Lent 3

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 of “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

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

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

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

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."

2nd Sunday of Advent

After the kingdom of Judah was conquered
by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar,
the Jewish people lived in exile in Babylon
for the next two generations,
until Babylon itself was conquered by the Persians
and the exiles were allowed to return.
For two generations the Jewish people
remained faithful to their God —
studying God’s Law, keeping God’s Sabbath —
as they awaited God’s salvation
and their return to their homeland.
Our first reading is an announcement of that return:
"Comfort, give comfort to my people. . .
speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her that her service is ended."

Many of us are familiar with these words
from the opening of Handel’s Messiah,
which places them in the context of the Christian faith,
so that the waiting of Israel in exile
becomes a sign and symbol
of humanity’s long wait for Christ, the world’s redeemer.
And our Gospel reading today
presents us with John the Baptist,
a voice "crying out in the desert,"
who announces that redeemer:
"One who is mightier than I is coming after me. . . .
he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."
And so the redeemer whom the world had awaited
arrives in the person of Jesus of Nazareth,
and the words of Isaiah are fulfilled:
"here is your God!"

And yet. . . and yet. . . aren’t we still waiting?
Has the rugged land been made into a plain?
Has the rough county becomes a broad valley?
Has the glory of the Lord been revealed?
If we look at the news,
don’t we still see the rugged land of terror and violence?
If we look at our own lives,
don’t we still find in ourselves
the rough country of pride or sloth or greed
or just plain thoughtlessness?
If we look at our world,
can we see even a glimpse of God’s glory being revealed?
We believe that the world’s redeemer has come;
why then does our world look so unredeemed?
If in Jesus God has spoken God’s definitive word of comfort,
why do we so often feel that we are still in exile in Babylon,
far from the homeland of God’s promise?

The way theologians sometimes put the matter
is that in Jesus we experience a salvation
that has already come to us,
but is not yet realized fully in our world.
Through faith in Jesus we are already
in the homeland of God’s promise,
but still have not yet completely left behind
our exile in Babylon.

Already. . . but not yet.
It’s a nice theological formulation,
but does it help us solve the problem
of how we live with that "not yet"?
Our second reading tells us that
"with the Lord one day is like a thousand years
and a thousand years like one day"
and this may help us to grasp intellectually
why we can’t expect the world’s redemption
to follow our human timetable,
but it doesn’t tell us how we are to endure
the passage of those thousand-year-long days
as we await the new heavens and new earth
in which righteousness dwells.
What we really need to know
is how to cultivate patience as we live in the "not yet."

I sometimes think that in our world today,
patience is one of the most under appreciated virtues.
It seems like we need everything to have been done yesterday,
that our computers never boot up fast enough,
checkout lines at stores never move speedily enough,
change in Washington never comes promptly enough,
and those with whom we must live and work
never adapt to our needs briskly enough.
But I suspect that it is not simply today
that we find patience so difficult.
Our second reading testifies to the fact that in the first century
people were complaining about the delay
of the world’s final redemption,
and I suspect that those same people complained
that their ox carts ran too slow
and their crops took too long to grow.

We find patience difficult because patience is hard;
indeed, the word "patience" comes from the Latin patior,
which means "to suffer."
We don’t like being patient because we don’t like to suffer.
But patience is precisely what we need
to live in the "not yet."
It is the form that faithfulness takes
as we await the new heavens and the new earth.
It is a faithfulness that allows God to act
according to God’s own schedule,
in our world and in each one of our lives.
It is what allows us to take action to make our world
a better place and ourselves better people
while allowing the fruits of our actions
to remain in hands of God,
who judges our actions and our lives
in terms of faithfulness and not results.

And so in this Advent season
we should try to cultivate patience.
We should let this season of spiritual anticipation
become a time in which we strive to live
with all of the "not yets" in our world.
I would make one concrete suggestions.
Our patience, our faithfulness,
is founded on God’s patience and God’s faithfulness.
Our second reading tells us
that what we perceive as the delay of God’s promise
is in fact God being patient with us,
God giving us time to change,
so that we can live joyfully in God’s kingdom.

As we try to be patient with God,
we must recognize that God is the source of all patience,
and so our cultivation of patience
must involve prayer, asking God for the gift of patience.
One way to cultivate patience is to make the world stop
by taking time each day, even if only five minutes, to pray.
And in your prayer, ask God for a share in God’s patience.
Ask God to enable you to see yourself and others
through God’s eyes,
those eyes for which a thousand years are but a day,
those eyes of infinite patience.
And then listen.
Listen for the glad tiding that are already here,
listen for God’s word of comfort,
spoken tenderly to you