidst the wind and the waves,

to catch us and hold us up over the abyss.

It is not our thinking

or our loving

or our suffering that can save us,

but only Jesus,

“who is over all, God blessed forever.”

If we trust in him,

if we cry out to him, “Lord, save me,”

we can trust that the storm will not overcome us,

the abyss will not swallow us up.

The Christian faith is hard,

not because it is complicated

but precisely because it is so simple.

All that it asks of us is that we see the world as it truly is,

to embrace the abyss that is the mystery of God,

and to trust the tiny whispering sound that says,

“Take courage, it is I;

do not be afraid.”

15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2011-07-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Isaiah 55:10-11; Romans 8: 18-23; Matthew 13:1-23

As Christians we believe

that God has spoken a word of grace to us,

and we are invited to respond to that word

by bearing the fruit of the Spirit.

In our Gospel reading,

God’s word is depicted as seed

that is scattered widely across on the earth

so that some falls on the path

and some falls on rocky ground,

and some falls among thorny weeds,

with only about a quarter of it falling on good ground.

These different sorts of soil

reflect different sorts of responses to God’s word,

some of which produce fruit and some of which do not.

The seed that falls on good ground produces an abundant harvest,

“a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold,”

by a process that seems to be natural and even effortless.

We might think that Jesus is saying

that while all people might not be good soil

in which his word can take root,

if you are good soil, then the fruits of that word

will be readily apparent;

if you are good soil then you will produce spiritual fruit

with the same ease with which seeds sprout from good soil.

And if you are finding life difficult and full of struggle

then maybe it is because you are not good soil.

This is not, however,

the implication that we should draw from this.

In our second reading, Paul also speaks

of how we live in response to God’s word.

Here the metaphor is not

that of the seed germinating in the soil

but of a woman laboring in childbirth:

“We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains

even until now;

and not only that, but we ourselves,

who have the firstfruits of the Spirit,

we also groan within ourselves.”

Paul speaks of “the sufferings of this present time,”

to which all of creation is subject,

and makes clear that

even those who have received God’s word with joy –

those who are “good soil” –

still share in that suffering.

Put in terms of our Gospel parable,

Paul is saying that we may indeed be the good soil

on which the seed of God’s word has fallen,

but we still groan along with all of creation

in our bringing forth fruit,

just as a woman must labor

in bringing forth her child.

The process of bearing fruit is not always,

and maybe not ever,

an effortless process.

As Jesus reminds us in John’s Gospel,

even the seed that falls to earth

only sprouts by means of a kind of death:

“Amen, amen, I say to you,

unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,

it remains just a grain of wheat;

but if it dies, it produces much fruit” (John 12:24).

I dare say we all have those moments

when we find ourselves groaning,

awaiting redemption,

asking ourselves and asking God,

does it really have to be so difficult?

We might even have those moments

when we ask ourselves

whether the sheer difficulty that we experience

in trying to be faithful to God’s word

might be a sign that we are not, in fact, good soil,

but are rather the rocky path,

or the shallow earth,

or the weed choked thicket.

We find ourselves unemployed,

and our faith wavers.

We groan under the burden of

a debilitating physical or mental illness,

and we wonder whether God has abandoned us.

We suffer the loss of someone we love

and we ask ourselves whether we really trust

that God is a God of life.

If we groan in our suffering,

does this mean that our faith is shallow

and our souls choked with weeds?

Paul seems to say, “no.”

Suffering in this life

is something we share with all of creation,

and why some suffer and others seemingly do not

should never be taken as a sign of who is and is not

the “good soil” that receives the word.

In fact, we have no idea why life’s sufferings

seem to be so unevenly distributed

and I suspect that the answer to this question

will remain a mystery to us in this life.

Paul, it seems to me, is trying to get us to shift our question.

He is trying to get us to ask not,

“where does this suffering come from,”

but rather “where is this suffering leading.”

We can see our sufferings

either as the last agony of one who is dying

or as the laboring of one who is bringing new life to birth;

our groaning can simply be a cry of despair,

or it can be a calling out to God.

The difference between the good soil and the bad soil

is not that one suffers and the other does not,

that one groans and the other does not,

but rather that the good soil suffers and groans

in faith, and in hope, and in love,

trusting that the trials and sorrows of this life

are, in a mysterious way that we cannot now clearly see,

the birthpangs of the good soil,

laboring to bring forth the fruit of eternal life.

Ascension

2011-06-05T10:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:17-23; Matthew 28:16-20

The event that we celebrate on this feast,

the Ascension of Jesus into heaven,

is recounted in our first reading, from the book of Acts.

Our Gospel reading, from Matthew,

doesn’t mention the Ascension

but rather tells us of the risen Jesus

commissioning his disciples

and promising to remain with them always.

Even though Matthew’s Gospel does not recount

the event of the Ascension,

there is a deep connection between this story

of the commissioning of the disciples

and Jesus' ascending to the right hand of the Father.

Matthew tells us that when the disciples saw Jesus,

“they worshipped, but they doubted.”

What is it that they doubt?

They don’t seem to doubt Christ,

since it says they worshipped him.

Perhaps they doubt their own capacity

to carry out the mission Jesus is giving them.

It is, after all, a daunting task he gives them:

“make disciple of all nation. . .

teaching them to observe

all that I have commanded you.”

Not, “make disciples of some nations”

or “make disciples of as many nations as you can,”

but “make disciples of all nations.”

Not, “teaching them to observe

some of the things I have commanded you”

or “teaching them to be just a little bit better,”

but “teaching them to observe

all that I have commanded you.”

This is a pretty tall order.

No wonder they doubted.

How is it possible for their small band

to make disciples of all nations?

How could they even remember,

much less teach others to observe,

all that Jesus had commanded them?

Perhaps it was these two “all”s

that caused them to doubt.

But the commission

to make disciples of all nations

and to teach them to observe

all that Jesus had commanded

is matched by two other “all”s in Jesus’ words:

“All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me”

and “I am with you always,” –

the Greek is literally “all the days” –

“until the end of the age.”

As if in answer to the disciples’ doubts

about their ability to go to all the nation

and to teach them all that Jesus had commanded,

Jesus reassures him that he has “all power”

and will be with them “all the days”

and that they should therefore

not doubt their ability to carry out

the mission that he is giving them.

And it is in this second pair of “all”s that we find

the true meaning of this feast of the Ascension.

As St. Paul says in our second reading,

the Father of glory has raised Christ,

“far above every principality,

authority,

power

and dominion”

and has “put all things under his feet”

so that now he “fills all things in every way.”

If we think of this feast simply as saying

that Jesus has gone to live with God

somewhere above the clouds,

then it might seem as if the Ascension

places Jesus at a greater distance from his disciples

and calls into question his claim

that he will be with them all the days,

until the end of time itself.

But if we think of the Ascension

as Jesus’ full sharing in divine power

then, rather than being a departure,

it is what Pope Benedict has called

“the beginning of a new nearness.”

Jesus in his humanity is now present

to all times and places

just as God is present always and everywhere.

The Ascension tells us that the one who was born of Mary,

taught and healed,

suffered and died,

is as near to us as he was to his disciples

two millennia ago;

indeed, he is in some sense nearer to us.

He is present to us

because he has received power to fill all things.

And if he is with us then we need not doubt

that he will bestow upon us what we need

to fulfill the mission that he gives us.

It is easy for us to fall into thinking that we Christians

are followers of someone who lived a long time ago

and who remains with us only in the form

of some interesting stories and intriguing ideas.

But the feast of the Ascension tells us that this is not true;

when we say that Jesus has ascended to the right hand of God,

we are not saying that he has left this world for some other,

but that he is present in this world

with a new nearness,

sharing with us the power of his risen life.

Where is the ascended Jesus?

Not calling out to us across the centuries,

but speaking to each of us directly

in the words of Scripture.

Where is the ascended Jesus?

Not somewhere above the clouds,

but placing himself in our hands

in the Eucharist we celebrate.

Where is the ascended Jesus?

Not managing some cosmic bureaucracy

but consoling and challenging us

through our fellow Christians

who are his body, the Church.

Like the disciples, we too worship . . .

and doubt.

We come here to worship,

because we believe in him,

but we also doubt that we can do all that he asks of us.

But the feast of the Ascension calls us

to cast those doubts aside

and believe that the one

who “fills all things in every way”

is present to us with a new nearness,

even until the end of time.

Easter 3

2011-05-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Acts 2:14, 22-33; 1 Peter 1:17-21; Luke 24:13-35

If you will indulge me for a moment of grammatical reflection,

think about the word “hope” in relation to verb tenses.

Hope is normally something we speak of in the present tense,

as when we say, “I hope it won’t rain tomorrow”

or, as in our second reading today, when St. Peter reminds us

that our “faith and hope are in God.”

While hope is always directed to the future,

we normally think about it

as something that is going on in the present.

Hope in the present tense is a hope that we possess –

a living hope.

But our first reading gives us an example

of hope spoken in the future tense,

when Peter quotes Psalm 16, saying,

“my flesh, too, will dwell in hope.”

It seems at first a bit odd to speak of hope

as something we will have in the future,

as if we were to say, “tomorrow I will hope it doesn’t rain.”

Maybe what we have here is something like a hope for hope –

a hope that we do not yet experience, but which we desire.

What about hope spoken in the past tense?

What about when we say, faced with our soggy picnic,

“I had hoped that it wouldn’t rain today”?

Or, perhaps, “I hoped that this job interview would work out,”

or “We were hoping that the tumor was benign,”

or “I hoped we would grow old together.”

In every statement of hope placed in the past tense

we hear echoes of a story

of disappointment

or disillusion,

of broken dreams

and abandoned aspirations.

This is what we hear echoing in the words of the disciples

as they converse with the unrecognized Jesus

on the road to Emmaus:

“we were hoping

that he would be the one to redeem Israel.”

These are words full

of the pathos of hope in the past tense:

“we were hoping. . . ,”

with the implied-but-unstated conclusion:

“. . . but now we hope no longer.”

These words sum up the shattering effect of the crucifixion

on Jesus’s followers:

they speak of a heritage of hope

that had been bequeathed to the people of Israel,

a hope for a savior who would free them from oppression;

they speak of the hope that in Jesus

all of God’s promises would be made good;

they speak of the death of that hope on Mount Calvary

and its burial in the garden tomb.

Perhaps only a hope of such comprehensive grandeur –

a hope that everything would be set right –

could come crashing down with such devastating force.

The disciples’ words speak of a hope

that has been so thoroughly snuffed out

that even the reports of the women

about the empty tomb

cannot bring it back to life.

Indeed, in their disappointment,

the very presence of Jesus walking beside them

goes unrecognized.

But, of course, the story does not end there.

We are told how, as they walk along together,

the risen Jesus explains to them

the true meaning of that heritage of hope

that had been so disappointed:

how it was “necessary that the Christ should suffer these things

and enter into glory.”

While this is not enough to reawaken their hope,

to allow them to recognize the risen Jesus,

it moves them just enough to ask this stranger

to stay the night with them.

Perhaps this is a case of hope in the future tense:

his words awaken in them a desire to someday hope again.

And so, as night falls, Jesus sits at table with them,

takes the bread,

says the blessing,

breaks it

and gives it to them.

And then their eyes are opened;

they recognize him in the breaking of the bread;

hope is reawakened in them

and they can see the truth of the risen Jesus;

the hope that was just a memory,

something that seemed irretrievably past,

becomes a present reality

as they receive the bread of life at Christ’s table.

And it can be that way with us, as well.

As we come to recognize Christ at the table of the altar

our hopes that had fallen into the past tense

can be spoken again in the present tense.

We who said, “we were hoping. . . ,”

with the implied-but-unstated conclusion:

“. . . but now we hope no longer,”

can know in the breaking of the bread

the presence of Christ, risen and alive,

just as those disciples at Emmaus did.

And a hope that knows the risen Christ

is a hope that can be spoken in the present tense.

We are surrounded by things

that seem to offer us hope:

medical breakthroughs

that promise cures deadly diseases,

forecasts of economic revival

that could fulfill out material wants,

and even the killing of a particularly evil man,

whose death might promise

an end to violence and terror.

But all of these hopes

can so easily slip into the past tense.

For all of our medical breakthroughs,

we still die.

Every economic revival

is followed by a downturn,

and our material wants remain insatiable.

The killing of one evil man

typically generates two or three more,

ready to take up his mission of violence and terror.

And we find ourselves saying, “We were hoping. . .”

But as Christians we believe

that the hope that we receive at this altar –

a hope that is born in the breaking of the bread,

a hope that is raised up with the risen Jesus –

is a hope that is always spoken in the present tense.

Christ is risen,

giving us a hope that will never die again.

So let us leave behind all illusory hopes,

which so quickly slip into the past tense,

and cling to the one hope

that rises with Christ and lives forever.

Holy Thursday

2011-04-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

Readings: Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13: 1-15

“Jesus loved his own in the world

and he loved them to the end.”

So John begins his account of the last supper,

which presents us with the striking scene

of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet.

“He loved them to the end.”

Not simply the “end” in a chronological sense –

the point at which something ceases –

but the end in the sense of a goal that has been reached,

a process that has been completed,

a task that has been finished.

Know that his hour has come

in which he is to pass from this world to the Father,

Jesus does the work God has given to him,

a work that can only be fulfilled by love,

a work whose completion he will announce on the cross

when he declares, “It is finished.”.

The washing by Jesus of his disciples’ feet

is not simply an example of service;

it is an enacted parable of his whole life.

The water that he pours over his disciples’ feet

is the living water that he offered

to the Samaritan woman at the well;

it is the water that will flow forth with blood

when his side is pierced on the cross;

it is Jesus himself,

pouring out his life for his disciples out of love,

for it is through such love that he accomplishes the task

that his Father has given him to do.

Only when he has poured out his life

for the life of the world

can he say “it is finished;

I have loved them to the end.”

It is finished,

but it is still going on:

Jesus continues to wash our feet today,

as he pours out his life for us

through the living water of baptism

and in the Eucharistic feast of his body and blood.

Jesus still washes our feet

because he gives himself totally

for each and every one of us,

holding nothing back.

And this is what he commands us to do as well:

“I have given you a model to follow,

so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”

Our participation in the ritual of washing feet

is an enacted parable of our own willingness

to give ourselves totally

for each and every one of our brothers and sisters,

holding nothing back.

But there’s the difficulty.

We see in Jesus the completion of love’s task

but we also see in ourselves love’s failures.

As every person knows,

no matter how fully we seek to love

there seem always to be those moments when,

even with the ones we love most deeply,

we say, “I can’t tolerate another moment.

I can’t forgive that hurt.

I can’t love that far.”

We see in ourselves the pride,

the grudges,

the prejudice,

the lack of patience –

all of the things that stand in the way

of giving ourselves totally in love,

the the things that keep us from saying

“it is finished;

I have loved them to the end.”

We know that as much as we try to reach that goal,

we always seem to stumble.

And this is why we cannot simply wash feet,

but must also let our feet be washed.

Our only chance of loving as Christ loved,

of pouring out our lives

and holding nothing back,

is to let ourselves be loved by him:

to let him bathe our stumbling feet

with his own mercy.

On the night before he died,

Jesus gathered with friends and betrayers,

some of whom were one and the same people.

He knew the failures of love.

He saw it in Judas.

He saw it in Peter.

He sees it in us.

He knows that the feet he washes

are feet that will stumble,

yet he washes them anyway,

to bathe us in his own life poured out.

And bathed in his life we, in our own imperfect way,

can join him in love’s task,

called forward into another day’s living by his great cry of victory,

“It is finished;

I have loved them to the end.”

Lent 4

2011-04-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9

Confronted with a man who was born blind,

Jesus’ disciples ask,

“who sinned, this man or his parents?”

A devastating earthquake hits the island of Haiti

and American televangelist (and sometime politician) Pat Robertson

asks whether this might be because of a pact

the Haitians had made centuries ago with the devil.

Who sinned, the Haitians or their parents?

An even stronger earthquake

and the resultant tsunami

pushes Japan to the brink of a nuclear crisis

and the governor of Tokyo asks

whether this might not be divine punishment.

Who sinned, the Japanese or their parents?

We might think that faced with such misery

we would never raise such questions

but it is a natural human response to misfortune

to ask why such things happen,

to ask who is to blame,

to seek some past action on someone’s part

that would justify the pain and suffering

that has occurred.

We desire to find order in the world;

for if we can figure out how misfortune and disaster

are connected to someone’s past action

then the perplexity that accompanies such events

might be dissipated,

and we can restore our belief

that the world really is, despite all appearances,

a reasonable, just and orderly place.

But Jesus approaches the misery and misfortune

of the man born blind

in a different way:

in response to his disciples’ question

he says that, “Neither he nor his parents sinned;

it is so that the works of God

might be made visible through him.”

Jesus then spits on the ground, makes a muddy paste

and, rubbing it in the man’s eyes,

heals him and restores his sight.

I don’t think Jesus is saying

that God blinded this man from birth

just so that Jesus could come along, decades later,

and heal him.

Rather, he is indicating to his disciples that,

when confronted with human suffering,

they are asking the wrong sort of question.

They are seeking an explanation

of where misfortune comes from:

Why was this man born blind?

Why must the suffering of the poverty-stricken people of Haiti

be magnified by a terrible earthquake?

What did the people of Japan do

to deserve a catastrophic tsunami?

But these sorts of questions are unanswerable,

or at least whatever answers God has to them

are probably not the kind of thing

we mere mortals might understand.

Instead, Jesus redirects the attention of his disciples

from asking about the reason for suffering

to the ministry of alleviating suffering.

The source of the misery and misfortune of the man born blind

remains hidden.

What is visible is the healing, saving, enlightening power of Jesus.

What is visible is the ministry of Jesus, the light of the world.

Into the darkness of the man born blind, Jesus brings his light

both to heal the man’s physical blindness

and to give to him the eyes of faith,

so that he might recognize the power of God

in the one who has healed him.

Having been enlightened by Jesus,

the man becomes himself a source of light,

bearing witness to Jesus

before those who would oppose him.

This remarkable transformation from darkness to light

is echoed in our second reading,

from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians:

“Brothers and sisters:

You were once darkness,

but now you are light in the Lord.”

Notice that Paul says to the Ephesians

not simply that they have received light in their darkness,

but that they have become light.

The light that they have received

they are now to share with others.

In other words,

now that they have received Christ’s light

they are called to share in Jesus’ ministry

of healing, saving, and enlightening.

Notice that in today’s Gospel Jesus says to his disciples,

“We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day.”

Not I, but we –

the disciples are called to share

in Jesus’ ministry of light in darkness.

Faced with human misery and misfortune,

whether that of the man born blind

or the disasters of our own day,

true followers of Christ

must not let the inevitable questions about “why”

keep them from answering Jesus’ call

to join in his ministry of light:

“Awake, O sleeper,

and arise from the dead,

and Christ will give you light.”

Through the light of Christ,

we become light.

And, transformed into light,

we can respond to the call

that he gave to the disciples

who witnessed his transfigured glory:

“Rise, and do not be afraid.”

Rise, and join me in being light

in the darkest places of human misery and misfortune.

9th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2011-03-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

Readings: Deuteronomy 11:18, 26-28, 32; Romans 3: 21-25, 28; Matthew 7: 21-27

On this last Sunday before we enter the season of Lent

our Gospel reading offers us the conclusion

of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount,

which we have been hearing for the past five Sundays.

Jesus has been laying down for us

the challenge of being his disciple:

the challenge to be poor in Spirit,

to be salt of the earth,

to turn the other cheek,

to love our enemies,

to not worry about tomorrow,

to seek first the kingdom of God.

This is the challenge that we take with us

into the Lenten season,

as we prepare to celebrate the great mystery

of the salvation that comes to us

through Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection.

That’s a pretty long to-do list.

You had better get busy.

But in today’s Gospel,

Jesus concludes the Sermon on the Mount with a warning.

He speaks of those who are very busy with their to-do lists –

saying, “Lord, Lord,”

prophesying in Jesus’ name,

driving out demons in Jesus’ name,

doing mighty deeds in Jesus’ name –

and he tells us that he will say to them, “I never knew you.”

He never knew them

because they were too busy with their to-do lists

to stop and to listen and to come to know him.

He contrasts them with the person,

“who listens to these words of mine and acts on them.”

The problem is not that they are busy with their to-do lists,

but that they have assembled those lists

without first listening to the words of Jesus.

They have not listened to him

so that they might come to know him

and to know what it is that he is asking of them.

Notice the kinds of things that are on their to-do lists:

prophesying,

driving out demons,

doing mighty deeds –

big, flashy things that might make you

the first-century equivalent of a celebrity,

with a million people following you on Twitter.

Compare this with the picture of the disciple

that Jesus has sketched for us

in the Sermon on the Mount:

poor in spirit,

merciful,

peacemaking,

and even insulted and persecuted.

Not the sort of person

who is likely to be tweeting their latest mighty deed

done in the name of Jesus.

So maybe the first challenge of Lent

is not one of working our way

through our to-do list of mighty deeds,

but simply of listening to the words of Jesus

as these come to us through the scriptures

and in our prayerful reflection.

For if we act before we listen,

our to-do list is more likely to represent our agenda than Jesus’;

it will end up being a lot more about glorifying ourselves

than about glorifying God,

even if we drape our deeds

in the fig-leaf of piety,

saying “Lord, Lord.”

Jesus goes on to say in today’s gospel, however,

that listening is not enough.

If we want our house to be built on solid rock

rather than on shifting sand

we must not only listen to his words,

but also act on them.

We must not act without first listening,

but we also must not listen without then acting.

The demanding picture of the disciple that Jesus’ gives us

in the Sermon on the Mount

is not simply an ideal that we are to admire

but a concrete set of instructions

that we are to embody in our lives.

We will, of course, fail.

We will be prideful

rather than poor in spirit.

We will hold grudges

rather than be merciful.

We will try to defeat our opponents

rather than be peacemakers.

We will surrender our ideals

rather than face insults and persecution.

As Paul reminds us in our second reading,

“there is no distinction;

all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God.”

But he also goes on to say that we are justified –

put back on the right path –

by God grace, “through the redemption in Christ Jesus.”

I suspect that your Lent, like mine,

will end up being something of a disappointment.

Prior experience tells me

that I will try to act without first listening,

or I will listen, but never get around to acting,

or, perhaps most likely,

I will fail to do either much listening or much acting.

But if we can manage to listen even just a little

to the words Christ will speak to us over these next six weeks

we will hear of his power and his glory

that is revealed in suffering and weakness.

We will hear of “the righteousness of God

that comes through faith in Jesus Christ”

and we can hope for some share in his righteousness,

not because we have said “Lord, Lord,”

or because we have done mighty deeds in his name,

but because we have listened and acted on our faith –

our faith in the mighty deed of God in Jesus Christ

by which we have been saved.

This Lent, let us make listening to Jesus and acting on his word

the solid rock on which we build.

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2011-02-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

Readings: Isaiah 58:7-10; 1 Corinthians 2:1-5; Matthew 5:13-16

Salt has been on my mind this week.

Not only has it been all over our streets,

melting ice and messing up our cars,

and not only do the new dietary guidelines

released by the federal government

say that we Americans,

in addition to consuming too much fat and sugar,

consume too much salt,

but it is also a central image

in this week’s Gospel reading.

Jesus tells his followers

that they are “the salt of the earth,”

evoking a whole web of associations

that human beings have with salt.

Salt is almost certainly the oldest seasoning

used by the human race:

we have archeological evidence of facilities

for the refining of salt

as early as 6000 BC.

Of course, salt was used for more

than making Neolithic french-fries tastier:

salting was for many centuries

the only way we had to preserve food from decay and corrpution.

Salt was, in fact, so valuable

that a wide variety of cultures have used it for religious purposes:

in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome

salt mixed with water was offered to the gods;

in ancient Israel,

salt was included in grain offerings and burnt offerings;

salt was used to purify and to exorcise,

but it also symbolized the table fellowship of a shared meal.

So when Jesus tells his followers

that they are the salt of the earth,

he is, as is the case with any good metaphor,

saying a number of things at the same time.

True disciples give our world its savor;

they are the element preserving the world

from decay and corruption;

they are an offering to God;

they are a foretaste of the day

when humanity will be gathered around the table

in God’s kingdom.

But, having told them that they are salt,

Jesus also warns them:

“if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned?

It is no longer good for anything

but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

If the disciples of Jesus lose their power to season and preserve

then they are useless,

they have no purpose,

and, like salt with no flavor, they will be cast aside.

We ought to be careful here, however.

We cannot simply assume that because we see someone

cast out and trampled underfoot

that he or she is salt that has lost its taste

and become worthless.

Remember that Jesus is saying this

immediately after telling his disciples

“Blessed are they who are persecuted

for the sake of righteousness,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

For Jesus, it is precisely those who,

in the eyes of the world,

have been cast out and trampled underfoot,

who are the true salt of the earth,

who give life its savor,

who preserve the world from decay and corruption.

In our second reading, Paul tells the Corinthians,

“I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling,”

not bringing with him words of human wisdom

but only his faith in Christ crucified,

Christ outcast ,

Christ trampled underfoot.

And it is only in this way

that we can proclaim the Gospel of grace.

This completely turns the logic of the world upside down.

Those whom the world might think of as failures,

who are willing to be persecuted for the sake of righteousness,

are the true salt of the earth

and possessors of the kingdom of heaven.

Earlier this week I saw a remarkable photograph

taken in Cairo’s Tahrir Square,

where anti-government demonstrations in Egypt

have been centered.

A large number of Muslim demonstrators kneel in the square,

performing the prayer that Muslims make five times a day.

They are encircled by a protective perimeter

formed by Coptic Christians

who stand with hands joined to ensure

that their fellow protesters

are not disturbed or attacked as they pray.

These Coptic Christians are a minority in Egypt,

and at times have been persecuted by their fellow Egyptians,

perhaps even by some of the very people they are now protecting.

But, by their actions,

they show themselves willing to look beyond that history

because they recognize the cause of righteousness

and are willing to risk, quite literally,

being cast out and trampled underfoot.

It is by actions such as this that the disciples of Jesus

show themselves to be the salt of the earth,

a light that gives light to all the world.

It is those who fear and flee

the persecution that often accompanies discipleship

who are the salt that has lost its flavor

and must be cast aside.

Saint Augustine wrote that

we should not fear being trampled underfoot in this world

as long as our spirit is rooted in heaven

(The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount 1.6);

For it is our being rooted in God

that allows us to live as Jesus’ disciples,

to embrace the risk of being persecuted for righteousness sake,

and to be the salt that flavors and preserves the world.

Baptism of the Lord

2011-01-09T09:09:00.000-08:00

Readings: Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7; Acts 10: 34-38; Matthew 3:13-17

There are two days in the Church year

when the sacrament of Baptism is brought into sharp focus.

One is Easter.

As most of you know,

it is the practice of the Church to baptize adults at Easter,

during the Easter Vigil, which is the high point of the Church year.

Here, we see Baptism in the context of our celebration

of the dying and rising of Christ,

as the sacrament in which we die with Christ to sin

and are raised with him to new life,

making us members of his body, the Church.

This is a way of thinking about Baptism that will, I hope,

seem familiar to many:

Baptism cleanses us of original sin

and makes us part of the Christian community.

We might call this the “Easter meaning” of Baptism.

The other day on which Baptism is brought into sharp focus is today,

the feast of the Baptism of the Lord.

Here the focus is not on the dying and rising of Christ,

but on Jesus’ own baptism,

which is recounted by Matthew in today’s Gospel reading.

This feast, no less than Easter,

ought to shape our thinking about Baptism,

because it fills out the meaning of Baptism

and gives us a fuller understanding of our own Baptisms.

While the Easter meaning of Baptism

looks to the conclusion of Jesus’ earthly ministry,

today’s feast points us to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry

and to his baptism as the inauguration of his public life

as the servant and witness to God’s kingdom.

Having spent some thirty years

living what our tradition calls the “hidden life” in Nazareth,

Jesus comes to John to be baptized.

Coming up from the water, the Spirit of God descends upon him

and the voice of the Father speaks:

“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Jesus is publicly identified

as the one spoken of in our reading from Isaiah:

“Here is my servant whom I uphold,

my chosen one with whom I am pleased,

upon whom I have put my spirit.”

Thus begins Jesus’ public ministry as God’s anointed one.

As our second reading, from the Book of Acts, puts it:

“God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power.

He went about doing good

and healing all those oppressed by the devil,

for God was with him.”

If we think of Baptism in this context,

we can see that our Baptism, no less than Jesus’,

ought to be the inauguration of a life of service and witness.

In Baptism, we are not simply washed of original sin

and made part of the Church,

but we are given a job to do,

a way of life that we are to live.

In Baptism, we too become God’s beloved sons and daughters,

and we are given the task of ministering in Christ’s name.

And what it means to minister in Christ’s name

is to let Jesus’ manner of service and witness

become the pattern for our own service and witness.

Our reading from Isaiah in many ways sums up Jesus’ ministry:

“he shall bring forth justice to the nations,

not crying out, not shouting,

not making his voice heard in the street.

a bruised reed he shall not break,

and a smoldering wick he shall not quench,

until he establishes justice on the earth.”

When we think of Jesus’ ministry in light of this passage from Isaiah,

what stands out is his gentleness, his patience,

his willingness to bear with the weak and faltering

and his unwillingness to use force as a way of establishing justice.

This is the ministry and witness to which we are called in our Baptism:

a way of life characterized by the same sort of

gentleness,

patience

and compassion

that Jesus showed.

Of course, we must not forget

that it was this path of

gentleness,

patience

and compassion

that led Jesus to his cross.

We ought not to mistake the gentleness of Jesus for weakness

nor his patience for inaction.

Indeed, the service and witness of his compassion

was so threatening to the religious and political leaders of his day

that he had to be eliminated, being nailed to a Roman cross.

And we have no reason to believe that the ways of the world

have changed all that much since Jesus’ day,

and if we follow faithfully the path of Jesus

we should not be surprised

if we too face opposition,

if we too must carry the cross.

And it this way, the meaning of Baptism

that we draw from today’s feast

is linked to the Easter meaning of Baptism,

because it is the ministry that is entrusted to Jesus at his baptism

that will lead him to the suffering of the cross

and the glory of resurrection.

And for us too, faithful to the way of Jesus

and trusting in God grace,

our Baptism initiates us into the ministry of Jesus

even as it makes us sharers in the mystery

of his cross and resurrection.

For many of us, our Baptisms may have been a long time ago,

but it is never to late to recommit ourselves to the way of Jesus,

the way of gentleness,

patience

and compassion.

Holy Family

2010-12-26T06:04:00.000-08:00

Readings: Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14; Colossians 3:12-17; Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23

Today, on the Feast of the Holy Family,
we continue to celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation –

our belief that God the eternal Son,

through whom all things were made,

became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth;

in Jesus Christ God has lived a human life.

But more than that, today’s Gospel reminds us that

in Jesus Christ God has chosen

to live a certain kind of human life.

This morning St. Matthew presents us

with what is still in our world

an all-too-familiar human story:

a family fleeing violence in their homeland

undertakes a journey involving great peril

to seek refuge in a foreign land

where they may not speak the language,

where their religion and culture and ethnicity

may appear to their neighbors to be alien

and perhaps even threatening,

where whatever social or economic status

they had in their homeland

may not translate into similar status in their new home,

where they may find themselves living on the margins of society

without any way to move into the mainstream.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph find themselves

among the ranks of history’s refugees,

among the “displaced persons”

who throughout history have had to choose

between violence at home and exile in a foreign land.

There are many other all-too-familiar human stories

involving families:

families locked into cycles of poverty and social marginalization,

families torn apart by broken promises and old hurts,

families that are scenes of physical and emotional violence

rather than havens of peace.

These all-too-familiar human stories remind us

that all of us are in some sense “displaced persons”

who live our lives exiled from all that we had hoped

those lives might have been.

The mystery of the Incarnation is that God,

the creator of heaven and earth,

of all things visible and invisible,

has chosen to live among us

and to make this all-too-familiar human story his own.

God, who is supremely rich,

the source and center of the world’s existence,

chose to be poor,

exiled,

threatened,

marginal,

defenseless,

betrayed,

abused

and ultimately to die on the cross.

Without ceasing to be God,

the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us,

sharing the joys and hopes,

the sorrows and anxieties,

of the human race.

As Saint Catherine of Siena put it:

“You, God, have clothed yourself in our humanity,

and nearer than that you could not have come” (Dialogue ch. 153).

God becomes human, sharing our human poverty,

so that we humans might come to share in God’s riches.

God becomes a displaced person,

so that we might find in God the place where we truly belong.

The mystery of the Incarnation is just this simple

and just this mysterious:

God has joined us in our exile

to transform that place of exile into our true home,

to make us members of God’s holy family.

And if this is true, then we ought to live with each other

in a way that reflects this mystery.

The letter to the Colossians tells us:

“Put on, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved,

heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience,

bearing with one another and forgiving one another.”

This too is something supremely simple . . . and mysterious.

It is something simple because this way of living

has been shown to us by Jesus –

in the face of the all-too-familiar human story

of betrayal and disappointment,

he chose to live a life of openness and compassion;

in him we have been shown what a truly human life looks like,

we see what it means to find our place in God’s family,

to be sons and daughters of God.

How we ought to live together is as simple as the story of Jesus.

But it is also something mysterious,

because we know

that we can live this truly human life,

that our place of exile can become our true home,

that we can find our place in God’s family,

only if we open ourselves to God’s grace.

We can be compassionate,

kind,

humble,

gentle,

patient,

forgiving

only if we, as the letter to the Colossians says,

let the word of Christ dwell in us richly –

if we, like Mary and Joseph, have Jesus with us in our land of exile.

As Paul reminds us,

“whatever you do, in word or in deed,

do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus,

giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

In the Incarnation, God did not simply live a human life,

but God lived the all-too-familiar human story

of exile and rejection.

And the joy of Christmas is that in living that story

Jesus has rewritten it,

Jesus has transformed it,

Jesus has triumphed over it

and so has made this our land of exile

into the place where God dwells richly among us,

making us into the holy family of God.

Advent 3

2010-12-12T10:31:00.000-08:00

Readings: Is 35:1-6a, 10; Jas 5:7-10; Mt 11:2-11

“Are you the one who is to come,

or should we look for another?”

This is the question that John the Baptist,

imprisoned by King Herod and facing execution,

sends his followers to ask Jesus.

“Are you the one who is to come,

or should we look for another?”

This question is a puzzling one.

Why would John, whom we heard last week

confidently heralding Jesus’ coming,

suddenly seem to doubt that Jesus really is God’s anointed one?

Having proclaimed him the one who is to come,

why would he be sending his followers

to ask if Jesus is really the one who is to come?

Has he forgotten?

Does he think he might have been wrong?

Early Christian theologians were puzzled by this as well,

and tended to think that John

was not really asking a genuine question,

but was posing the question rhetorically,

for the benefit of his followers.

In other words, he knows the answer,

but he wants his followers to hear the words

from Jesus’ own lips

so that they will know, as John knows,

that Jesus is the one who is to come.

I have always found this interpretation of John’s question

somewhat dissatisfying,

probably because I find disingenuous rhetorical questions

somewhat irritating,

as if John were trying to be sly,

by pretending not to know something that he knows perfectly well.

Pope Gregory the Great, in the late-6th century,

took a different approach to this story.

As he interprets it, John is asking a genuine question.

He has no doubt that Jesus is the promised Messiah,

since he had clearly declared this at the beginning of the Gospel,

when he served as Christ’s herald.

But now, at this point in the story,

John is seeking to know something different.

John is facing execution at the hands of Herod;

he knows that he will soon depart this life

for the realm of the dead.

Thus, Gregory says, he is asking

whether he will also be Christ’s herald among the dead,

whether Christ, who had come into our world as God with us,

would also be God with us even in death.

As Gregory puts it, it was as if John were asking,

“Just as you deigned to be born on behalf of human beings . . . ,

will you also die on our behalf” (Homily 5).

I will admit,

Gregory’s interpretation might seem like just as much of a stretch

as the interpretation that says

that John is asking only a rhetorical question.

Yet there is something about it that makes sense to me.

Facing death, John is confronted with a new question:

how deep does your faith in Jesus go?

He believed fervently that Jesus had come into this world

to share our human life.

Now John wants to know,

has he come also to share our human death?

In our Gospel last week John had declared,

“the one who is coming is mightier than I.”

Now John asks, “just how mighty are you?

Are you mighty enough to conquer even death?

I am about to go into the darkness.

Will you be there?

Are you mighty enough to follow me into that dark place

and bring me back to the kingdom of life?”

Will you be there to say to me,

“Be strong, fear not!

Here is your God, he comes with vindication;

with divine recompense he comes to save you.”

John is asking for the gift of faith, to believe that,

even into the mystery of death,

Jesus is the one who is to come.

He will come with his light to dispel death’s darkness.

And as with John, so too with us:

we too ask of Jesus,

“Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”

Are you the one who will come to me

in the darkest places of my life?

Will you be there when I am in pain,

when I am alone,

when I am terrified,

when I am confused,

when I am in the valley of the shadow of death?

Are you the one?

Are you mighty enough to share my weakness?

You who deigned to be born on behalf of human beings,

will you also die on our behalf?

Joining me in death, will you lead me back to life?

We pray in this Advent that God would find us ready,

expectant,

waiting to receive Jesus.

But perhaps even more we should pray

for a deeper faith that it is Jesus who is ready,

expectant,

waiting to receive us.

Let us pray this Advent

that God would find us ready to believe

that no place is so dark that God in Christ is not there,

ready to meet us with joy and gladness,

ready to set sorrow and mourning to flight.

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

2010-11-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

Readings: 2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38

“You can’t take it with you.”

That is at least part of Jesus’ reply

to the Sadducees in today’s Gospel.

The Sadducees were a group within Judaism

who held to a very traditional interpretation of the Law

and who, in particular, rejected what they considered the novel idea

that in God’s kingdom those righteous one’s who had died

would be raised to new life.

We see this belief testified to in our first reading,

from the book of Maccabees:

“the King of the world will raise us up again to live forever.”

For the Sadducees, this idea was a dangerous innovation

that undermined their more traditional view

that people were rewarded or punished by God in this life.

So they pose to Jesus,

who teaches this dangerously innovative idea of resurrection,

the following puzzle:

If a woman’s husband dies, and she marries his brother,

who in turn dies, and she marries another brother,

and so on and so forth through seven brothers

(if I were the seventh brother

I would think twice before marrying this woman),

when the dead are raised to new life,

whose wife will she be?

Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees is twofold.

The first part of his answer is to make clear

that the kind of life led by those

whom God will raise from death to new life

is something quite different from the sort of life we live now.

Those who live in the kingdom of God

“neither marry nor are given in marriage.”

No doubt in God’s kingdom we will still love

those whom we have loved in the time of this life,

but the institution of marriage itself,

tied up as it is with creating households and raising children,

is for this world, not for the kingdom.

People say, “you can’t take it with you,”

and it would seem that, according to Jesus,

marriage is one of those things you can’t take with you.

The second part of Jesus answer to the Sadducees

is that we believe that the dead shall be raised

because we believe that our God is the God of the living;

what it means truly to live is to live in relationship with God

and God’s relationship to those whom God loves

cannot be defeated, even by death.

As Paul says in our second reading,

“the Lord is faithful;

he will strengthen you and guard you.”

Those whom we think of as dead are not dead to God,

and when God’s kingdom is manifested in its fullness

we shall see and know the fullness of life

that is enjoyed by those righteous ones

who have died in God’s cause.

While the saying “you can’t take it with you”

applies to many things in this world,

it doesn’t apply to our relationship with God.

In fact, it seems that this relationship

is the one thing you can take with you.

So Jesus’ response to the Sadducees is to remind them

that the things we think of as making up the fabric of our life –

institutions like marriage,

political structures,

economic systems,

and even the outward forms of the Church –

are in fact simply temporary bulwarks

that we construct against the terrifying reality of death,

and in the age to come they will give way

before the one reality that is the true fabric of our life:

God’s love for us.

You can’t take these things with you

because you don’t need to take them with you;

in the fullness of God’s kingdom,

God’s love alone will unite us with God and with each other

and we will not need those temporary structures

that form the fabric of our lives in this world.

But, of course, we do not yet live

in the fullness of God’s kingdom.

In the time of this life

people still marry and are given in marriage,

they vote and run in elections,

they invest and spend money,

they gather weekly as Church

to hear God’s Word spoken in human words

and to encounter God through sacramental signs.

In the time of this life these things,

provisional though they be,

are the warp and woof from which our lives are woven.

In the time of this life these things,

provisional though they be,

are of crucial importance

to the life that we hope to live in the kingdom of God.

In the time of this life these things,

provisional though they be,

are the means by which we bear witness in this age

to the life we hope to live in the age to come.

Though there will be no marriage in the kingdom of God,

how we live our committed relationships in this age

can become a sign

of how we will live our risen life in the age to come

if we live those commitments

with integrity and honesty and self-sacrifice.

Though there will be, thank God,

no politics or economies in the kingdom of God,

how we inhabit the political and economic structures of this age

can become a sign of our dwelling in God’s kingdom

if we inhabit those structures in such a way that we always look,

not to our own concerns and well-being,

but to the concerns and well-being

of the poor, the outcast and the defenseless.

Though there will be no need

for sacramental signs in the kingdom of God,

how we gather as Church in this age

can become a sign of the heavenly liturgy

that we will celebrate in the kingdom

if we give ourselves generously and without reservation

to the worship of God.

Marriage, power, money,

even the outward structures of the Church. . .

you can’t take them with you

into the risen life of God’s kingdom.

We can, however, use them in this age,

in the time of this life,

as a means by which we begin to live that risen life now.

They are the strands from which

the fabric of our lives is woven,

the lives that we are called to place

at the service of God and neighbor.

Next week we will be asking you to consider again

your financial support of our parish.

I always tell people that if they do not give more money

our doors will not close,

our current staff will not have to be let go;

we will find a way to make do.

But that is not why we give.

We given because even though

both our money and our parish community

are simply provisional realities,

neither of which will go with us into God’s kingdom,

the two of them together

can become a sign of that kingdom here and now.

You can’t take it with you,

but you can use it now in such a way

that it becomes a sign

of the risen life we will lead in the age to come.

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2010-10-10T11:56:00.000-07:00

Readings: 2 Kings 5:14-17; 2 Timothy 2:8-13; Luke 17:11-19

There are many interesting issues raised in today’s Gospel –

concerning healing, gratitude and so forth –

but I want to begin with one question:

why is it that, when the ten lepers ask Jesus to heal them,

he tells them to go show themselves to the priests?

According to the book of Leviticus,

it was the role of the priests in the Temple

to examine those who had been afflicted

with the disease of Leprosy

in order to see if they had recovered,

so they could be re-admitted to the community of Israel.

When Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the priests,

he is telling them to do what the Law of God required them to do.

So perhaps we ought not to be so hard on the nine lepers who went on their way

without so much as a “thank you” to Jesus.

They were, after all, doing what was right

in the eyes of their religious tradition;

they were doing what was expected of them

as good Israelites.

But one leper came back. Why?

Well, he was a Samaritan.

As you may know, the Samaritans

were something like second-cousins to the Jews

who worshipped the God of Israel,

but did not worship at the Temple in Jerusalem

or accept the Temple priesthood.

What is surprising

is that he would have approached Jesus in the first place,

for at the time of Jesus there was a great deal of hostility

between Jews and Samaritans

and the fact that Samaritan

would have gone to a Jewish holy man for healing

can only be a sign of just how desperate he was.

But it is not surprising that he would have felt no great urgency

to fulfill Jesus’ command

to go show himself to the priests,

since Samaritans did not think much

of the priests in Jerusalem to begin with.

He knew that he was an outsider,

and that even now that he had been cleansed of his leprosy

he was still an outsider.

But being an outsider helped him to see

something that the insiders missed;

it allowed him to see that it was Jesus who had healed him

and it was to Jesus that he was to give thanks.

His nine fellow-lepers were so well schooled

in their traditions and customs

that they seem to have been blinded

to what God was actually doing in their midst.

They were so focused on religious business-as-usual

that they missed something truly extraordinary:

the kingdom of God present in the healing ministry of Jesus.

“Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?”

The insiders could benefit from the perspective of the outsider.

This valuing of the perspective of the outsider

is a theme that runs throughout the Old and New Testaments.

Those who are not settled

within the well-worn patterns of religion and culture

bring to us fresh eyes with which to see

what God is doing in the world.

Prophets like Jeremiah seem deliberately

to make themselves outsiders

so as to better hear the Word of God.

This insight is an integral element

in the long-standing Catholic tradition

of openness to and advocacy for migrants and refugees.

In his 2003 Message on the World Day of Migrants and Refugees

Pope John Paul II called this openness part of,

“the Christian duty to welcome

whoever comes knocking out of need.”

In other words, it is nothing less than what we must do

if we wish to hear on the day of judgment:

“Come, you who are blessed by my Father.

Inherit the kingdom prepared for you

from the foundation of the world.

For I was hungry and you gave me food,

I was thirsty and you gave me drink,

a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:34-35).

But this openness is more than a matter

of simple Christian charity,

for we are called not simply to give to the outsider,

but also to receive from the outsider,

to receive from the outsider a fresh perspective

on ourselves, our world, and our God.

Pope John Paul went on in the same message to say,

“Such openness builds up vibrant Christian communities,

enriched by the Spirit with the gifts brought to them

by new disciples from other cultures.”

We cannot be complete without the other, the outsider,

who can see us in a way that we can never see ourselves.

In the foreigner who returns to give thanks,

who perceives God present

in a place we never thought to look,

we learn something new about ourselves and about God.

We have seen this in our own parish community,

in all that we have gained in the past few years

from our Filipino parishioners,

who have enriched us with their customs

and given us fresh eyes with which to see

what God is doing in the world.

They have helped our parish to become more Catholic,

more universal,

through the Missa de Gallo,

Our Lady of Perpetual Help,

and most of all their prayerful presence among us.

I believe it is particularly important

to recall our Catholic tradition

of openness to and advocacy for migrants and refugees,

and our Catholic belief that we are enriched

by those who come to us as outsiders,

as questions of immigration reform begin to come to the fore

in America’s political debates.

Immigration reform is a complex issue,

and I would not presume to suggest in this forum

how we should go about balancing

compassion,

justice,

and concern for the common good

in the enacting of legislation.

People of good will can differ on these issues

and on details of various proposals.

These matters are complex and the correct solution is not always obvious.

But politics can get ugly,

and sometimes we can get ugly along with it.

Sometimes we can get locked into the framework of American politics

and forget that we are first of all Catholics.

But, as Paul reminds us in our second reading,

the word of God is not chained,

and today God's word reminds us that

there are some things that we as Catholics can never do.

We can never use the stranger in our midst as a political football

in order to gain an electoral victory.

We can never demonize those we perceive as outsiders

or to use them as scapegoats for a host of social problems.

We can never convince ourselves that we “insiders”

have nothing to learn,

nothing to gain,

in welcoming these “outsiders.”

We as Catholics can never forget

that Christ is to be found in the stranger that we welcome

and that it is sometimes the foreigner among us

who sees that to which we are blind,

who recalls to us what we have forgotten,

and who reminds us to return to give thanks to God.

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2010-09-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Amos 8:4-7; 1 Timothy 2:1-8; Luke 16:1-13

How do you react in a crisis?

When you find yourself at a crossroads

and are confronted with events

that threaten to turn your life upside down,

what do you do?

Where do you find the resources to know how to act?

In today’s gospel Jesus tells the story of a man who is faced with a crisis

that many people today are also faced with: the impending loss of his job.

Of course, in his case he is about to lose his job

not because of an economic downturn

but because he has been squandering his employer’s money.

But what is important is that he doesn’t panic but rather, true to form,

sets about securing a golden parachute for himself.

He does this by, as it were, cooking the books to help out those

who are in debt to his employer,

so that when he is turned out on the street

they will all owe him a favor

that he can cash in.

Funny enough, by means of this craftiness,

he earns the admiration of his employer,

who is probably none too honest himself.

The rich man praises his dishonest employee for his prudence;

the Greek word is phronesis,

which is the name the philosopher Aristotle gives

to the disposition of the mind

by which we know how to act in a particular situation

so as to achieve a fulfilling life.

And in this case, the dishonest employee certain shows phronesis,

particularly given that his own understanding of “fulfillment”

seems bound up with having material possessions.

Indeed, he does not hesitate;

it is as if he had been preparing for this crisis his whole life,

and he knows exactly how to respond.

Earlier this week, the Church offered for our consideration

the story of another man facing a crisis.

Last Thursday was the feast of St. Cyprian of Carthage,

who was a bishop in North Africa in the third century AD.

Cyprian had guided his flock

through a period of severe persecution under the emperor Valerian

until the time came when he too was arrested

and put on trial for being a Christian.

At his trial the Roman governor of the province told him

that if he would perform a ritual sacrifice to the emperor,

signifying his renunciation of the Christian faith,

his life would be spared.

Cyprian responded, “I will not do so.”

The governor said, “Consider your position,”

to which Cyprian replied,

“In such a just cause there is no need for deliberation.”

The governor then decreed that Cyprian would be executed,

as an example to other Christians,

to dissuade them from resisting the emperor’s decree.

So the sentence was carried out.

Like the dishonest employee in Jesus’ parable,

Cyprian too does not hesitate;

it is as if he had been preparing for this crisis his whole life,

and he knows exactly how to respond.

What makes us capable of responding in a crisis,

and what determines how we respond?

How do we acquire prudence or phronesis?

Jesus says,

“The person who is trustworthy” –

the Greek word is actually pistos or “faithful” –

“in very small matters

is also trustworthy in great ones;

and the person who is dishonest in very small matters

is also dishonest in great ones.”

In other words, we prepare for great moments of crisis

by means of the little choices we make each and every day,

the choices that form our character,

that make us the people that we are.

The dishonest employee in the parable

spent his life being dishonest in small matters,

and when the moment of great crisis comes,

he is dishonest then as well.

St. Cyprian spent his life seeking God’s grace to be faithful

and when the moment of great crisis comes, he is faithful to the end,

boldly professing Christ even in the face of death.

This single moment of boldness

grew out of a multitude of small acts of love,

thousands of brief prayers for grace and assistance,

hundreds of occasions when he gathered with God’s people at Christ’s altar

to be strengthened by the Eucharist.

These are perhaps small matters, taken singly,

but they were for Cyprian

what prepared him for the decisive moment

in which he would witness to Christ at the cost of his life.

The Roman governor said Cyprian would be executed

as an example to others.

As sometimes happens, he spoke better than he knew,

for he meant that Cyprian’s death would be a warning to other Christians,

but instead, Cyprian became for them an example

of a truly fulfilling life: a life of faith.

He became an example of how being faithful in small matters

can lead to faithfulness in those moments

when everything in our lives comes together as if at a crossroads,

a moment of crisis.

It is not so different with us here today.

Many people in this parish have had to face moments of crisis,

when everything comes together as at a crossroads:

the death of someone they love,

the loss of a job or a home,

the painful ending of a relationship,

the realization that they or someone they love suffers from an addiction,

moments of doubt about themselves and even about God.

And I have seen them respond

with a faith and a resilience that is astonishing.

Of course, in the end all of this is a matter of the sheer grace of God,

freely given to us out of love.

But this is not a grace that is suddenly dumped on us in that moment of crisis,

but a grace that works its way into our hearts and minds

over the course of a lifetime,

as we have sought to be faithful and hopeful and loving in small matters.

So let us pray for the grace to live our lives in such a way

that when the decisive moment comes,

and it seems as though the meaning of our entire life

hangs on how we respond,

we will be able to speak and act in a way

that shows us to be who we have become:

faithful disciples of Jesus, who live by his Spirit.

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

2010-08-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Rv 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab; 1 Cor 15:20-27; Lk 1:39-56

Although we habitually speak of heaven as “up” and of hell as “down,”

I suspect that most of us know, as most Christians have always known,

that neither place can be reached by traversing a physical distance.

Indeed, a number of years ago

Pope John Paul II reiterated the traditional Christian view,

saying, “the ‘heaven’ or ‘happiness’ in which we will find ourselves

is neither an abstraction

nor a physical place in the clouds,

but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity”

(General Audience, Wednesday 21 July 1999).

In other words, “heaven” is not so much a place

as it is a state of being.

It is good to remind ourselves of this

when we celebrate a feast such as the one we celebrate today.

Today, the feast of the Assumption, we celebrate our belief

that Mary, upon her death,

was taken body and soul into heavenly glory.

Already in the 451 AD, when the Emperor Marcian

asked the bishop of Jerusalem

to bring Mary’s bones to Constantinople

so that they might be placed in the cathedral there,

the bishop responded to his request by saying that,

“Mary had died in the presence of the apostles;

but her tomb, when opened later . . .

was found empty

and so the apostles concluded that the body was taken up into heaven."

Universal acceptance of this belief

developed over the centuries in the Church

until it was solemnly defined by Pope Pius XII in 1950

as part of the official body of teachings of the Catholic Church.

Now one might imagine this event

as one often sees it depicted in art:

with Mary slowly rising up into the clouds,

perhaps with angels beneath her feet,

giving her an extra boost.

But if heaven is not a physical place,

but rather a state of being in perfect relationship with God –

a state that involves a radical transformation

of our entire self, body and soul –

then these artistic imaginings

must be understood as precisely that:

acts of the human imagination,

in which we attempt to depict for ourselves

realities that go beyond what our minds can fully grasp.

So when we speak of Mary being “assumed” or taken up into heaven,

we aren’t really talking about a direction to which we can point

or a distance that we can traverse.

Mary is not, literally speaking, “up there”

because heaven is not, literally speaking, “up there.”

But it is not too hard to imagine

why people have spoken that way over the years.

There is something about the sky –

or, as we sometimes call them, the heavens –

that speak to us of that exalted state of being

that we might call “heavenly glory,”

that state of being into which Mary has entered.

This summer, while on vacation in Northwestern Colorado,

in one of those increasingly rare places

where there is no electrical lighting for miles around,

I was amazed by the night sky.

In contrast to Baltimore, where at night our stingy skies

might favor us with at best a glimpse of the Big Dipper,

there the stars were strewn across of sky with reckless prodigality.

Their number and their variety were almost more

than the mind and senses could take in;

the immensity of the space of the sky

was like a pool into which one could fall forever.

I was put in mind of the words

of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:

“Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!"

It was as if in the sky above us

God had provided the whole world

with a symbol of heavenly glory.

The night sky spoke of a mystery

in which there is always more to discover,

a pearl of great price

for which it just might make sense to risk everything,

a standing invitation

to join the fire-folk dwelling there in glory.

It made it possible to imagine

that that which spread itself out above me

was not merely a sky,

but was indeed the heavens.

What better place to imagine Mary,

“a woman clothed with the sun,

with the moon under her feet,

and on her head a crown of twelve stars”?

Surely of all Christ’s followers, Mary is among the fire-folk,

those in whom God’s grace has kindled the fire of divine love.

St. Augustine wrote:

“My weight is my love.

Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.

By your gift we are set on fire and carried upwards;

we grow red hot and ascend” (Confessions, 8.9.10).

Mary loved God,

and that love has carried her into heavenly glory.

It is perhaps fitting that,

on this feast of Mary’s being taken up

into the mystery that we call heaven,

our Gospel lets Mary herself speak

of the love that burns within her,

the divine gift by which she is carried upward.

She sings in her Magnificant, her song of praise to God,

of the love that casts down the mighty from their throne

and has lifted up the lowly.

Mary is lifted up in her lowliness

because she said “yes” to God’s love,

said "yes" to the invitation

to become the mother of Jesus, God with us.

But this feast is not just about Mary,

for Mary is not only the Mother of God,

but also the first disciple,

the first to say “yes” to Jesus Christ.

And all of us who say “yes” to Jesus stand with Mary:

we have hope that Mary’s destiny in heavenly glory

will also be our destiny;

we have hope that the unimaginable joy of eternal life with God

will be ours as well;

we have hope that we too will be among the fire-folk

who burn with divine love.

So heaven may not be “up”

and hell may not be “down,”

but the next time you happen to be away from the city’s lights

and the night is particularly clear,

and you find yourself beneath that great symbol of heaven,

“Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!"

Imagine Mary among the stars in glory,

and imagine yourself there too.

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2010-07-18T09:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Genesis 18:1-10a; Colossians 1:24-28; Luke 10:38-42

In the Christian tradition,

today’s Gospel has usually been understood

in terms of two different sorts of Christian callings –

the calling to the life of active service, represented by Martha,

and the calling to the life of contemplative prayer, represented by Mary –

and the relative superiority of the life of contemplation to the life of action.

But if we read this story from Luke’s gospel in light of our first reading,

which is the story from Genesis

about Abraham’s reception of three mysterious angelic figures

who bring him unexpected tidings

of the impending birth of Isaac, his son,

then the story of Mary and Martha can also be read

as a story about hospitality.

In particular, it is a story about our hospitality

and the hospitality of God.

In our parish of Corpus Christi

we tend to think of ourselves as a pretty hospitable bunch,

welcoming all sorts and conditions of people into our community

and seeking to live together the good news of our salvation in Jesus Christ,

good news that inspires us to reach out to the stranger.

Indeed, the annual event of Artscape allows us to show our hospitality

by offering our church building as a venue for performances,

as well as offering the building itself

as one of the significant works of art in the city of Baltimore,

a space that speaks through the medium of art

of the fundamental mysteries of our Catholic Christian faith.

And, in the past few weeks,

we have had the additional opportunity to flex our hospitality muscles

in welcoming Fr. Marty as our new pastor.

It is precisely these sorts of occasions

that invite us to reflect on what it means to be hospitable.

In the ancient world, receiving hospitality was necessary for survival

when one found oneself a stranger in a strange land

and hotels, motels, and bed and breakfasts had not yet been invented.

The first reading notes that Abraham sees the three visitors,

“when the day was growing hot”

and that he offers them shade and water, as well as food to eat.

In a harsh physical environment, receiving and offering hospitality

can be a matter of life and death.

In this case, the three visitors

are messengers or angels sent from God,

so it is not so important that they receive hospitality

as it is that Abraham offers it to them.

Indeed, throughout the Old Testament God tells the Israelites

that they are to show hospitality to strangers

because God has shown hospitality to them,

taking them in when they were wandering strangers without a homeland.

Part of what it means truly to receive God’s hospitality,

is to show hospitality to others.

In the Gospel, Martha reacts to the arrival of Jesus

in a way not unlike Abraham

reacting to the arrival of his three guests:

she runs around, getting things ready,

becoming in the process, as Jesus notes,

“anxious and worried about many things.”

Indeed, she gets herself in such a state

that she asks Jesus, her houseguest,

to take her side in an argument with her sister:

“Lord, do you not care that my sister

has left me by myself to do the serving?

Tell her to help me.”

Think about this for a second:

someone comes to your house

and you try to drawn him into a domestic dispute.

This is hospitality?

It sounds more like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

It would be as if we asked our newly-arrived pastor

to take a side in some long-standing feud among parishioners,

and I know none of us would ever do something like that.

Martha may think she is the one being hospitable,

but in fact she has tried to put Jesus, her guest,

in a very uncomfortable position.

Moreover, she is so busy doing things for Jesus

that she cannot take the time to be with Jesus, her guest,

except to pop in to complain about her sister.

We might be inclined to forgive Martha these breaches of hospitality

since she, like many of us, is burdened with much serving.

Also, she is, after all, only doing what she thinks is expected of her

as a woman in the household.

Indeed, she probably presumed that, as a woman,

all that she could offer a religious teacher like Jesus

was her anxious, worried activity.

What she cannot imagine –

but which somehow Mary can imagine –

is that Jesus wants her to be with him,

in the position of a disciple,

sitting at his feet

and learning from him the mysteries of God’s kingdom.

Mary chooses the better part

because she chooses to be with Jesus;

she gives her guest the one thing that he really wants:

herself as his disciple.

True hospitality, Jesus seems to be saying,

is not so much a doing-for as it is a being-with.

In our everyday acts of hospitality,

all of our anxious and worried activity –

cooking food, making beds, cleaning bathrooms –

must at some point come to a stop

so that we can finally do the one thing

at which all our activity aims:

being with our guest;

giving ourselves to him or her by opening ourselves

and truly listening to what our guest has to say.

And when the one whom we are welcoming is God,

it is even more the case

that the only thing we really have to give

is our attentive presence.

We cannot really do-for God;

but we can certainly be-with God.

It is as if we show God hospitality

by accepting the hospitality God offers us.

That, after all, is all that God really desires.

And in the hospitality that we as Christians show to others –

whether through opening our church at Artscape,

or welcoming couples who wish to get married here,

or inviting people who want to explore the Catholic faith

to consider the RCIA process,

or even celebrating the arrival of a new pastor –

what we are really doing is inviting them to join us

in accepting God’s hospitality,

to join us in being-with God by being-with each other.

For it is in giving and receiving such hospitality

that we truly are corpus Christi: the body of Christ.

11th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2010-06-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: 2 Samuel 12:7-10, 13; Galatians 2:16, 19-21; Luke 7:36-50

The biologist Richard Dawkins, in his best-seller, The God Delusion,

writes of what he calls

“the unhealthy preoccupation of early Christian theologians with sin.”

He continues,

“They could have devoted their pages and their sermons

to extolling the sky splashed with stars,

or mountains and green forests, seas and dawn choruses.

These are occasionally mentioned,

but the Christian focus is overwhelmingly

on sin sin sin sin sin sin sin.

What a nasty little preoccupation to have dominating your life”

(The God Delusion p. 252).

To some, it might seem that our readings today

would bear out his charge:

we hear first of David who,

once he is caught out by Nathan and threatened by God,

repents of the sin of having Uriah killed;

then we hear Paul speak of our unrighteousness

and our need to be “justified” before God;

finally, we hear the story of this sinful woman,

whom Jesus compares to a debtor,

before he forgives her sins and sends her on her way.

So is sin the “nasty little preoccupation”

that dominates the minds of Christians?

Do we take some masochistic delight

in pondering and proclaiming our own wretchedness,

or, perhaps more plausibly, the wretchedness of others?

And does our “nasty little preoccupation” with sin

stunt our sense of the beauty and wonder of the natural world?

Some who do not share Professor Dawkins’s atheism

might still agree with him

that we’ve really had too much of this sin business

and that we ought to focus more on the goodness of God,

on God’s blessings,

and not so much on sin,

which simply leaves us paralyzed with guilt –

Catholic guilt, which apparently is the most virulent variety.

One might think that if we focus on our sinfulness,

we will miss the beauty of what God gives us;

we will fail to see the blessing of, in Dawkins’s lovely phrases,

“the sky splashed with stars,

or mountains and green forests,

seas and dawn choruses.”

The more we are preoccupied with sin,

the less we will perceive God’s goodness.

Well, Jesus seems to be of a different opinion,

at least in today’s Gospel reading.

While dining at the house of Simon the Pharisee,

a woman – apparently a well-known sinner in town –

interrupts the proceedings

by washing Jesus’ feet with her tears,

drying them with her hair,

and anointing them with an expensive ointment.

The reaction to this of Simon –

who sees only the woman’s sins

and her temerity in touching Jesus –

prompts Jesus to speak of the great love that has moved her

to such seemingly outrageous actions –

crashing a dinner party

and daring to touch a prophet with her sinner’s tears.

He implies that her love’s greatness is directly proportional

to the burden of sin that had been lifted from her,

the debt that is to be forgiven her:

“her many sins have been forgiven

because she has shown great love.

But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”

It is only because she knows how great her sins are

that she can have this great love awakened in her.

Her “nasty little preoccupation” with her sins

has opened before her vistas of divine love

vaster than the sky splashed with stars

and more beautiful than the dawn choruses.

How do we find this great love;

how can we have it awakened within us?

Where can we go to hear Jesus say to us what he said to her:

“Your sins are forgiven. . . Your faith has saved you; go in peace”?

In the Catholic tradition one of the privileged places

where we encounter Christ’s forgiveness

is the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

It is no secret that this is a sacrament that, in the past few decades,

many Catholics have come to practice only infrequently, if at all.

Recent data from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate

at Georgetown University

shows that among those Americans who identify as Catholic,

only about a quarter goes to confession on even a yearly basis.

For about a ten-year period of my life,

I was among the three-quarters majority who never go:

held back by embarrassment, inertia, inconvenience,

and who knows how many other reasons.

I won’t speculate about other people’s reasons for avoiding the sacrament,

but I know that for myself

that the longer I stayed away from the sacrament

the harder it became to contemplate going,

as I imagined the priest saying,

“It’s been how many years since your last confession?”

I suppose I feared I would encounter someone who,

in terms of our Gospel,

was more like Simon the Pharisee and less like Jesus.

When, somehow moved by God’s grace,

I finally did return to the sacrament –

walking around a field in France,

confessing to a Benedictine monk

who was the only native English speaker in his monastery –

I was shocked to find that he was not shocked

by my long absence from the sacrament.

In fact, he didn’t seem much shocked by anything I said.

I discovered that all my reasons for not going to confession

were in fact excuses,

and that what had been dominating my life

was not my “nasty little preoccupation” with sin,

but my studious attempts to avoid thinking about sin –

or maybe I should say, “sin sin sin sin sin sin sin” –

in any personal way.

For Jesus, being aware of our sins –

indeed, confessing them,

weeping over them,

getting to our knees before the God whose love we have offended

and asking for mercy –

is not a “nasty little preoccupation,”

but a prelude to the great love

that can only be experienced in forgiveness.

It is not neurosis to know that we are sinners,

but rather a realistic assessment of our situation:

we have sinned in our thoughts and in our words,

in what we have done and in what we have failed to do.

To deny this is the true neurosis;

it is to lock ourselves into a world of illusion,

and to make ourselves

blind to the infinite vistas of God’s goodness

and deaf to the song of divine mercy.

For we cannot know how good God is

until we see that, despite our sins,

Jesus does not shrink from our touch.

We cannot love God with all our heart, mind and strength

until we know how great a debt has been forgiven us,

until we hear Christ say,

“Your sins are forgiven. . . Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Easter 5

2010-05-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Acts 41:21-23; Revelation 21:1-5a; John 13:31-33a; 34-35

As many of you know,

the pastoral council’s survey of the parish last year

revealed that 65% of those responding

have been in the parish for fewer than ten years,

and 51% had been in the parish for fewer than five years.

(I should note that, having been in the parish twelve years,

this makes me one of the “old timers” –

something I’m not too happy about.)

And if you have been paying attention

to those who tend to stand in the back of the church

you might have noticed that in the past six months

we have had something of a baby boom.

And when you add this to the seven children

we welcomed to Christ’s altar

at last week’s first communion celebration,

one has something of a sense of what John felt in the book of Revelation

when he heard the voice form the heavenly throne say,

“Behold, I make all things new.”

He must have felt a sense of exhilaration

at the new vistas opening up before him:

the new Jerusalem descending from heaven,

the city where God will dwell with the human race,

where “there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain,

for the old order has passed away.”

At the same time, John must have felt a sense of apprehension

at the prospect of all things being made new –

the prospect of the transformation of all that is familiar

into something new and different.

How, we might ask, will we find our way

if God makes all things new,

if the old order passes away entirely?

These thoughts occur to me at this particular moment

because on Thursday we buried Ruby Strawberry,

eighty-nine years old,

a long-time and faithful parishioner

who attended the 4:00 Mass,

and because in a few minutes we will baptize

two of our newest parishioners, Theo and Mary.

Somehow, at least in my mind, these two events

keep intersecting with each other.

It is tempting at such a moment

to think of an old order of things passing away

and a new order of things beginning,

to think of the passing the torch from one generation to another

as part of the ceaseless cycle of birth and death.

But I think there is something far more mysterious going on here.

It is not that Theo and Mary are arriving just as Ruby is leaving.

This might be true in terms of the natural cycles of birth and death,

but it is not true when we take into account the mystery of God’s grace.

For our faith is that Ruby hasn’t really left us;

reborn in Christ, she is not part of the old order that has passed away,

but rather is a citizen of the new and heavenly Jerusalem

where she dwells with God.

She is not gone;

she has simply moved more deeply

into the mystery of Christ’s body,

the same body of Christ into which

Theo and Mary will soon be baptized.

By our human reckoning Ruby might belong to one generation

and Theo and Mary to another,

but in Christ’s body they share a common birth into eternal life,

and are “fellow citizens with the saints

and members of the household of God” (Eph. 2:19).

Somehow, in the mystery of the Church,

Mary and Theo will be Ruby’s friends;

they will pray for her

when our book of memory is presented each November,

and I am confident that she will pray for them

in the mysterious eternity of the Church triumphant.

This is what it means to be the Church:

to believe that we are united by God’s grace in Christ’s body.

And this is why Christ commands his disciples in today’s Gospel

to love one another with the same love with which he has loved them.

This is the love that can united us across barriers of time and distance,

and even across the barrier of death.

It is important always to keep this love that Christ commands

before our eyes

as we live our life together as a community of faith.

Given human nature, we can be tempted either to cling to the past,

to the ways that we have always done things,

or to become so enamored of the new that we dismiss our heritage

as merely part of the old order that has passed away.

Both temptations must be resisted

if we are to fulfill Christ’s command of love.

The one who says, “Behold, I make all things new”

constantly calls us into a future that requires us to change,

to think in new ways,

to venture outside the boundaries with which we are comfortable.

The large influx of new parishioners in the past decade

is a wonderful sign of life

but is also a challenge to those of us who have been around a while:

a challenge to think in new ways and to ask new questions,

to listen to new voices and consider new possibilities.

At the same time, we have a body of accumulated wisdom:

the wisdom of our long-time parishioners

and the wisdom of the tradition of the Church,

and this too must be listened to

if we are to be faithful to who we are.

What will make all of this possible is love:

the love with which Christ loves us

and with which he commands us to love each other.

Like Mary and Theo and Ruby,

we meet on the common ground of the love of Christ,

trusting that Christ crucified and risen is in our midst,

and that God’s spirit is here to guide us.

Our treasured past,

our challenging present,

and our unknown future

are all united in the God whom St. Augustine called

the “beauty so ancient and so new.”

So let us love one another:

old timers and newcomers,

children and adults,

progressive and traditional.

Let us love one another with the same love

with which Christ has loved us.

We owe it to Mary and Theo.

We owe it to Ruby Strawberry.

We owe it to ourselves.

Easter 4

2010-04-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

Readings: Acts 13:14, 43-52; Revelation 7:9, 14b-17; John 10:27-30

Today’s reading from John’s Gospel

is an echo of Jesus’ longer discourse in that Gospel

about himself as the good shepherd

who lays down his life for his sheep.

Taking up this image, Jesus says

“My sheep hear my voice;

I know them, and they follow me.”

Some scholars argue that the image Jesus is using here

reflects the custom in the ancient near east

of the members of a village

keeping their sheep in a common pen at night;

when morning comes

and it is time for the shepherd to take his sheep

out of the pen to pasture

he would call them with a distinctive cry

and they would separate themselves

from the other sheep and follow him.

A pretty neat trick, if you ask me.

I can’t even get my dog to come when I call.

In John’s Gospel Jesus uses this image

to indicate how those who are members of his flock

will recognize his call and follow him,

separating themselves from those who do not recognize his call.

It is an image shaped both the concrete situation

in which John’s Gospel was written –

a situation of conflict between the Church,

the synagogue,

and pagan culture –

as well as the perennial call of Christians

to live in a manner that distinguishes them

from the culture and values of the world around them.

Thinking about our own vocation

to hear the voice of Christ and to follow him,

we might interpret this passage as a call

to separate ourselves from a world

that seems in many ways hostile to the Christian faith,

and, in particular, to the Catholic Church.

As we watch the Church and her leaders

pilloried in the press on an almost daily basis

over the scandal of sexual abuse by the clergy

and the cover up of that abuse by Church leaders,

some have suggested that this experience is showing us

that the secular world is out to get the Church

and that now is the time to circle the wagons,

pull up the draw bridge,

batten down the hatches,

leave the common sheepfold

and follow Jesus our shepherd to some place

where we can be free from these attacks.

Let me say that I think it would be a mistake

to take such a lesson from today’s Gospel.

My reason for thinking it is a mistake

is not because I think that there are no people in our world

who are anxious to use the current scandals as an occasion

to settle long-standing grudges with the Catholic Church.

I think some – though probably a minority –

of the current critics of the Church fall into this category.

As the ancient proverb says,

“When you want to beat a dog, any stick will do,”

and in this case the stick is the misdeeds of Catholic clergy.

Nor do I think it is a mistake

because I think that Christians should in no sense

seek to distinguish themselves from the world around them

and its culture and values.

Rather, I think it is a mistake

because Christians should be distinguished

not by their withdrawal from the world into a sheltered enclave

but by the way in which they live in the midst of the world.

Our way of living as those who follow Christ the shepherd

should not be one in which we flee our critics

into the safe haven of self-congratulation or self-pity,

but rather should be a life

of fearless self-scrutiny and on-going conversion.

What should distinguish us from the world

is our ability to hear the truth about ourselves,

no matter who speaks it,

and to repent and reform when needed.

The Christian calling involves

hearing the voice of the shepherd

even in the voices of those who would criticize the Church,

and to follow the shepherd into the new life that is promised

to those who let the blood of the lamb wash away their sins.

In the image from the book of Revelation

of the lamb who is our shepherd,

we see that following the call of Christ

is not a fleeing of the world to a place of invulnerability

but precisely our willingness

to let ourselves be wounded as he was

so that he might heal us.

And we are able to face the truth about ourselves,

to let the truth wound us.

because we believe the promise of Christ:

“I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.

No one can take them out of my hand.”

The recognition of painful truth about ourselves

is the path to resurrection.

Some criticism is unfair and uninformed;

some is even malicious.

But the distinguishing mark of Christians –

both as individuals and as a community –

is not to flee from criticism to some imagined place of safety,

but our willingness to listen for the voice of our shepherd

even in the words of our critics.

Because our willingness to hear

uncomfortable truths about ourselves

grows from our faith

that no one can take us out of God’s hands.

If we are following the voice of the shepherd,

we have nothing to fear from the truth,

no matter who may be speaking it.

Easter Sunday

2010-04-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18

“Seeing is believing.”

It is a phrase by which we express credulity:

“I didn’t think that Tide could get out stubborn stains,

but I saw an advertisement on TV that convinced me.”

It is also a phrase by which we express incredulity:

“Well, Congress may have passed healthcare reform,

but I’ll believe that it works when my insurance premiums go down.”

“Aunt Martha claims that UFOs land in Druid Hill Park every July 4th,

but I’ve never see it for myself.”

“You say that you are going to change,

but talk to me when you’ve been six-months sober.”

“Seeing is believing.”

We also sometimes apply this principle

when it comes to religious faith.

Students in my classes at Loyola

will often venture the opinion

that faith was easier for people in the time of Jesus

because God worked a lot more miracles back then,

and that if they could have seen a miracle –

Jesus healing someone

or walking on the water

or feeding the multitude –

then they could believe because, after all,

seeing is believing.

But the Gospels repeatedly make the point that,

at least when it comes to Jesus,

seeing is not believing,

at least not necessarily.

Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus will work a miracle –

sometimes a quite spectacular miracle –

and some of those who see it believe,

but many of those who see it do not.

Indeed, in our journey through Holy Week

we have heard how the disciples,

those who had been with Jesus since Galilee

and who had seen his mighty works,

all abandon him in the end,

because though they had seen,

they had not believed.

Even in the face of the mightiest work of all,

Jesus’ resurrection,

seeing is not always believing.

John’s account of the resurrection tells us

that at the empty tomb

the beloved disciple “saw and believed,”

but this was not the case for everyone there in that garden.

Mary Magdalen, who finds the stone rolled away from the tomb

and who summons Peter and the beloved disciple,

tells them “They have taken the Lord from the tomb

and we don’t know where they put him.”

She doesn’t specify who “they” are,

but presumably she thinks that someone has stolen Jesus’ body.

For Mary Magdalene, seeing the empty tomb is not believing.

Once the disciples return home, Mary stays at the tomb, weeping.

She peers into the tomb and sees two angels in white

who ask her why she weeps,

and the responds again that “they” have taken her Lord away.

For Mary Magdalene, seeing the angels is not believing.

Then she turns and sees Jesus,

but she thinks that he must be the gardener

and she asks him if perhaps he is the one

who has taken away Jesus’ body.

For Mary Magdalene, seeing the risen Jesus himself is not believing.

She must have turned away from him in disappointment,

because John tells us that when he speaks her name

she turns back to him.

She turns back because now, suddenly, she recognizes him,

and she says to him “rabbouni” – “my teacher.”

There is nothing there to see that was not there before,

but now Mary believes.

She believes because the risen Jesus calls her by name.

Gregory the Great wrote that it is as if Jesus were saying to her,

“Recognize him who recognizes you” (Homily 25).

Mary believes not because of what she sees

but because she stands before the one

who knows her to the very depths of her heart

and who reveals himself to her there.

The resurrection is surely something that happens to Jesus:

the one who was killed on Good Friday

is the one who lives on Easter morning;

his tomb is empty and his body is raised.

But it is also something that happens to his followers.

The resurrection involves not simply a change in Jesus,

but a change in those who, like Mary Magdalene,

will become witnesses to his resurrection.

Paul tells us in the letter to the Colossians

that we have died with Christ,

so that our life is hidden with Christ in God,

and that we have been raised with Christ,

so that we ought to seek that which is above.

Seeing is only believing if the one who sees is transformed.

Were we to stand at the empty tomb,

were we to see angels

and the risen Christ himself,

we would not, could not, believe

until the risen one calls us by our name,

summoning our belief

in the good news of the resurrection.

Jesus is truly risen,

but to know this we must be risen with him;

along with him we too must rise from death:

the death of sin and sorrow,

the death of doubt and disappointment.

To truly recognize the resurrected Lord

we must experience

not simply his rising from death,

but also our own.

Otherwise, the story of the resurrection

is just another tale

about something that supposedly happened

a long time ago

in a land far, far away.

During Lent we have focused on a phrase

from the letter to the Ephesians:

“Let the eyes of your heart be enlightened.”

We have prayed in this season of Lent

that God would help us to see

with the eyes of the heart,

that our vision might be transformed.

And now as Lent blossoms forth into Easter

we continue that prayer.

We don’t simply want to see,

but we want to see with the eyes of faith,

the eyes with which Mary Magdalene

was able to see the risen Jesus.

We want the faith that will allow us

to recognize him who recognizes us,

to know him as a living presence

in this community of faith:

in the words of scripture,

in the sacraments,

and in one another.

We want the faith that enlightens the eyes of our hearts.

Because seeing is not believing;

rather, it is believing that allows us to see.

Easter Vigil

2010-04-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

Readings: Genesis 1:1-2:2; Exodus 14:15-15:1; Isaiah 54:5-15; 55:1-11; Baruch 3:9-15, 32-4:4; Ezekiel 36:16-17a, 18-28; Romans 6:3-11; Luke24:1-12

“Evening came, and morning followed. . .”

This phrase, along with the refrain “God saw how good it was,”

punctuates the story of creation

found in the opening chapter of the book of Genesis.

And throughout the history of God’s saving work,

by which God seeks to restore and perfect that creation,

we see evening and morning

punctuating the lives of God’s people.

In the book of Exodus, evening comes

as the Israelites camp at the edge of the Red Sea

with the Egyptian armies bearing down upon them,

intent upon their enslavement and destruction.

But God parts the sea for them and they pass over to safety

and as morning comes God closes the sea back,

destroying the Egyptians.

Evening came, and morning followed.

In the book of the prophet Isaiah,

after the long night of exile in Babylon,

the light of God’s love dawns upon the Israelites

as they return to their homeland,

and they are invited: “come to the water. . .

come, receive grain and eat. . . drink wine and milk.”

The night’s long fast is ended as the people of Israel

return to their promised land and its abundant fare.

Evening came, and morning followed.

The word of God comes to Ezekiel,

so that he might speak to God’s people,

to tell them that though they have defiled themselves

with deeds of darkness,

God will cleanse them,

and place within them a new heart and a new spirit,

hearts of living flesh in place of their stony hearts.

The night of God’s wrath

gives way to the light of forgiveness.

Evening came, and morning followed.

Dawn follows sunset,

morning follows evening,

down through history

until we come to that morning when,

“at daybreak on the first day of the week

the women who had come from Galilee with Jesus

took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb.”

Day is breaking after what must have seemed to those women

to be one of the longest and darkest nights of their lives.

This is a morning that brings with it no joy, no hope,

but only the sorrowful but necessary task

of preparing the dead body

of the one in whom they had placed all their hopes.

For them, what lies dead in the tomb

is not simply the teacher from Nazareth

but hope itself.

Though the sun may crest the horizon,

and its light fall upon the world,

for these women it seems

that an evening has come

that no morning will follow;

they are dwelling in a darkness of despair

that the sun cannot dispel.

But evening and morning,

darkness and light,

despair and hope:

these are in the hands of God.

As the prophet Baruch reminds us,

God is the one “who dismisses the light, and it departs;

calls it, and it obeys trembling.”

On Easter morning,

at the mouth of an empty tomb,

the women learn what our Exultet proclaims,

that Jesus Christ is “the Morning Star which never sets. . .

that Morning Star, who came back from the dead,

and shed his peaceful light on all humankind.”

The women learn that Christ is risen from the tomb,

and their hope is risen with him.

Evening came, and morning followed,

and the hope that was resurrected with Christ on Easter morning

is a light that will never set.

As Paul says, “Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more;

death no longer has power over him.”

And we know that this is true

because this history of salvation is our history as well.

The death and resurrection of Christ

is one that we mystically share in baptism.

“If we have died with Christ,

we believe that we shall also live with him.”

This is the mystery into which Laura will be baptized,

the mystery of Christ’s saving death and resurrection.

This is the mystery that Dan will reaffirm

in his reception into the Church.

Of course, as all of us who are baptized know –

and as Laura no doubt suspects –

after our rebirth in Christ

evening still comes

and morning still follows.

Even for those who have died and been raised with Christ in baptism

there is the daily dying and rising,

an evening and morning,

that remains the fabric of the Christian life.

Yet in the resurrection of Christ God has given us,

like those women at the tomb at daybreak,

a rebirth of hope.

And so we live, with the alternation of

evening and morning,

woe and wellbeing,

sorrow and joy,

but always knowing that Christ’s victory over death

has changed the world forever,

so that even in the darkest night

the light is still with us,

even if we can only see it

with the eyes of faith, hope and love.

“At daybreak on the first day of the week. . . “ –

on the first day,

the day on which God said “let there be light” –

God speaks again:

let the morning of light and life

follow the evening of darkness and death.

Evening has come and morning has followed,

and it is the first day once again:

the victory of light over darkness;

the victory of life over death.

Christ has risen!

Death is defeated!

Let there be light!

Palm Sunday (C)

2010-03-28T09:32:00.000-07:00

Readings: Luke 19:28-40

Isaiah 50:4-7; Philippians 2:6-11; Luke 22:14-23:56

So, who killed Jesus?

Who is responsible for his death?

Of course we believe that the death of Jesus

is somehow part of God’s plan for human salvation,

but we might still ask about the human actors in this drama.

This has been a question of particularly intense interest

among Christian theologians and others

since the 1950s when,

in the wake of the slaughter of millions of Jews by the Nazis,

Christians began to reassess the long-held view

that the Jewish people as a whole

were collectively responsible for Jesus’ death

and therefore, as a people, cursed by God.

For Catholics, this process of reassessment eventually led in 1965

to the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate,

which declared that the Jewish people did not share

collective or hereditary guilt for Jesus’ death

and that “the Jews should not be presented

as rejected or accursed by God.”

Which then leaves us with the question:

if not the Jews, then who?

Where can we lay the blame?

Whom can we hold responsible?

Today’s passion Gospel from Luke

seems to be of limited help here,

since the story it tells is one

in which responsibility is passed around like a hot potato.

The leaders of the Jewish people

would like Jesus out of the picture because he is a blasphemer

and because he has just enough of a following

that his disciples might cause serious trouble

that would bring down the wrath of the Romans on the whole city.

But they don’t want to alienate the crowds

who had greeted Jesus upon his entry into Jerusalem,

so they would like the Roman governor, Pilate,

to take care of the problem.

Pilate does not see Jesus as much of a threat,

and he waffles and vacillates and hems and haws,

not because he wants to acquit an innocent man,

but because he wants someone else to make the decision for him.

So he sends him to Herod,

the ruler of Jesus’ home province of Galilee.

Herod is initially curious, but eventually disappointed

when Jesus won’t perform tricks for him,

so he sends him back to Pilate.

Finally, Pilate, strengthened by Herod’s contempt for Jesus

and incited by the crowd

and the advice of the religious leaders of the people,

agrees to have Jesus executed.

So who is responsible?

Whom can we blame?

There seems to be plenty of blame to go around,

and lots of plausible candidates to hang it on.

But it is unsettling not to have a clear scapegoat to blame,

someone whom I can clearly identify as evil,

the sort of monster who would do the kind of things

I would never do.

It was so much clearer when it was “them” – the Jews –

who were responsible.

It is unsettling not to have a scapegoat,

because it leaves me open to asking myself

if perhaps I might not be all that different

from those who passed Jesus around like a hot potato.

Perhaps I too, like the Jewish leaders,

want those who disturb my peace simply to go away.

Perhaps I too, like Pilate,

am unwilling to act on what I know is true and good.

Perhaps I too, like Herod,

want only the sort of savior who will perform tricks at my behest.

Those responsible for the death of Jesus were not monsters

who did something that I would never do;

they were ordinary people who did what I do on a daily basis.

Their sins are my sins.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world:

enlighten the eyes of our hearts and have mercy on us.

Lent 4

2010-03-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Joshua 5:9a, 10-12; 2 Corinthians 5:17-21; Luke 151-3, 11-32

I had a homily that I prepared and delivered
yesterday at the 4:00 Mass
that was, if I do say so myself,
spiritually rich and theologically astute (as usual).
But between then and now something happened.
When meeting last night with our RCIA candidates, Laura and Dan,
Laura asked about the latest wave of reports coming out of Europe
of cases of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy,
and the perhaps worse crime of covering such things up by bishops.
So we talked and, as usual, I had no particularly good answers.
I had no good answer to the question of why one would want
to become part of a Church that would allow such things.
I had no good answer to the question of how one reconciles
the joyous and life-giving aspects of the Church
with what can only be called
the dark and demonic power of evil
that seems to infect the Church
and not to be going away any time very soon.
It is beginning to feel like a nightmare
from which I cannot wake up,
and I find myself having to face the ugly truth
that this is no bad dream, but reality.

And the reality is that the Church has, like the prodigal son,
wandered into the distant land of sin and alienation from God.
As someone who studies the history of the Church and Theology,
I am well aware that in every age
we, the Church, have fallen short of God’s will for us,
and there have, believe it or not, been eras
when the leadership of the Church
was even more corrupt, more venal, more scandalous
than it is today.
I am also well aware that matters are complex,
and the media often doesn’t get things quite right
when it comes to the Church,
wanting a sensational story
rather than the complex and messy truth.
But such historical perspective
and such awareness of complexity
are little comfort when one reads yet again,
not simply of priests and deacons and religious
who have used their status to abuse the vulnerable,
but also of bishops and other leaders
who conspire to hide these crimes.

This is not a bad dream from which we can awaken,
but a horrible reality that must be changed.
Indeed, the dream seems to be
our illusion that everything is alright.
So we ask ourselves,
what hope is there for change?
What hope can we find that the Church will,
like the prodigal son,
come to her senses and realize
that she has been longing for the food of swine
and say, “I shall get up and go to my father
and I shall say to him,
‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.
I no longer deserve to be called your son.’”?
Every time I think the Church has learned this lesson,
every time I think we have turned the corner,
I find myself back in the distant land,
feeding the swine, far from God.

We seem unable to come to our senses,
unable to recognize the truth of our situation,
unable to wake from our illusion
that the problems have been fixed.

In all this I can only cling to the promise of Christ
that the gates of hell
shall not prevail against the Church –
despite the best efforts of her leaders.
I cling to the belief that the Church is the body of Christ
and that we are joined to Christ our head
and that his graces can still flow into this body
despite our sins and failings.
I keep returning to one of the more enigmatic statements
by Paul in our second reading today:
“for our sake [God] made him to be sin who did not know sin,
so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”

The entire context of the parable of the prodigal son in Luke’s gospel
is a controversy with the scribes and Pharisees
over Jesus’ willingness to share a table with sinners,
his unwillingness to dissociate himself from those
who live their lives alienated from God’s covenant.
Jesus’ solidarity with sinners means that no land is so distant
that the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself
is not there with us.
Jesus has joined himself to humanity,
becoming like us in all things but sin.
But though he himself remains faithful to God and does not sin,
he still, as it were, knows our sin from the inside.
Indeed, he not only knows our sin, he suffers it.
In his cross, he knows both the anguish of the sinner
and of the sinner’s victim.
He knows the evasions of the abuser,
the crooked ways of the human heart,
and the pain of the abused child.

I have no adequate answers to the hard questions of Laura and Dan,
no ready reply when asked how the Church – indeed, how God –
can allow such things.
But I do know that Jesus Christ has made the journey
into the distant land of sin,
not just to share the misery of our alienation from God,
but to be light in that land of darkness,
to reveal our sin and to awaken us from our illusions,
so that we may come to ourselves
and say “I will get up and go to my Father.”
In the distant land of alienation from God,
the land of hunger and death,
he is the one who arises to return to his Father
and in his returning he can bring us back with him.

During Lent we have been focusing
on Paul’s exhortation in the letter to the Ephesians:
“Let the eyes of your heart be enlightened.”
I pray this even more fervently today:
O God, enlighten the eyes of my heart
so that I may understand myself and you;
enlighten the eyes of your Church’s heart,
so that we might arise with Christ this Easter
and return to your embrace. Amen.

Lent 1

2010-02-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

Readings: Deut. 26:4-10; Rom. 10:8-13; Luke 4:1-13

In our first reading, from the book of Deuteronomy,

we hear Moses giving instructions to the Israelites

on how to celebrate the offering of their first fruits at harvest time.

Given that today is the (long-delayed) beginning

of the Archbishop’s annual appeal,

the temptation to focus this homily

on the incredible generosity of the Israelites in their giving,

and to try to draw some contemporary parallel,

is almost overwhelming.

But, strengthened by our Lord’s example in today’s Gospel reading,

I will resist that temptation

and simply say, “Let those who have ears to hear. . .”

Instead, I would draw your attention

to the narrative that is ritually recited

prior to the offering of the gifts.

It is as if he Israelites must remind themselves of who they are

before they bring the fruit of their life and labor before the Lord.

“My father was a wandering Aramean

who went down to Egypt with a small household

and lived there as an alien.

But there he became a nation great,

strong, and numerous.”

The Israelites – God’s covenant people – are to recall

how they left the land God had given them

and lived as aliens in Egypt, and prospered for a while.

“When the Egyptians maltreated and oppressed us,

imposing hard labor upon us,

we cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers,

and he heard our cry and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.”

The Israelites are to recall

how they came to be oppressed by the Egyptians,

and how, though they had forgotten God,

God did not forget them.

“He brought us out of Egypt with his strong hand

and outstretched arm,

with terrifying power, with signs and wonders;

and bringing us into this country,

he gave us this land flowing with milk and honey.”

The Israelites are to recall how God

saved them from their oppression

and brought them to the land

that has produced the fruit that they now offer to God.

It is only then,

when they have remembered who they are, and whose they are,

that they can freely offer back to God

the gifts that God has first given to them.

Why this ritual recitation?

Why tell over again the story

that they all probably know pretty well any way?

Well, it is easy to forget who you are.

The Israelites were constantly tempted to think

that they were the people of other gods

rather than the People of the one true God,

who had saved them from oppression.

And for us, too, it is easy to forget who we are.

Not, of course, that we forget our names;

but with all the clamor of the world and its allurements,

we can forget the deepest truth about ourselves –

that we are God’s people and disciples of God Son –

and begin to think that we are something else:

maybe a wonder-worker who can, and must, solve everyone’s problems

by turning stones into bread;

maybe a power-broker who can, and must, break a few eggs

to get done what needs to be done;

maybe even a minor celebrity who can, and must, bask

in the admiration of others.

In our Gospel today we hear how Jesus resisted the temptation

to think of himself in these ways

because he remembered who he truly was:

the Messiah who must give himself over

to the way of cross and resurrection.

And we can resist these same temptations

if we remember who we are.

This is one way to think about what Lent means.

Lent is a time to remember

that we are God’s people and disciples of God’s son.

It is a time in while, by our disciplines

of prayer and fasting and alms-giving,

we let God teach us once again who we are and whose we are.

In the RCIA, Lent is known as

“The Period of Purification and Enlightenment.”

During this time our catechumen, Laura,

and our candidate for full communion, Dan,

will undertake the final period of their preparation

for reception of the Easter sacraments.

It is, as the Rite of Christian Initiation says,

a time intended “to enlighten . . . [their] minds and hearts . . .

with a deeper knowledge of Christ the Savior” (RCIA §139).

For it is in coming to know Christ more deeply

that they will come to know who they really are.

For they will know that it was for them that Christ gave himself over

to the way of cross and resurrection.

For us, too, Lent is a time of purification and enlightenment.

Perhaps we are used to thinking of it as a time of purification,

when we try to wean ourselves away from bad habits

by giving stuff up.

But it is also, and even more so, a time of enlightenment,

a time in which we seek to let God’s light shine in our hearts,

by removing from our lives those things that cast the shadows

that keep us from seeing the deepest, truest,

and most real thing about ourselves:

the fact that God has called us to be God’s people

and disciples of God’s Son.

During Lent, whether praying at Mass or praying in private,

ask God to give you the light you need

to know yourself as you really are,

as God knows you to be.

So as we pray during this period of enlightenment

for those who are preparing

to receive the Easter sacraments,

we pray also for ourselves,

that God will enlighten the eyes of our hearts.

Lent is a time to turn away from the false images of ourselves

that we are tempted to take as true –

those images that would seem to make us greater than we are,

and those images that would seem to make us less than we are –

so that we can see ourselves as we truly are:

those wandering souls whom God has heard

and rescued from the oppression of sin

and brought into a land flowing with milk and honey.

Then, with the eyes of our hearts enlightened,

remembering who we are and whose we are,

we can offer back to God the gift of our life and labor

that God so generously gives to us each day.

The Baptism of the Lord

2010-01-10T08:33:00.000-08:00

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11; Titus 2:11-14; 3:4-7; Luke 3:15-16, 21-22

“Are you saved?”

Have you ever had anyone ask you that?

It is a question that tends to make Catholics nervous.

Many years ago, when I was young and foolish,

I spent a summer in Alaska working at a seafood processing plant.

If that in itself is not sufficient evidence that I was young and foolish,

I should add that, at the end of my summer in Alaska,

I decided that I would hitchhike home to South Carolina.

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time

(did I mention that I was young and foolish?).

And in many ways, it was very educational.

One of the things I learned

is that when traveling across a vast space, like the Canadian plains.

you can easily lose any sense of forward progress,

especially when it is your fifth consecutive hour

standing on the side of the highway with your thumb out.

I also learned that one group of people who habitually pick up hitchhikers

are Christians who are on the lookout for potential converts.

I met several of these folks on this particular journey,

but one who stands out in my mind was a Baptist minister

who picked me up somewhere outside of Medicine Hat, Alberta,

and took me all the way to Regina, Saskatchewan.

This was a journey of several hours

in which our conversation consisted pretty much of a single topic:

was I saved?

He would ask, and I would reply,

“Well, I don’t really know. I’d like to think I am trying.”

He would in turn reply, “If you were saved, you would know it,

because you would believe in Jesus as your personal Lord and savior.”

To which I would say,

“Well, I believe in God and Jesus, but I still don’t know if I will be saved.

A lot could happen between now and when I die.”

And he would respond, “If you’re saved, you know it.”

And so forth and so on,

from Medicine Hat through Swift Current and Moose Jaw, on to Regina –

a conversation going nowhere at great length.

So, are you saved?

This might seem to be a simple case

of a classic difference between Catholics and Protestants:

Protestants believe that they are saved by grace through faith,

once and for all in a decisive moment,

while Catholics believe you need to do something in addition to having faith,

something we call “good works,”

and that until your good works are totaled up at the end of your life

you can’t really be sure of your salvation.

But if this were really what we believe,

then why would we be reading in our second reading today

that “the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared,

not because of any righteous deed we had done but because of his mercy”?

In fact, it has always been the teaching of the Catholic Church

that our salvation depends totally upon God’s grace:

we are saved simply through the generous love of God

and not through any righteous deed – any good work – that we might do.

So why are we so nervous about the question “are you saved?”

Why can’t we rest easy with simply answering “yes”?

I would like to think that our Catholic anxiety

over this question of salvation

grows out of an at least implicit awareness

that the real question with regard to salvation

is not “what should I do?” but “who should I be?”

The question is not whether I should perform

some sort of inward, mental action called “having faith,”

or some other sort of outward, physical action called “performing a good work,”

that God will reward by saving me.

The question is rather one about who it is that I am in the eyes of God.

The question is whether the kindness and generous love of God

is transforming me into someone

who can live fully in God’s presence,

and thus share in the eternal life that is God.

Our faith is that the answer to this question is “yes”;

we believe that God’s grace is transforming us

into what Paul calls “heirs in hope of eternal life.”

But note that we are heirs “in hope” –

our certainty is the certainty of hope,

which is quite different

from the kind of certainty we might have in science or mathematics.

We have a keen awareness of ourselves as works-in-progress,

people on a journey,

and whatever assurance we have of salvation

is found in our faith

that God’s grace is sufficient to bring that work to completion,

to guide our journey to its destination.

Paul singles out baptism as a key moment

in our becoming heirs in hope of eternal life.

In Jesus’ own baptism, recounted in our Gospel today,

the Holy Spirit descends on him

and a voice speaks from heaven,

“You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

Likewise for us, baptism is what Paul calls “the bath of rebirth”

in which we are reborn with a new identity

as God’s sons and daughters,

an identity that we do not fashion for ourselves,

but that is bestowed on us by God,

through the Spirit of renewal that, as Paul puts it,

“is richly poured out on us through Jesus Christ our savior.”

But the grace that God gives through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit

takes time – a lifetime – to work itself into our bones.

Our new identity typically takes shape slowly within us:

it is a journey far longer

than the journey from Medicine Hat, Alberta, to Regina, Saskatchewan.

The very way in which the Church celebrates the sacraments of initiation

recognizes this.

In the case of children,

the identity given in baptism must be nurtured and developed

through the other sacraments,

not just until adulthood, but over the course of a lifetime.

For those who are baptized as adults,

their new identity is not just nurtured after baptism

but must also be prepared for prior to baptism.

This is the point of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults or RCIA:

to assist adults who desire baptism or the other sacraments of initiation

in preparing themselves to live the new identity God will give them.

Paul puts this rather dramatically

in terms of God “training us to reject Godless ways and worldly desires.”

We might put it, somewhat less dramatically,

in terms of those who ask for baptism

seeking to live a life of greater spiritual depth,

a life more deeply rooted in God’s love and mercy,

given to us in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit,

a new life that may well involve unlearning an old way of life.

In the Rites of Christian Initiation we the Church

assist them with our prayers and our love

as they undertake the arduous task

of learning to live lives of faith, hope and love.

For all of us, the task of living the identity given to us through grace in baptism

is one that is on-going.

We should ask God each day in prayer

to make us more faithful, more hopeful, and more loving.

Sometimes, it is true, we can see little in the way of forward progress,

not unlike hitchhiking across the Canadian plains,

yet in our faith we trust that God has already given us

the grace to finish the journey,

the grace that is gradually transforming us into those

who can live fully in God’s eternal presence.

“Are you saved?”

Let us answer with the confidence of the early Christian poet who wrote:

"I trusted, consequently I was at rest;

because trustful is the one in whom I trusted.

And immortal life embraced me, and kissed me.

And from that life is the Spirit which is within me.

And it cannot die because it is life" (Odes of Solomon 28:1-3, 7-8).

Holy Family

2009-12-27T10:30:00.000-08:00

Readings: 1 Samuel 1:20-22, 24-28; 1 John 3:1-2, 21-24; Luke 2:41-52

As many of you undoubtedly know,

Christians in the first five or six centuries

produced a number of gospels

in addition to the four that are in the New Testament.

These gospels, which are almost surely not as old as the canonical Gospels

that the Church accepts as Holy Scripture,

seem to have been composed in many cases

to fill in gaps that were perceived in the Scriptural Gospels,

particularly concerning the birth and childhood of Jesus, or his resurrection.

One of these gospels is known as The Infancy Gospel of Thomas

and is composed of materials written between the second and sixth centuries.

It tells stories of Jesus as a young boy – and an unusual young boy he is, too.

It opens with a story of five-year-old Jesus

playing by a brook on the Sabbath day:

he first gathers the water into pools, simply by commanding it,

and then begins to forms figures of birds out of the clay.

The neighbors, of course, complain to Joseph

that Jesus is engaged in work on the Sabbath.

When Joseph goes and reprimands him, Jesus claps his hands

and the birds come to life and fly away,

silencing, at least temporarily, his critics.

This is a charming story

that seems to be trying to depict God incarnate as a child:

the same God who in the book of Genesis commands the waters

and forms Adam from the clay of the earth

and makes him a living being.

Other stories in The Infancy Gospel of Thomas

sound a more ominous note,

such as the one in which Jesus strikes dead

a boy who inadvertently runs into him.

When the boy’s parents go to Joseph to complain,

Jesus strikes them blind.

Joseph boxes Jesus’ ear, but this does not seem to have much effect:

in the stories that follow Jesus seems as likely to curse and kill the neighbors

as he is to bless and heal them.

Again, what we seem to have here

is an attempt to imagine what God incarnate is like as a child,

only in this case we see the power of God

combined with the impulsiveness and petulance

that sometimes characterizes young children.

Jesus comes across in these stories as some sort of evil child-genius

who terrorizes the town of Nazareth.

While we might appreciate the impulse

that motivated those who composed these tales –

the desire to imagine God incarnate as a child –

in the end what is conveyed

is less the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ,

and something more like one of those movies

in which the demon-possessed child kills off the characters on-by-one.

The events in these stories are, as my son Denis would say,

are not so much miracles as they are “weirdicals.”

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas concludes

with a version of the story from Luke’s Gospel

that is our Gospel reading for today,

which is the only story from the New Testament

that tells us anything about Jesus between his infancy and his baptism.

After the sometimes bizarre tales

that precede it in The Infancy Gospel of Thomas,

it is something of a relief to arrive at this familiar story

that doesn’t involve anything particularly extraordinary.

Indeed, compared to what has come before,

one is struck by just how ordinary the boy Jesus depicted by Luke is.

True, he seems to astonish people with the answers he gives

to the questions of the teachers in the Temple,

but no one gets struck dead or blind;

Jesus doesn’t levitate or speak with a booming heavenly voice;

he seems nothing more than a spiritually precocious child.

He is not, as he comes across in the later imaginings

of The Infancy Gospel of Thomas,

a powerful and capricious deity in human disguise,

like an avatar of Zeus or Apollo.

Rather, he is a fully human being,

who listens and asks questions of his teachers,

who slips away from his parents and causes them great anxiety,

who returns home with them and is obedient to them,

who advances in wisdom and age and favor,

in the same way that any of us grows and develops within a human family.

And yet, within this ordinariness

there is something extraordinary,

something miraculous.

The boy Jesus says to his anxious family,

“Why were you looking for me?

Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

Even at this young age, Jesus knows

that when he is in the Temple he is in his Father’s house;

even at this young age Jesus knows

that he is the Son of the God whom he calls “Abba,” Father.

We might try to imagine what this consciousness was like,

whether the twelve-year-old Jesus could have formulated words

such as “begotten, not created” or “one in being with the Father.”

But in the end our imaginations fail,

as they always fail when it comes to knowing God.

Suffice it to say that Jesus knows himself to be God’s Son

in something like the way we might, from our very infancy,

know ourselves to be loved by our parents.

While the newborn infant “knows” very little –

if we are using the term “know” in the sense

that I know next Tuesday is the 29th

or that Caracas is the capital of Venezuela –

there is a sense in which the infant that is held in its mother’s arms

knows her love more deeply and surely

than any other knowledge it will ever have.

The infant knows this love

as the power that has given and sustains its life.

It cannot know itself without knowing this love,

for this love is the soil in which it is rooted.

Just so, Jesus cannot know himself

without knowing the love of his Father,

which is the eternal source of his identity:

we might say that from the outset

he knows himself to be rooted from all eternity

in the soil of divine love.

But there is a difference between this divine love and our human love.

While we human parents try to love our children to the best of our ability,

we are also keenly aware of the failures of our love:

the limits of our patience and generosity,

the shortness of our tempers,

the poverty of our wisdom.

Jesus, however, knows himself to be rooted in a love that is perfect,

a generosity without limits,

a power that will enable him to face opposition and misunderstanding

and even the failure of the cross,

a love that will carry him through death

into the risen life of the Kingdom of God.

This is the true miracle of the boy Jesus:

not the power to make clay birds fly or strike opponents down,

but the miracle of a human life rooted perfectly

in the eternal love of God,

the miracle of one like us,

who unshakably knows himself to be God’s beloved child.

But the miracle does not stop there.

As our second reading, from the First Letter of John, tells us:

"Beloved:

See what love the Father has bestowed on us:

that we may be called the children of God.

And so we are.”

The miracle is that God’s Son has become what we are

so that we might become what he is.

The divine love in which his life is rooted from all eternity

has now, in time, been bestowed upon us.

In the face of misunderstanding and opposition and even death

we can know that we are held in God’s love,

a love that will carry us through

to the risen life of God’s Kingdom.

Tricks with clay birds pale in comparison

to the true miracle of this Christmas season –

that we become by grace what Jesus Christ is by nature:

beloved children of God.

2nd Sunday of Advent

2009-12-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

Readings: Baruch 5:1-9; Philippians 1:4-6. 8-11; Luke 3:1-6

In our first reading, from the prophet Baruch,
we are presented with a vision of the return of the Israelites to the promised land

from their exile in Babylon.
We know from the book of Ezra that the return of the exiles

was not that of triumphant victors,
but of a divided and dispirited people,

plagued by economic woes and threatened by hostile neighbors.
And yet Baruch presents this return as a glorious one.
Indeed, in today’s reading the word “glory” is used six times.
God is glorious, shining forth in mercy and justice,

but the Israelites too are glorious:
indeed, Jerusalem is called to share in God’s glory,
which is like a cloak that she is to wrap around herself,

having put off her garments of mourning.

So who is right, Baruch or Ezra?
Was the return from exile a glorious one,
or was it really a disheveled band of displaced people straggling home,
beset by troubles and bickering among themselves

and otherwise acting in all-too recognizably human ways?

I am not sure we need to choose.
I suspect Ezra is more or less accurate

in his depiction of the disarray of the returning exiles,
but Baruch the prophet offers us a different sort of vision,
the kind of vision that only a prophet can have,
the kind of vision that can discern the glory of God in the most unlikely of events,
the kind of vision that sees God’s glory
even in the stumbling and all-too recognizably human return of these exiles.
Because Baruch knows that in this event

the most unlikely of things has happened:
God has made a way home for his people.
The prophetic eye can see glory

in the all-too recognizably human struggle of the returning exiles
because it sees that God is present.

What would it mean to look with the same prophetic eye

at our own community here at Corpus Christi?
Like the returning exiles, we too are all-too recognizably human;
even when we are on our best and most self-consciously “churchy” behavior –
when we gather to celebrate the liturgy –
our human limitations seem at times more manifest than God’s glory.
As any liturgical minister will tell you, during the liturgy, stuff happens –

stuff that you hadn't planned on.
You read the wrong reading as a lector,

or mangle the name of some Bronze Age potentate from Assyria.
You drop the host when you are a minister of the Eucharist,
or realize half-way through communion that you've been administering the chalice
with the words, "the body of Christ."
You are leading the the prayer of the faithful and realize in the middle of it
that the carefully thought-out and theologically profound response

you had so carefully prepared
is in fact too long and too quirky for the congregation to remember.
These examples spring to mind because they are all things that I have done.
For me, a particularly memorable moment came last Easter when,
after the gifts of bread and wine has been brought forward

and I had filled the first chalice,
I discovered that the wine was full of ants.
Often such mistakes go unnoticed by the congregation,

though they seem momentous to the minister.
But as anyone who has had a role in serving the liturgy will tell you,
that’s just how liturgical ministry is:

we prepare, we do our best, but sometimes things go wrong,
so we accept our all-too recognizably human imperfections,

and perhaps long for the heavenly liturgy,
where every voice will be in tune,

every word spoken eloquently,

every movement executed gracefully.

Of course, the all-too recognizably human imperfections of our worship

are not limited to liturgical faux pas.
The true imperfection of our worship

is our falling short in faith, hope and, especially, love.
The true imperfection of our worship

is not the mispronounced name,

but the unkindly spoken word;
not the inadvertently dropped the host,

but willfully ignored neighbor;
not the ill-chosen prayer response,

but the hardness of heart that turns us away from prayer altogether.
In short, our worship is imperfect

because we fail to be a people who, in the words of the prophet Micah,
do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before God.
This is why we begin our worship by acknowledging our sins

and asking for God’s grace and mercy.

Yet despite all this,

we believe it is in our limited, imperfect, error-prone liturgical celebrations
that God comes to meet us,

that the glory of Jesus Christ shines forth in our midst,
and we catch a glimpse of that perfect heavenly liturgy.
It is through hands that all too often fail to do God’s will
and voices that all too often fail to speak God’s good news
that we sinners worship the God of grace and mercy.
And this is possible not because of what we do,

but because of what Christ does.
Last week Fr. Rich spoke of the confidence that we can have that,
despite the turmoil in our world and within ourselves,

Christ is with us.
In the liturgy, Christ becomes flesh and dwells among us.
When we gather as Christians for worship and proclaim the mystery of faith

in words both ancient and new,
when we move beyond words and enact that same mystery

through the language of ritual,
we can have confidence that Christ is present,
speaking and acting with us,
speaking and acting for us.

It is this presence that takes from us our cloak of mourning

and wraps us in the cloak of God’s glory.

Julian of Norwich said that

“As the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin,
and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the chest,
so are we, soul and body,

clad in the goodness of God and enclosed in it” (A Revelation of Love, ch. 6).
We – a poor, disheveled and all-too recognizably human band of pilgrims –

gather weekly in this place
and speak our imperfect words of prayer

and make our imperfect gestures of peace and. . .
wonder of wonders,

Jesus Christ stands with us in our midst
and clothes us in the robe of his own glory
and, perhaps for just a moment,

we feel the weight of that glory resting on our shoulders,
and we know in that moment

that we truly are clad and enclosed in the goodness of God.

Solemnity of All Saints

2009-11-01T10:36:00.000-08:00

Readings: Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12a In his Revelation, St. John gives us a vision of the saints in heaven:
“a great multitude, which no one could count,
from every nation, race, people, and tongue.”
This redeemed multitude
worships before the throne of God, crying out,
“Salvation comes from our God,
who is seated on the throne,
and from the Lamb.”
It is a glorious vision of the saints
caught up in the worship of God.
And one of the most striking things about it
is the way in which the saints are envisioned
as being not just in the presence of God,
but in the presence of each other.

Our Catholic tradition tells us
that heaven is an eminently social place:
it is not a matter of the isolated soul
alone with God for eternity.
Rather, part of the joy of the saints in God’s kingdom
is the joy that they feel in being with each other.
St. Catherine of Siena, the 14th century Italian mystic,
wrote that the saints,
“rejoice and exult,
sharing each other’s goodness with loving affection. . . .
For when a soul reaches eternal life,
all share in her good and she in theirs. . . .
They experience a new freshness in their exultation —
a mirthfulness, a jubilation, a gladness —
in knowing this soul” (The Dialogue, ch. 41).
So the great multitude rejoice not simply in knowing God,
but in knowing the incredible varieties of goodness
that God’s grace has made possible in human beings:
the mother rejoices in the martyr’s courage
and the martyr in the mother’s patience;
the pastor rejoices in the scholar’s knowledge
and the scholar in the pastor’s prudence.
The saints bring with them the particular gifts
that God’s grace has poured into their lives
and then they share those gifts of holiness with each other,
so that each may delight in the goodness of others.

In our family there is an All Saint’s tradition that, to me,
embodies this sharing of gifts that we find in the saints.
On the eve of the solemnity of All Saints
our children go (or, at least did when they were little)
from house to house in our neighborhood
while dressed in costumes representing the multitude
drawn from every nation, race, people, and tongue
(you know: pirates, princesses and zombies)
and collect gifts, known as “treats,” from the neighbors.
Perhaps you have heard of such traditions;
your families may even have similar customs.
The highpoint of this traditional celebration of All Saints
has always been the point after the gifts have been collected
and the children gather at someone’s house,
dump out their bags on the floor,
and begin trading:
Kit Kats exchanged for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups;
bars of dark chocolate for bars of milk chocolate;
Circus Peanuts for. . .
well, you might just have to hang on to those.
And what is most remarkable is that,
aside from occasional bickering,
this exchange is characterized by great excitement and happiness.
And it is not just the excitement and happiness
of trading up for better candy,
but it is really the excitement and happiness
of being together with friends
and of both giving and receiving.
To borrow words from Catherine of Siena,
it is an occasion of mirthfulness, jubilation and gladness
as people rejoice and share in the gifts that others have received.
What more appropriate way to celebrate the saints
than to joyfully share our gifts with one another,
for this is what the saints do for eternity.

Last week Fr. Rich spoke about how our financial support of our parish
ought be something that we do not out of guilt, but out of gratitude.
I would go so far as to say that it should be an occasion
of mirthfulness, jubilation and gladness,
because it is a chance to take what God has given us
and to share it with each other.
Both our first and second collections are ways in which
we acknowledge God’s gifts to us
by sharing them with others.
In our second collection we share them with those outside our parish
who are most in need of material assistance,
and in our first collection we contribute to supporting the parish structures
that make our ministries possible:
keeping salaries paid and lights on and boilers heating.
The money we give makes it possible for us
to gather as a community of worship,
to be an image of God’s kingdom,
where the saints cry out in concert,
“Blessing and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving,
honor, power, and might be to our God forever and ever.”
Indeed, it not only makes this worship and community possible,
but in the offering of our gifts to God and to each other
we are engaged in an act of worship
and the building up of our community.
We are doing what the saints do for all eternity in God’s kingdom.
So it is appropriate that we do it together.

In a minute the ushers will pass out offertory pledge cards
and I will ask you to fill them out.
You are, of course, free to do so or not:
no one will twist your arm;
God will not spurn you;
the parish will not have to close its doors.
But what if we think of it not as paying our dues or paying a bill
or even making a contribution to a good cause,
but rather think of ourselves as children sitting on the floor
sharing their Halloween candy;
think of ourselves as the saints in heaven
sharing the gifts of God’s grace with each other.
It is an occasion of mirthfulness, jubilation and gladness.
Why would we not want to join in?

Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

2009-10-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Genesis 2:18-24; Hebrews 2:9-11; Mark 10:2-16
Today is designated by the Catholic Church in the United States
as “Respect Life Sunday.”
The phrase “respect for life” is not simply a code word
for the issue of abortion.
Catholic teaching on respect for life extends to issues
of poverty, healthcare, war, the death penalty,
the environment, the disabled and so forth.
As Eileen Egan put it, “The protection of life is a seamless garment.
You can’t protect some lives and not others.”
I would like to think that part of the strength
of our tradition of Catholic Social Teaching
is precisely the breadth of vision that is involved
when we speak of respect for life.
But I also think it is worth focusing at times
on respect for human life at its earliest stages of development
not least because many Catholics
feel confused and conflicted over how to think about this issue,
feeling as if they are being presented by our culture
with the demand that we choose between concern for the unborn
and concern for women.
Catholic teaching about respect for life says that this is a false choice.
But the only way that we will begin to see
another way of framing the issue
is if we begin with what, for Christians,
is the most fundamental question:
What does Jesus Christ require of us?

In today’s Gospel, we hear that Jesus
welcomed the children who were brought to him;
he blessed them, and told his disciples that
“the kingdom of God belongs to such as these,”
going on to say that “whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child
will not enter it.”
Jesus seems to be saying that those who inherit the kingdom of God
are those who, like children, are without power, without strength,
and who must rely entirely on others — who must rely entirely on God.
Those who are weak and vulnerable
have a privileged place within our community
because they are living signs of who we must become
if we wish to enter God’s reign.
As Catholics, our concern for the unborn
does not grow from a right to life that they possess,
but from the fact that we cannot be the people whom God calls us to be
unless we protect and foster the lives of those
who are least able to care for themselves,
unless we see the unique beauty and value
that grows from that vulnerability,
unless we extend to the most vulnerable
the same welcome that Jesus himself did.
To be who we are called to be as members of Christ’s body,
we must care for the unborn.

This is something distinct from the legal and political controversy
surrounding the issue of abortion.
In our Gospel reading today Jesus treats the question
put to him by the Pharisees
about the Jewish laws concerning marriage and divorce
as rather beside the point
when thinking about how his followers should approach these matters.
Jesus says that Moses gave them that law,
“because of the hardness of your hearts” —
to establish a minimum standard of semi-justice —
not as the standard by which we measure Christian discipleship.
If this is true of the Law given by God through Moses,
how much more true it is of our human laws.
Any legal structure will be at best
a distant approximation of the justice that God desires.
This does not mean that our laws are unimportant;
indeed, with regard to the issue of abortion,
I think every Catholic should desire
that our nation’s laws would foster and protect the lives of the unborn.
But, unlike some, I also think
that the exact nature of those laws,
and how they would relate to other goods
that need fostering and protection,
and how distantly or closely
they might approximate true justice,
are matters over which it is possible for Catholics to differ in good faith.
I have my own ideas about these matters,
and I am sure that many of you do as well,
and it might be interesting to discuss these sometime,
preferably over a drink, or maybe three.
But the political question, important as it is,
cannot be for us the first question.
The first question is not one of legislation
or court decisions
or executive orders;
it is the question, “what should we as the Church of Jesus Christ
do to help create a world
in which every child is welcomed
and cared for from the moment of conception,
and recognized as one of the ‘little ones’
whom Christ himself welcomes?”

In asking this question, we see that our concern for these children
is inseparable from a concern for the mothers of these children.
This is part of the reason why in Catholic teaching
the respect for life is a seamless garment:
we can’t separate the issue of abortion
from the fight against poverty or the fight for the dignity of women.
Our concern for the unborn must extend to the material needs
of women who are pregnant in difficult circumstances —
and this is an area in which individual Catholics
as well as numerous Catholic social service agencies
have an admirable record,
though there is of course always more that can be done.

But our concern must extend beyond material needs.
We have a gospel — good news — to share,
what Pope John Paul II called “The Gospel of Life.”
And part of the message of this gospel
is that even when it appears that there is no way forward,
when we can see no good choices,
when we seem trapped by circumstances,
we can have faith that God can make a way forward,
and, with the help of God’s grace and God’s people,
God can strengthen us to choose life.
People often see the abortion issue in terms of tragic choices,
and I would never want to underestimate the moral struggle
of women who find themselves pregnant in difficult circumstances,
or to suggest that choosing life
does not often require women to live lives of heroic virtue.
Choosing life might mean raising a child
when you are young or single or poor.
Choosing life might mean caring for a disabled child
long past his or her childhood, on into adulthood.
Choosing life might mean living with the life-long sense of loss
experienced by many women who surrender their children for adoption.
These are heroic choices.
But the Gospel tells us that God’s grace makes such heroism possible,
if we can receive that grace with the trust of a child
and if God’s Church is ready to be the kind of community
that will itself go to heroic lengths
to be the kind of community where such heroic choices can be lived out.
The Gospel also tells us that when we fail to live heroically,
there is mercy and forgiveness to be found in God’s Church.

For Christians, there are no tragic dead ends,
because the world’s story is ultimately not a tragedy,
that ends with the bodies of the dead
strewn across the stage of history
and nothing left to do but the work of mourning.
Rather, for Christians the world’s story ends
with the marriage of heaven and earth
and the wedding feast of the lamb.
This is the vision that we have to offer to the world:
a vision that sees the beauty in vulnerability,
a vision that we possess only to the degree
that we actually put it into practice.
This is the vision that must sustain our hope
that our respect for life
can weave together concern for the unborn
and concern for women,
together with concern for the poor, the elderly,
the disabled and the imprisoned,
into a seamless garment in which we,
as Christ’s body,
can be clothed
as we bear witness
to the Gospel of Life in our world.

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

2009-09-06T09:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: Isaiah 35:4-7a; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37In today’s Gospel we hear of Jesus
engaging in what might seem to us unusual behavior.
Confronted with a man who cannot hear or speak,
he touches the body part to be healed,
sticking his fingers in the man’s ears.
He puts his spit on the man’s tongue,
as if it were possessed of magical properties.
He groans, perhaps in effort or for dramatic effect?
And he speaks a magical word — Ephphatha! —
which our Gospel writer Mark
is careful to keep in its original, Aramaic form.
In short, he acts very much like a typical magical healer
in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Such a depiction of Jesus as a “magician” makes Christians nervous.
Indeed, it made the Gospel writers Matthew and Luke nervous enough
that this is one of the few incidents recounted in Mark’s Gospel
that they do not include it in their own Gospels.
The idea that Jesus might have behaved in such a way
that people would have seen him as a magician
seems to trivialize what he was about;
it seems to reduce Christianity to a superstitious cult
that is about manipulation of occult forces
rather than the worship of God in spirit and in truth.
We Catholics might be particularly sensitive to this,
since the sacramental nature of our worship
sometimes strikes other Christians as indistinguishable
from various forms of religious magic
that can be found in many so-called “primitive” cultures.
We want to say that our sacraments are radically different
from the ritualistic magic of tribal peoples.

But perhaps we protest too much.
Maybe these so-called “primitive” cultures recognize something
that we modernized,
industrialized,
urbanized,
individualized,
rationalized people have forgotten.
We human beings are ritual animals;
we make meaning with bodily gestures.
Symbolic action is the DNA of human cultures,
the means by which tradition is transmitted and imbibed,
an effective means of communicating
that which is distinctively human.
Even more, our rituals are signs of a deep mystery
that lies at the heart of the world’s existence,
and they are the means by which that mystery gives itself to us.
So there is really no reason for us Catholics to apologize
for believing that our ritual actions actually make something happen,
that they are, for lack of a better word, magical.
After all, if Mark’s Gospel is to be trusted,
Jesus did not hesitate to engage in “magical” behavior.

But perhaps we do need to make some distinctions
between different sorts of “magic.”
The kind that is probably most familiar to us,
the sort traditionally performed by men on stages
wearing tuxedos and top hats and waving magic wands,
the kind you see at a “magic show,”
is really a matter of illusion, clever and entertaining,
but not really magic at all.
I think it is safe to say that this is not the sort of magic
that is going on
either in today’s Gospel or in the sacraments.

Then there is the “magic” that is associated with incantations and spells —
potions, crystals, amulets, curses, voodoo dolls, the evil eye, and so forth.
This crops up in a variety of places:
from ancient folk beliefs to new age religions to the Harry Potter books.
This magic seeks to control unseen forces in the universe
in order to attain a desired result --
asort of primitive technology
by which people have sought some measure of control
over cosmic forces.
At its best, it expresses our human desire to live in an enchanted world
with hidden possibilities.
But in any case, I think it is safe to say that this is not the sort of magic
that is going on
either in today’s Gospel or in the sacraments.
Jesus is not manipulating hidden forces in order to heal the man;
rather, the healing power of God is manifesting itself
through his symbolic actions.
Likewise, the sacraments are not about our power to control,
but about God’s power to act through our human rituals.

This is a third form of magic.
At least, I cannot think of a better word than “magic”
to convey the idea
of that which makes possible
what we normally consider impossible.
This is the real magic
that will satisfy the desire for an enchanted world.
In literary terms, the world of Christian faith
is a world of “magical realism” —
the magic of God’s hidden power manifesting itself in our reality,
transforming our symbols and rituals
so that they become effective signs of God’s grace.
Jesus’ actions —
involving touch and spit and groaning and ritual phrases —
show us that there is real magic in the world:
there is hope for the hopeless,
there is forgiveness for sinners,
there is release for captives,
there is a home for the outcast.
The world of dead ends and limited possibilities
is not the final truth about the world.
To believe in real magic, the magic of God,
is to believe that when you are in a situation
in which you can see no way forward —
whether depression or addiction
or a broken relationship or professional failure —
that is not the end of the story:
when you cannot hear, cannot speak, cannot see a future,
God can touch you,
God can release you,
God can show you a way forward.
And in the sacraments, the real magic of God touches us
just like Jesus touched the man in today’s Gospel.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be embarrassed by Jesus acting like a magician.
The world is hungry for magic, for real magic.
The world is hungry for the hope that what appears possible to us
is not in fact the limit of the possible.
Let us have confidence that in our sacramental celebration
Jesus will touch us and say to us ephphatha — be opened:
be opened to hear the silent music that sustains the world;
be opened to speak a word of hope to the hopeless,
be opened to embrace
the impossible possibility of the kingdom of God.

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

2009-08-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

Readings: 1 Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:30—5:2; John 6:41-51
In today’s second reading, Paul gives the Ephesians
a command that, at first glance,
might strike us as rather strange: “be imitators of God.”

Imitators?
It sounds sort of. . . phony. . . and pathetic.
No one wants to be a copycat, a poseur, a clone, a wannabe.
We like to think of ourselves as those
who march to the beat of a different drummer,
who take the road less traveled,
who think outside the box. . .
or whatever other cliché you prefer to invoke.
We want to be trendsetters,
and not trendy.
We want to be the ones who are imitated,
and not the ones who imitate.

Yet a certain impulse to imitate
seems to be built into our human nature.
Indeed, some have argued that imitation
is at the heart of human desire —
that a major factor in the desirability of something for us
is our perception of its desirability to others.
In other words, seeing someone desiring something
awakens in me a desire for that same thing,
precisely because I see another desiring it.
My desire has less to do with the intrinsic worth of the thing
and more to do with my imitation of the desire of another.

I do not know if all desire can be explained in this way,
but it would certainly seem to explain a lot:
from romantic triangles to professional rivalries
to inexplicable fads like Tickle-Me-Elmo.
I never noticed how attractive someone was
until she started dating my friend;
I didn’t particularly want the job,
until my colleague applied for it;
I hadn’t noticed how much I needed a particular product
until I heard about people standing in line for it.

This imitative element in desire
might to some degree also explain
the conflict that seems endemic in human relationships.
Because my desire is awakened by your desire,
you and I must become rivals in our desiring:
we both want the same object,
but we can’t both have it.
Whether it is a person or a position or a product,
the imitative character of desire
means that my gain is your loss, and vice versa.
And because of such rivalry,
we come to view life as a competition
and others as a threat.
So not only is imitation pathetically uncool,
but the imitative nature of our desire
leads to the very evils
that Paul speaks of in our second reading:
bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling.

So why, then, does Paul call on us to imitate God?
Because imitating God is not like imitating another person:
God’s gain is not my loss.
God is not a rival with whom we are in competition.
God needs nothing.
God lacks nothing.
God is rather the source of all things:
pure generosity without boundaries;
the inexhaustible source of the torrent of life
that pours constantly into our world.
God desires nothing but to share God’s goodness.

This is the God whom Paul calls us to imitate
by being “kind to one another, compassionate,
forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.”
Our imitation of God, our desiring what God desires,
is the medicine that can heal our rivalries.

But how is this possible?
How can a mere human being imitate God?
We should always remember
that we are created in God’s image and likeness,
so that if we can manage, through God’s grace,
to be the people God created us to be,
we are already imitating God, being God’s image.

And we see what this looks like
by looking at the life of Jesus.
Jesus is the Word of God made flesh
and the image of the invisible Father,
but he is also fully human,
like us in all things except sin.
In him we see what it means
for human beings to be the people God created them to be.
To desire what God desires
is to desire to live the kind of life Christ lived.
As Paul tells us: “live in love, as Christ loved us
and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God.”
Or, as Jesus says in our Gospel,
he gives his flesh “for the life of the world.”
To imitate God is to imitate Christ,
who holds nothing back,
who sees no one as his rival
and desires nothing but to share God’s goodness,
who goes to his death rather than live in any other way.

Some imitate Christ in a quite literal way,
by laying down their lives for the cause of God.
These we call martyrs and we rightly venerate them.
For most of us, however, this imitation
happens in small, undramatic ways.
It happens when we rejoice in the good fortune of others,
and manage not to see their gain as our loss.
It happens when we desire to live our lives
in service of those less fortunate
and to see in their flourishing our own flourishing.

So in the coming week, take some time to reflect on your desires
Do they foster in you a sense of rivalry with others?
Or are they the desires of God, the desire to be more like Christ,
the desire to live a life of joy and generosity?
And as we discern the source of our desires
let us pray that, through the grace of Christ,
we might become imitators of God.

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2009-07-26T07:12:00.000-07:00

For most of this year,
our Gospel reading is taken from the Gospel of Mark,
but today we begin what we might call
the lectionary's “Johannine digression.”
For today and for the next four Sundays following,
our Gospel reading is taken from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel,
the so-called “Bread of Life Discourse.”
It is in this section of his Gospel that John,
who does not recount Jesus’ words
over the bread and wine at the Last Supper,
shows us Jesus speaking of himself
as the true bread that has come down from heaven
and in whom we abide by eating his Eucharistic flesh.

John prefaces this “Bread of Life Discourse” with a miracle story
that is found in all four of the Gospels:
the familiar story of Jesus feeding the multitude
with five loaves and two fish.
John underscores the Eucharistic echoes of this miracle,
by telling us that it occurs at Passover time —
the same time when Jesus will eat
his final meal with his disciples one year later —
and he describes the actions of Jesus in the same terms
used by the other Gospel writers at the Last Supper:
Jesus takes the loaves, gives thanks, and distributes them.
In feeding the multitude,
Jesus foreshadows what he will do at the Last Supper,
and what he does for us every time we gather at his altar.

In preaching on this text, St. John Chrysostom,
who lived in the last half of the 4th century,
raised an interesting question:
why doesn’t Jesus simply create food out of thin air?
Why bother to multiply the food that was there,
rather than simply make new food from nothing?
After all, barley loaves and pickled fish
were pretty simple, lowbrow food —
a young boy's lunch;
maybe the first-century equivalent
of saltines and canned sardines —
and Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh,
through whom the universe was created from nothing,
could surely have conjured up something more exciting,
something more elegant,
something that would be a special treat
for the multitude that had followed him across the sea of Galilee.
So why does he choose not to throw out that simple peasant food
and create from nothing a great feast of the finest delicacies?

According to Chrysostom, it is because he wished to use
“the creation itself as a groundwork for his marvels”
(Homily 42 on the Gospel of John).
Rather than create something anew,
Jesus takes what is already at hand,
and transforms it by multiplying it,
so as to feed a multitude.

It seems to me that in wishing to use creation
as the groundwork for his miracle
Jesus is pointing out two things to us.

First, creation itself is already miraculous.
John Chrysostom’s contemporary, St. Augustine,
in preaching on this same passage,
noted how odd it is
that the multitude marvels
at the multiplication of the loaves and fishes,
but takes no notice of the miraculous fact
of God’s on-going and continuous activity in the world.
He says, “Governing the entire universe is a greater miracle
than feeding five thousand people with five loaves of bread,
yet no one marvels at it.
People marvel at the feeding of the five thousand
not because this miracle is greater,
but because it is out of the ordinary”
(Homilies on the Gospel of John 24, 1.6.7).
Jesus works miracles not to convince us
that God can, on occasion, do extraordinary things,
but to awaken us to the fact
that God does extraordinary things all the time.
This is why in John’s Gospel
the miracles are always referred to as “signs.”
Like a sign, they point away from themselves to something else:
the constant extraordinary action of God
in what we think of as the most ordinary events of life.

Second, the way God works in the world
is not by discarding the ordinary realities of creation
and substituting for them something new and different,
but by taking what is already at hand and transforming it.
If God’s creation and preservation of the world is itself a miracle,
as Augustine said,
then God does not need something “better” to work with
in order to save us.
Just as Christ uses the simple loaves of barley
to feed the multitude,
so too he can use the simple substance of our lives
to make his kingdom present.
We might look at our lives and ask, like Andrew in today’s Gospel,
“what good is this for so many?’
but it is good enough if Christ takes it and blesses it.
An adage of traditional Catholic theology
is that “grace perfects and does not destroy nature.”
This means that becoming a new creation in Christ
does not involve the destruction of who we are
but rather is our perfecting and transformation
into who we truly are in God’s eyes,
the miraculous beings whom God has loved into existence.

So as we continue to reflect on this story
of the miraculous feeding of the multitude,
let us pray that we grow ever more attentive
to the miraculous ways in which God feeds us everyday,
the way in which God feeds our bodies
with the food that comes from the earth,
and the way in which God feeds our souls with Christ,
the bread who has come down from heaven.
Let the miracle of the Eucharist awaken us to the ways in which
God uses the daily bread of our lives
and transforms and perfects it to become the bread of angels.

Don’t miss the miracle that you live everyday,
because it is this everyday life
that Christ will take into his hands,
and bless,
and multiply to feed a multitude.

12th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2009-06-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

Three years ago this month I went with a group of people,
including some Corpus Christi parishioners,
down to New Orleans to participate in the efforts
to rebuild the city after hurricane Katrina,
which had hit the gulf coast some nine-months previously.
I say “rebuilding efforts” but in fact what we spent the week doing
was emptying and gutting a house in the lower Ninth Ward —
a low-income area of the city that was particularly hard-hit
in the flooding following Katrina —
as a prelude to its possible rebuilding.
Wearing protective masks and heavy clothing,
we spent our days hauling out furniture, appliances,
and personal belongings
that had been ruined by the rising waters,
and then tearing out the mold-covered walls and floors
so that the house would be ready if, one day,
the owner might find the money and emotional energy to rebuild.

Two things stand out in my mind from this experience.
One is the immense destructive power of water.
The interior of this house looked as if a giant
had picked the whole thing up
and shaken it vigorously.
Furniture had been moved from one room to another;
heavy appliances had been overturned;
every single item that was touched by the water
had been displaced.
And this was not simply one house;
when we stepped outside and looked up and down the street,
we saw an entire community that had been destroyed by water:
almost all of the houses were deserted
and the only people on the streets seemed to be National Guardsmen
and occasional drug dealers.
I have never in my life had a keener sense
of the deadly, destructive power of water.

This destructive power of water
is highlighted in our first reading and Gospel.
More precisely, we are assured in those readings
that God’s power is greater than water’s destructive power.
God can bar the doors of the sea
and say to the proud waves, “be stilled.”
And Christ, the power of God incarnate,
can “rebuked the wind” and say to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!”
It is the God who creates the sea who can command it,
and this is the God we encounter in Jesus Christ.

The other thing that stands out in my mind
from that week in New Orleans
was how the combination of our heavy protective clothing
and the climate of New Orleans in June,
with temperatures in the nineties,
gave me not just a sense of water’s destructive power,
but also a sense of the life-giving and life-sustaining power of water.
We were told that frequent water breaks
were not a luxury but a necessity
and we quickly learned that this was true.
We sometimes say that we are “dying of thirst,”
but during that week I began to have some sense
of what this might mean in a literal sense.
The same element that had destroyed the lives
of the residents of the lower Ninth Ward
was also life-sustaining.
Indeed, one of the factors preventing people from moving back
was the lack of fresh water.

The power of water to give death is matched by its power to give life
and it is for this reason, I believe,
that Christ chose water as the outward sign
of the sacrament by which we become members of his body,
the sacrament we celebrate today.

In our second reading, Paul tells us
that “whoever is in Christ is a new creation.”
Paul sees salvation not in terms of what happens after we die,
but rather in terms becoming a “new creation,”
of taking on a new sort of existence
that he characterizes as being “in Christ.”
This is an existence in which we live no longer for ourselves,
but for the God who creates and redeems us.
And our Catholic faith is that this normally happens to us
through the sacrament of baptism.
In baptism, the life-giving power of water
is raised by God to a new level.
The water that sustains our mortal lives
is taken up by God in baptism
to become the instrument through which
God grants us immortal life,
through which we become a new creation.

But Paul also tells us that becoming this new creation
means leaving behind our old self:
“the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.”
And here we return to the destructive power of water,
the power of water to sweep away all in its path.
The waters of baptism are the waters of life,
but they are also, in a certain sense, the waters of death —
the death of an old way of life:
a way of life that we are born into as members of the human race,
a way of life in which we live only for ourselves,
a way of life that Jesus died to free us from.
Old things must be swept away by the flood of baptism
so that new things might come.
In baptism, our old self is plunged into the waters of death
so that we might arise from the waters of life as a new creation.

Death and new life:
this is pretty serious business for a tiny baby.
Indeed, it sounds sort of risky.
But it is precisely because life itself
is a serious, risky business
that we bring our children to the waters of baptism.
We bring them because we believe
that they too have been born into that old way of life
from which all of us must be freed.
We bring them because we believe
that dying to the old ways of living for ourselves
and leading the life of the new creation in Christ
is the path of true life.
We bring them because we believe
that Christ is the one “whom even wind and sea obey”
and that those who have faith in him need not fear.
So let the waters of baptism
sweep away the old life,
and let the waters of baptism
give and sustain our new life in Christ.

Easter 6

2009-05-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

St. Thomas Aquinas,
at the end of his lengthy commentary on John’s Gospel,
recounts the medieval legend that “as an old man
John was carried to the church by his followers
to teach the faithful.
He taught only one thing:
‘Little children, love one another.’”
Then Thomas adds,
“This is the perfection of the Christian life” (§2653).

This is a legend and not from scripture,
but it rings true with our second reading and Gospel for today,
both of which are traditionally ascribed to St. John
and both of which place love at the center of their message.
From the first letter of John:
“let us love one another, because love is of God.”
From our Gospel:
“This I command you: love one another.”
This is the perfection of the Christian life:
to know the one, true and living God.
And we come to know God by loving because God is love,
and when we love, we know God, as it were, from the inside.

This sounds like pretty good news.
Love: this is the commandment of Christ to his disciples.
Disciples who love will “bear fruit that will remain.”
What could be more simple than that?
As St. Augustine said,
“Love, and do what you will” (Homilies on 1 John 7.8).

But anyone who loves knows
that love is really not simple at all.
Our feelings about people and things
can be complex and conflicted.
Our love finds itself entangled
with a host of emotions and passions,
not excluding anger, jealousy, lust and pride,
which makes it difficult for us to separate what is love
from what might be something else, some darker impulse,
that has attached itself to our love, or masquerades as love.
People bind themselves to others in the name of love,
but they also break those bonds in the name of love.
People die in the name of love,
but they also kill in the name of love.
St. Augustine’s injunction, “love, and do what you will,”
can be twisted so that any action on our part can be justified
so long as we do it in the name of love.

This has been on my mind recently
particularly in light of the highly-publicized murder
of Stephanie Parente, a student at Loyola College, where I teach.
Stephanie, along with her mother and sister,
was killed by her father,
who then took his own life.
I did not know Stephanie personally,
but the impact of her murder on her friends,
many of whom are my students,
and the particular nature of this crime,
a father murdering his family,
has caused me to reflect on this event
more than I might on the typical human tragedy
that confronts me in my morning paper.

I don’t think anyone yet knows what role, if any,
mental illness might have played in this tragedy,
and how this might affect our understanding of this man’s actions.
But what has haunted me
is that this man who killed his wife and children
appears from all reports to have loved them.
What haunts me more is that he quite possibly thought
that he was taking their lives because he loved them —
that he was somehow protecting them,
or ensuring that he could have them with him even in death.
Could it be that he used love as the justification for his actions?

“Love, and do what you will?”
In this case, surely not.
This man may have loved his family;
that is not my place to judge.
But this was not an act that was born out of love
but out of some darker passion that hid behind the mask of love.
Surely there are actions that are simply incompatible with love,
and yet our human love can become so twisted by sin
that we attempt to justify these actions in the name of love.
This is an extreme example,
but the shadow of sin falls across us all
and if I am honest with myself I find that I my love too
is not immune from the darker impulses of the human species.

But thanks be to God that all this talk about love
that we hear in today’s readings
is not first and foremost about our human love at all.
Our second reading says: “this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”
This phrase “expiation for our sins”
is perhaps somewhat ominous and technical sounding,
but what it means is that God has sent us Jesus
to redeem the failures of our love.
We are to love one another
not according to the pattern of our fallen human love —
a love that has become entwined with other, darker passions —
but with the pure love that Christ showed on the cross,
the love that lays down its life so as to give new life.
This is the pattern of true love in which we are to abide
and the good news of Jesus Christ
is that God gives it to us as a gift
because God is love.
It is not something that we achieve,
but something that God achieves in us.
Through the free gift of God’s love,
our human love can, over the course of a lifetime,
begin to be untwisted,
disentangled from those dark passions that hide within it;
it can be remade according to the pattern of Christ’s love.
In the waters of baptism, love can be purified,
because we are immersed in God’s own love.
At the table of the Eucharist, true love can be nourished in us,
because the love of God becomes our food and drink.
This is the gift of love in which we are to abide.
This is the love that Christ commands.
This is the perfection of the Christian life.

Easter 4

2009-05-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

Every year, on the fourth Sunday of Easter,
our Gospel reading is one of the passages from the tenth chapter of John
in which Jesus speaks of himself as a shepherd.
Thus, in the tradition of the Church,
this has come to be called “Good Shepherd Sunday.”
The image of Jesus as a shepherd is one that is familiar to us all —
indeed, some of the earliest artistic representations of Jesus that we have
are not the familiar robed and bearded figure
but the image of a young, beardless shepherd boy.
The image of a shepherd was a resonant one for early Christians,
and not simply because shepherds
were relatively more common two thousand years ago
than they are now.
It was an image rooted in the Old Testament’s understanding
of what sort of king God desired for the people of Israel.
The king was not to be
one who used and exploited the people for his own gain,
but was to care for them and guide them and protect them.
And as the Jewish people hope for a messiah —
a savior who would restore the fortunes of their nation
and lead them in the ways of God —
this image of the shepherd king
became a way of expressing that hope.

In speaking of himself as a shepherd,
Jesus is claiming to be the fulfillment of that hope:
the king who will care for and guide
and protect the flock of God’s people.
But more than that:
in calling himself the good shepherd,
the shepherd who not only cares for
and guides and protects the sheep,
but even lays down his life for them,
Jesus presents himself as the one who surpasses Israel’s hopes —
a radically new kind of shepherd, a new sort of leader.
The kind of rule that Jesus exercises
involves nothing less than giving his life for his people:
the stone rejected by the builders
who has become the cornerstone of God’s new temple.
In Jesus’ laying down of his life, God’s love is bestowed on us,
so that we may be called children of God.

But this is not simply the kind of leadership,
the kind of shepherding,
that Jesus himself exercises.
He calls us, too, to be shepherds.
At our baptisms we were anointed with the oil of Chrism
to share in Christ’s ministry of priest, prophet and king.
We share in his priestly ministry
by worshiping God as part of Christ’s body, the Church.
We share his prophetic ministry
by bearing witness to his Gospel in the world.
And we share in his kingly ministry, his royal ministry of shepherd,
by exercising the kind of care and guidance of others that he exercised:
the kind of care and guidance that calls us to lay down our lives.
As the first letter of John puts it:
“We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us —
and we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 Jn 3:16).

So part of our being sent as Jesus’ disciples
is our being sent to be good shepherds
who will lay down our lives
for those whom God has put into our care.
Not the kind of care and guidance
that dominates or smothers,
but the kind that empowers and gives life,
even if this requires us to sacrifice ourselves.

Of course, the language of laying down one’s life
conjures images of dramatic acts of sacrifice,
in which one dies in the act of defending
those whom one has been charged to protect.
It conjures such images
not least because this is precisely what Jesus does:
he is the good shepherd who gives his life
to keep the wolf from catching and scattering his sheep.
And perhaps it is the case that some of us
will lay down our lives in this dramatic way.
But we ought not let these dramatic images lead us to overlook
the more mundane, every-day ways in which we lay down our lives
for those who have been put into our care.

Any parent who has walked the floor in the middle of the night
with a sick or fussy baby
or who manages to let go of the parental grasp
and send their child out into the adult world
knows what it means to lay down one’s life.
So too, any child who cares for an aging parent
with patience and forbearance
knows what it means to lay down one’s life.
Any employer or supervisor who stays late at the office
figuring out how to tweak the budget,
or who forgoes a bonus,
in order not to have to lay anyone off
knows what it means to lay down one’s life.
Any minister, ordained or lay,
who spends hours listening to his or her people,
sharing their struggles and joys,
while still laughing at jokes
about only having to work one day a week
knows what it means to lay down one’s life.
All of these involve a kind of dying to oneself
so that others might have life in its fullness.
All of these can be ways that we as disciples
answer Christ’s call to lay down our lives.

But Christ does not simply say that he is the good shepherd
who lays down his life for his sheep;
he says that he has “power to lay it down,
and power to take it up again.”
And it is part of our Easter faith as Christians
that he has power to take up our lives as well,
if we lay them down for the sake of his flock.
The kind of dying to self that is involved in being a good shepherd —
a good parent or child or manager or minister —
might at times seem beyond our capacity.
But the call to lay down our lives is in the end
not simply a call to self-sacrifice,
but rather is a call to entrust ourselves
to the one who is our good shepherd,
the who has laid down his life for us
and who will take up our lives with his into eternal life.
For the Lord is our shepherd, and there is nothing we shall want.

Easter 2

2009-04-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
During Lent we have been reflecting on our call as disciples —
our call to sit at the feet of Jesus
and learn from him the path that leads to true life.
We have gathered on Sundays and Wednesdays to pray and reflect
and to deepen our relationship with Christ
and the relationships we have with each other in Christ.
But today, as we move further into the Easter season,
we hear something different.
We hear not so much “come, you are called” as “go, you are sent.”
Jesus is still calling us as disciples, of course,
but having been called to be formed in our identity as disciples,
now we are called to live out our identity as disciples in the world.
Having been called, now we are sent.

But today’s Gospel calls us to notice not simply that we are sent,
but that we are sent in a specific way, after a particular pattern:
“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
In other words, we are sent by Jesus
in the same way that Jesus has been sent by his Father
into the world of human history.
But what is it about the way that Jesus has been sent by his Father,
that is reproduced in our own being sent by Jesus?

Referring to this verse, St. Gregory the Great wrote:
“The Lord is sending his chosen apostles into the world,
not to the world’s joys,
but to suffer as he himself was sent.
Therefore as the Son is loved by the Father
and yet is sent to suffer,
so also the disciples are loved by the Lord [Jesus],
who nevertheless sends them into the world to suffer” (Homily 26).

Well, how is that for raining on your Easter parade?
Here we are, still basking in our Easter joy,
and Gregory comes along to tell us
that being sent by Jesus as he has been sent by the Father
means being sent to the cross.

I remember a few years ago when Clarence Hicks was in RCIA,
he used to ask, “Did Jesus have to suffer and die on the Cross?
Was it God’s will that Jesus die?”
This is a profound question.
It pushes us to ask how it is possible that the Father who loved Jesus
could have sent him to a world in which he would have to suffer and die.
Was that the point of the whole thing?
And this is inseparable from the question of how Jesus,
who loved his disciples,
could send them out into a world
in which they would have to suffer and die.
How can one who loves us
call us to a life of discipleship that will lead to suffering?
Is suffering the whole point of discipleship?

Here we are dealing with the deep mysteries
of how the divine will plays itself out in history,
something that surpasses our comprehension,
and perhaps the best we can do
is try to come up with analogies from our own experience.
So when I ask myself,
why is it that God the Father would send Jesus into the world
knowing that he would suffer,
and why would Jesus send his disciples into the world,
knowing that they would suffer,
I think about my own children and what I hope for them.
When I ask myself, “who do I want my children to be?” I think:
I want them to be honest,
I want them to be generous,
I want them to be loving,
I want them to be people who have faith in God.
And I want them to be all of these things because I love them
and because I believe that all of these qualities
are what makes a human being truly happy.
But at the same time I know that if they are honest,
they will meet opposition;
I know that if they are generous,
people will try to take advantage of them;
I know that if they are loving,
they may well have their hearts broken;
and I know that if they are faithful to God,
they will not turn back, even in the face of suffering.
So, do I desire the suffering of my children?
I don’t think so.
What I want is for them to live truly human lives,
even though I know that in a world marked by evil
such a life will inevitably bring with it a measure of suffering.
And so my children are loved by their father,
who nevertheless sends them into the world to suffer,
yet it is not the suffering I desire,
rather I desire for them the kind of life that leads to true happiness.

I think it is something like this that is going on
with the suffering that must be endured by Jesus
and those who would be his disciples.
God does not desire that Jesus suffer,
but rather that Jesus live the sort of human life —
a life of love and faithfulness —
that is the path to true happiness.
It is the life lived, not the suffering endured, that is the point.
But in a world marked by sin, a life of love and faithfulness
will bring with it a measure of suffering,
and in the case a Jesus a suffering beyond all measure.
And so too Jesus does not desire that his disciples suffer,
but rather that their lives, like his,
would be lives of love and faithfulness.
And such a life — the life of a true disciple —
is the pearl of great price;
it is a way of life of such value
that it is worth the suffering that it might entail.

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
We as disciples have been sent by Christ
on the path that he himself trod,
the path that led him to the Cross,
but not a path that ended there.
And because it did not end there,
we are sent as those who through our faith
are already victors in the struggle of life with death.
And if we believe this, if we really believe this,
then we will know that the path of Christ
that we as disciples walk
is not simply the path of suffering
but is in fact the path that leads through the empty tomb
into the very life of God.

Holy Thursday

2009-04-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

I recall a particular Holy Thursday, over 20 years ago,
listening to the first reading, the story of the Passover.
It suddenly struck me that this story
was not about something that happened years ago
to an obscure group of slaves in bronze-age Egypt,
but, in some mysterious way,
was about something that had happened to me.
I had been marked with the blood of the lamb who was slain,
and the angel of death had passed over me,
and I was the one who was to remember and give thanks.
Though I could not explain it in any way
that would fully satisfy the demands of reason,
I knew that this story was also my story,
the story of all of us who have been baptized into Christ
and marked with the sign of his cross.
In the years since then,
I have struggled to understand this mystery.
Isn't this, after all, what theologians are supposed to do?
Isn't this, after all, what all of us as disciples are supposed to do:
to sit at the feet of our master and learn and understand?
But before some mysteries understanding must, in the end,
give way to silent, ecstatic adoration.
This too is part of what it means to be a disciple:
to learn how to live in the mystery that we cannot master.

This night is filled with such mysteries.
Or, rather, this night is filled
with the one mystery that is the story of Christ:
the one mystery that is refracted
through a multitude of particular mysteries:
a people saved from slavery and death by the blood of a lamb,
a meal in which the flesh of God becomes our food,
the creator of the universe stooping to wash our feet.
These things are mysteries
not because they leave something hidden from us,
but because they show us everything,
and our finite human minds cannot take it in.
In the second century Melito of Sardis spoke of Christ,
the Alpha and the Omega,
as “the beginning which cannot be explained
and the end which cannot be grasped.”
In Christ, nothing is hidden; everything is revealed.
But just as we can be blinded by light that is too bright for our eyes,
the light shed by Christ dazzles our reason
and disorients our desire to grasp and control the mystery that is God.

Of course, we have our techniques.
We have our ways of trying to tame this mystery,
to make it something that we can handle,
something we can use,
something we can master.
We can turn the story of the first Passover
into a simple historical event, locked in the past.
We can turn the mystery of Eucharist
into a human meal of fellowship and remembrance.
We can turn Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet
into a simple moral lesson about service.

Such things can be easily grasped, easily mastered,
if we reduce them to our level of understanding
and hold them at a safe distance.
Or so we think.
But on this night we do not observe these things from afar;
rather, through our liturgical celebration we dwell in these events
and let them dwell in us.
We become disciples of the mystery
and let it pervade our consciousness.
We unclench the grasp of merely human reason
so that our hearts and souls and minds
can be carried beyond themselves
into the very life of God.

In a few moments, in the ceremony of the washing of feet,
we shall obey the command of Christ:
“as I have done for you, you should also do.”
We shall follow his example of humble service
in a ritual that speaks to us of our call as disciples
to serve those who are in need.
For we wash feet in myriad ways:
giving food to the hungry,
seeking justice for the oppressed,
offering friendship to the lonely.
In all of these actions we follow Jesus’ example
and fulfill his command:
“as I have done for you, you should also do.”

But there is more going on in Jesus’ washing of his disciples' feet
than a simple example for emulation.
Rather, it is an enacted parable of the mystery of our salvation.
When Jesus removes his outer cloak
and ties the servant’s towel around his waist
this is not simply part of the practical business of footwashing.
It is an action that brings before our eyes
the mystery of the eternal Son of God
stripping himself of his divine glory and taking the form of a servant,
so that he might stoop at the feet of his own creation
and pour out his life for the world,
a cleansing flood that can wash away the stain of sin
and give us new life.
For the water that flows over the feet of the disciples
is in fact the blood of Christ:
the blood of the sacrificed lamb
that marks and protects the dwelling of God’s people,
the blood that is in the cup of eternal salvation
from which we are invited to drink.
It is this mystery that enfolds and sustains
our giving of food,
our seeking of justice,
our offering of friendship.

We try to understand this, and it is right that we do so,
for Christ speaks to us the same words he spoke to Peter:
“What I am doing, you do not understand now,
but you will understand later.”
And we will understand, in the end, when we see God face to face
and know as we are known.
But what we will understand, in the end, is that we stand before a mystery:
it is not something that we master,
but something that masters us.
We will understand that we live within the mystery of God,
and that this is what it means truly to live.
And so, tonight, let our minds bow before
the mystery that has stooped to wash our feet,
the mystery that has given its life to guard us from death,
the mystery that has become our food and drink.

Lent 3

2009-03-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

During this Lenten season
we have been focusing on our call as disciples of Jesus —
our call to sit at his feet and learn from him,
our call to follow him where he would lead us.
Of course part of the difficulty in reflecting on our call as disciples
is the difficulty we have in thinking of ourselves as disciples at all.
“Disciples?” we ask.
“Weren’t those the people who followed Jesus around
2000 years ago in Palestine?”
We tend to this of the disciples as Jesus’ contemporaries,
and we presume that the time of discipleship is past.

But even once we grasp the idea
that “disciple” is a more general term
that can include us today as we seek to be followers of Jesus,
I suspect that we continue to feel that we are at some disadvantage
by comparison with those
who could actually see Jesus with their own eyes
and hear Jesus with their own ears.
I don't mean to make excuses,
but I sometimes find myself thinking that
if I could have heard Jesus' preaching with my own ears,
if I could have seen Jesus’ miracles with my own eyes,
then I would have the same kind of faith,
the same kind of hope,
and the same kind of love
as disciples like Peter or James or John or Mary Magdalene.
If I could have been Jesus’ contemporary during his earthly ministry
then I could have heard first hand
his call to sit at his feet and learn from him,
his call to follow him where he would lead me.
If I could have been his contemporary,
then I could have been a real disciple.
As it is, I feel as if the best I can do
is be what the philosopher Kierkegaard called
“a disciple at second hand.”

But our Gospel today indicates that being Jesus’ contemporary
did not necessarily confer any advantage
with regard to being his disciple.
In today’s reading from John’s Gospel,
Jesus performs a rather strange, disruptive act
in the temple in Jerusalem,
utters some cryptic words about his Father’s house,
and speaks mysteriously
about a temple being torn down and rebuilt in three days —
and his disciples are left, frankly, baffled.
They have no idea what he is talking about.
They see his actions with their own eyes
and hear his words with their own ears
and they are at least as puzzled as we are.
John tells us that it was only several years later,
after Jesus had been raised from the dead,
that they begin to understand
that it is his body that was the temple
torn down and rebuilt in three days.
John tells us that it is only after,
when Jesus’ mortal voice had faded from their hearing,
that, “his disciples remembered that he had said this,
and they came to believe the Scripture
and the word Jesus had spoken.”
Though they were his contemporaries,
they found it no easier than we do to believe his words
and to answer his call to come and be his disciple.
As Paul indicates in our second reading,
the words and actions of Jesus
seemed foolish and weak when viewed from the perspective
of human wisdom and human strength.

So Jesus’ contemporaries were as bad off as we are
with regard to discipleship.
They had as much difficulty as we do grasping the truth
of “the foolishness of God,”
of feeling the power “the weakness of God.”
Indeed, they were in some sense worse off than we are,
because they only learned later
what we have proclaimed to us now:
that “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom,
and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”
They had to await Christ’s resurrection before they could
“believe the Scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.”
The faith, hope and love of the disciples
was born from the empty tomb
and Jesus' risen presence among them.

But for us, Jesus Christ crucified and risen
stands in our midst right now,
if we can but see with the eyes of faith
and listen with ears of hope.
Indeed, if Jesus is not present to us here and now
as much as he was present in Jerusalem two-thousand years ago —
indeed, if he is not in a sense more present to us
because he has been raised to new life in the Spirit —
then we might as well stop now and all go home.

So for Lent, I’ve decided to give something up:
I am going to give up making excuses.
I’ve decided to stop telling myself
that if only I could have been there
to see and hear Jesus with my own eyes and ears,
if I could only have heard his own voice calling me,
then I would be a real disciple,
then I would sit at his feet and learn from him,
then I would heed his call to follow him where he would lead me.
Because the fact is, the risen Jesus is here now,
calling me and calling you;
his own voice is calling us, no less than it called his first disciples.
If we believe that Christ is risen and active in our midst
then the time for excuses is over
and the time of discipleship has begun.

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2009-02-08T22:30:00.000-08:00

Job, who is perhaps history’s most famously unhappy person,
says in our first reading,
"the night drags on;
I am filled with restlessness until the dawn."
The image conjures for us those nights
in which we toss and turn
and wonder if the dawn will ever arrive.

Restlessness.
Not just the restlessness of sleepless nights,
though Job undoubtedly had many of those,
but a restlessness that is at the very core of our being.
The restlessness of creatures whose "life is like the wind,"
who long for union with their creator,
who long to see clearly that which they now perceive only dimly,
who long to find a love that will never disappoint,
a cause that will not fail.
This is the restlessness
of which St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions:
"O God, you have made us for yourself,
and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

For the first thirty years of his life,
Augustine knew this restlessness
in the young person’s desire to have life mean something,
the desire not to settle from just some job
or just some relationship
or just some life,
the desire to live intensely
and to find that thing into which you can pour your love,
invest your life, and which will not fail you
by becoming boring or routine or trite.
This restlessness yearning for meaning led Augustine
through a succession of religions and philosophies,
friendships, jobs, and lovers.
If I may be permitted to associate him with another author
with whom he is not usually associated,
the young Augustine reminds me of Jack Kerouac,
who wrote in his book On the Road:
"the only people for me are the mad ones,
the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing,
but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars
and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop
and everybody goes ‘Awww!’"

Restlessness.
Even those of us who are no longer young
can perhaps recall that feeling,
that thirst to have life mean something more,
that burning to be something more.
Maybe, beneath the rhythm of life’s routine,
we feel it still,
a kind of syncopation that calls to us:
"your life can mean more;
your life can be more."

Augustine eventually found
that his infinite thirst for life could only be quenched
by the God who is the infinite source of life.
And yet, even in finding God,
in falling deeply in love
with the one who had loved him into existence,
Augustine did not lose his restlessness;
his life as a Christian remained a life of always seeking more,
always seeking to know God better
and to love God more deeply,
to know as we are known
and to love as we are loved.
Our life on earth, he came to realize,
remains, even for the Christian,
a restless pilgrimage though time,
and it is only at the end of this pilgrimage
that our restless hearts will find their rest in God.

Restlessness.
It does not end when we realize
that we will only find our rest in God.
But it does change;
it does take on a new direction and purpose,
and in finding its direction it becomes somehow different.
The restlessness of aimless wandering,
the vague feeling that there is. . .
that there must be. . .
something more,
gives way to the restlessness of the pilgrim
who knows that he or she has a destination,
even if it lies unseen over the horizon,
and who hastens toward it.
We have a goal, we have a purpose,
and we are restless until we reach it.

Like Jesus in today’s Gospel, we cannot rest where we are,
whatever successes we might have had in that place,
but are called always onward into new labors in new places.
When asked by his disciples to return to Capernaum
and continue his successful ministry there
Jesus instead tells them that he must go
and preach in new towns and new villages.
It is for this purpose that Christ has come
and it is for this same purpose that God
has called us to be his disciples.
Because God’s love for the world infinitely surpasses
what we can even begin to imagine,
the task of bringing that love to the world
is always a task of restlessly hastening onward,
a restless task of becoming all things to all,
so that all might be won for Christ.

Restlessness.
But not the restlessness of those who lie restless on their beds,
hoping against hope for a dawn that will show them
that their lives can mean more, can be more.
Rather, the restlessness of pilgrims
who long to always be moving forward
into the mystery of God’s love
because their lives
have already begun to mean more, to be more.
And within that restless pilgrimage there is a peace
that allows us to journey without fear
because the goal of our journeying
does not lie hidden and unknown
but has come to meet us in Jesus Christ.
Indeed, the one who is our destination
has come to join us as a fellow pilgrim
and our restless hearts
are already enfolded within the heart of Christ.

Baptism of the Lord

2009-01-11T10:22:00.000-08:00

The poem "Christmas Oratorio" by W. H. Auden begins:
"Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes —
Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week —
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully —
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers."

But more than regretting Christmas excesses,
Auden sounds an elegiac note,
mourning the passing of Christmas
and the beginning of what he calls "the Time Being" —
the everyday life of school and work
and days unmarked by anticipation or feasting
He says:
"To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all."

The Time Being seems pale and lifeless
in comparison to the excesses of Christmas,
but not just the material excesses of food and drink,
but the spiritual excess, as Auden puts it, of:
"Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It."
This is the true excess of Christmas:
an excess of faith, hope and love
that opens our eyes to the possibility
of everyone and everything made alive by the Spirit —
a virgin become a mother,
a stable become a palace,
shepherds become courtiers,
and a feed trough become the throne of a king.
It is a time of magical transformations.

But now we return to the Time Being.
And what does the Church offer us today,
as we wrap up our celebration of the Christmas season
and carry it back to the attic
or drag it out to the curbside?
We begin our return to the Time Being —
what we in the Church call Ordinary Time —
by remembering the baptism of Jesus.
But why?
What does the baptism of Jesus
have to do with Christmas excess?
What does the baptism of Jesus
have to do with the Time Being
in which we live our daily lives?
And how does the baptism of Jesus
help us to link these two?

In Mark’s telling of the story of Jesus’s baptism,
we find many of the same elements that occur
in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke:
John the Baptist,
the Jordan river,
the Spirit in the form of a dove,
the Father’s voice from heaven saying,
"You are my beloved Son;
with you I am well pleased."
But in Mark we find a small detail that is a bit different:
whereas Matthew and Luke speak
of the heavens "opening" at Jesus’ baptism,
Mark says, "On coming up out of the water
he saw the heavens being torn open
and the Spirit, like a dove, descending upon him."

This image of the heavens being "torn open" is striking
because the language conveys an event
that is dramatic, drastic, almost violent.
It is as if the heavens —
that boundary zone between the world of God
and the human world —
must be forced open
so that the Spirit might descend
and the Father speak.
It is as if a veil that has fallen between God and the world
is being ripped away.
This scene is echoed at the end of Mark’s Gospel,
when at the death of Jesus the curtain in the Temple,
which represents the separation of God from creatures,
is torn miraculously in two from top to bottom.

Mark is giving us a clue as to what Jesus is all about:
the veil between God and humanity being torn open
by God coming to dwell among us as a human.
This is what Advent and Christmas have been about.
This is what Lent and Good Friday and Easter will be about.
And this is what the Time Being —
our Ordinary Time —
is about.
It is really all just one mystery:
the mystery of the heavens torn open
and the grace of the Spirit raining down on us.
This is the mystery of Jesus’ baptism,
and this is the mystery that we share in through our own baptisms.

The elegiac, mournful tone of Auden’s poem
captures well how we might feel
about the passing of Christmas.
But this feast of the baptism of Jesus remind us
that the true mystery of Christmas has not passed.
Because of Jesus —
because of God dwelling in our human flesh —
the world has been changed.
Each and every time that we gather at this altar
the heavens are torn open and the Spirit descends
and God says: this is my beloved Son,
present under the appearances of bread and wine,
and present in you
who have been baptized into his death and resurrection.

So as we leave the Christmas season behind us,
we may regret the excesses of food and drink,
but let us never regret the excess of faith, hope and love
with which this season has filled us.
Let us hold in our hearts the vision of the heavens torn open
and God in our midst,
so that even the Time Being,
the Ordinary Time of our daily lives,
will reveal itself to us as the time of the world transformed.

Christmas: Mass During the Day

2008-12-25T10:30:00.000-08:00

The Web browser programs that we use
to navigate the World Wide Web on the internet
typically have an option under the "view" menu
that is called something like "source" or "page source."
If you click on this, it reveals to you
that the beautiful and elegant (or ugly and confusing)
web page that you are looking at
is actually made up of a series of codes
written in a language called HTML
(hypertext markup language)
that web designers use to tell your computer
where to insert pictures,
what text to bold or italicize,
where to break paragraphs, and so forth.
It doesn’t have the "user-friendliness"
of a well-designed web page,
it doesn’t have the attractive details
that catch the eye,
but there is something fascinating,
at least for those with a certain type of mind,
in getting a glimpse "behind the scenes,"
to see the web page from the perspective of its designer,
to get a sense of the complexity underlying
what presents itself so attractively on our computer screens.

Today’s Gospel is a bit like clicking
the "view page source" menu on the Christmas story.
According to the tradition of the Church,
on Christmas morning we do not read
Luke’s familiar account of the Christmas story,
but rather the prologue with which John’s Gospel opens:
"In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God."

John does not offer us the eye-catching, user-friendly details
that we find in Luke:
no inn without a vacancy,
no Christ child placed in the manger,
no angels,
no the shepherds.
Instead of Jesus, we are told of the Word:
the Word who is in the beginning with God
and who, at the same time,
in some mysterious manner,
is God.
We are told that the world
came into being through this Word,
and yet does not know him.
And, perhaps most bafflingly of all,
we are told that the Word has become flesh
and made his dwelling among us,
and has given power to become children of God
to those who believe in his name.

It can seem, at first, as baffling as HTML code.
But what John is offering us
is a glimpse "behind the scenes" of the Christmas story,
an opportunity to see from the perspective of its designer,
to get a sense of the deep mystery that underlies
what presents itself so attractively in Luke’s Gospel.

Most of us find our hearts moved
by the story of Joseph and the pregnant Mary,
homeless and unprotected.
We find attractive the simplicity of the image of Christ
born amidst the animals in the barn.
We thrill to the angels’ announcement to the shepherds:
"Glory to God in the highest
and peace to God’s people on earth!"

In comparison, John’s Gospel might seem cold and cerebral:
Luke gives us baby Jesus;
John gives us the eternal Word.

But we ought to realize
that they are both telling us the same story.
The child in the manger is the eternal Word,
who has taken on our flesh, our human nature,
so that we too might be God’s children.
John’s Gospel shows us the eternal source that lies behind
the moving, attractive, thrilling events in Bethlehem of Judea.

With a story as well known and pleasing
as Luke’s account of the nativity,
there is always the danger
that we might sentimentalize the entry of Christ into our world.
We can begin to think that Christmas is all about
babies with rosy cheeks
and shepherds with cute lambs
and angels that look like pretty ladies with wings and halos.
Our Gospel this morning reminds us
that Christmas is about God transacting
the serious and unsentimental business
of the world’s salvation.
Our glimpse behind the scenes in Bethlehem shows us
that Christmas is about God taking on our human nature
so that God,
through the bitter suffering of the cross
and the glory of the resurrection,
might bestow upon us a share in God’s own immortality.
As St. Athanasius of Alexandria put it:
God became human
so that human beings might become divine.

John’s Gospel reminds us that this is the real Christmas story.
And this glimpse behind the scenes
should lead us to marvel even more
that God would transact
such serious and unsentimental business
in the little town of Bethlehem,
by means of a young mother,
and some shepherds,
and a child.

Christmas: Mass at Midnight

2008-12-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola
develops a method of prayer
that involves the imagining of a biblical scene,
and then locating ourselves within that scene
and observing what transpires and how if affects us.
With regard to the story of the nativity,
Ignatius begins by suggesting that we imagine Mary,
nine-moths pregnant and riding on a donkey,
journeying to Bethlehem with Joseph,
a servant girl
and an ox
to pay the tribute Caesar had imposed on the land.
He suggests we imagine the road:
is it level or hilly, smooth or rough?
He suggests we imagine the place where Christ is born:
is it big or small, high-ceilinged or low?
Then we are to imagine the people present:
Mary, Joseph, the servant girl,
and eventually the Christ child himself.
Finally, we place ourselves within that scene.
Ignatius writes:
"Making myself into a poor and unworthy servant,
I watch them, and contemplate them,
and as if I were present, serve them in their needs
with all possible respect and reverence; . . . .
notice and consider what they are saying. . . .
watch and consider what they are doing:
for example, their journeys and labors,
so that Christ comes to be born in extreme poverty
and, after so much toil, hunger, thirst, heat and cold,
insults and affronts, he dies on the cross —
and all of this for me.
Then I will reflect and draw some spiritual profit."

Ignatius offers us here a suggestion
for internalizing the events of the Christmas story,
and a way of realizing
that all of these things were done "for me."
Surely it would be worth our while if each of us
took 15 minutes or half an hour tomorrow,
amidst the presents and meals and family and friends,
to engage in this exercise in prayerful imagining.

But there is one point on which Ignatius
doesn’t offer us guidance:
when I place myself in the scene, who should I be?
He suggests that we take the role
of "a poor and unworthy servant,"
but doesn’t say which unworthy servant.
Are we to invent a persona for ourselves,
or should we inhabit one that is already in the scene?

My suggestion is this:
why not, this Christmas, imagine yourself as the donkey?
Now the donkey and the ox,
whom Ignatius imagines Mary and Joseph
bringing with them to Bethlehem,
are not mentioned in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth.
They seem to have gotten imported into the scene
from the Old Testament:
a passage from the prophet Isaiah that says,
"An ox knows its owner,
and a donkey, its master’s manger" (Isaiah 1:3).
Perhaps it was this passage’s mention of the manger,
the food trough,
that led Christians to imagine
the ox and the donkey present
at the manger in which the infant Jesus is laid.
In any case, they have been inextricably incorporated
into the traditional scene,
and so I make my suggestion:
this Christmas, imagine yourself as the donkey.

St. Augustine loved the image of the Christian as the donkey:
both the donkey present at Christ’s birth
and the donkey that carried him
into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
He particularly loved this image
because the donkey is a beast of burden:
the donkey carries Christ
in his mother’s womb into Bethlehem,
the donkey carries Christ
in his mother’s arms on the flight into Egypt,
the donkey carries Christ
into Jerusalem, where he will meet his destiny
in cross and resurrection.

And this is the role of the Christian: to carry Christ.
St. Augustine writes, "Look at the manger:
do not be ashamed to be the Lord’s beast of burden. . .
Let the Lord sit upon us,
and let him direct us whither he will" (Serm. Ben. No. 189).

OK, imagining yourself as the donkey
is not particularly glamorous,
but then Christianity
is not a particularly glamorous undertaking.
Like the donkey,
we depend on our rider to guide us to our goal;
like the donkey,
we are pretty much in the dark
as to where our rider is guiding us;
like the donkey,
we sometimes grow weary
and even, on occasion, resentful and stubborn.

Indeed, it is sometimes during this season of joy
that this burden of faith weighs most heavily upon us.
I was reminded of this two days ago
when I heard from some neighbors
that they would be out of town attending the funeral
of the infant child of friends in New York.
I was reminded of this again yesterday
when I received an email from a student
telling me that her grandmother had just died and that,
while other people were planning Christmas celebrations,
her family would be planning a funeral.

The gift of new life that we see in the Christ child can be,
even in this season of joy,
shadowed by the sorrow of death and loss.
We may declare a holiday,
but the business of life and death goes on,
the journey continues.
Our Christmas faith is that in Christ
God shares in the business of life and death.
Even as you imagine yourself
in the joyful scene of Christ’s birth,
you know that it is your task to carry the one
who, as Ignatius put it,
suffers "toil, hunger, thirst, heat and cold,
insults and affronts," and ultimately death on a cross.

We look at the child in the manger and we ask ourselves,
can one who seems so small, so weak,
one who has shared so fully in human mortality,
really save me from death, really redeem my suffering?
And our faith answers, "yes."

And so, tonight, we donkeys stand at the manger,
ready to take up again the burden of faith’s "yes."
We only dimly understand
the great mystery taking place around us —
the mystery of God made flesh —
and we are perhaps frightened at the prospect
of taking that mystery upon ourselves.
And yet the burden of the mystery,
the burden of Christ,
the burden of faith,
is not in the end something we carry,
but something that carries us.
Christ takes upon himself our mortal nature
so that we might share in his immortality.
As Augustine writes:
"With him sitting upon us,
we shall not be burdened down, but raised up.
With him leading us, we shall not go astray.
We shall be going to him,
we shall be going through him,
we shall not perish."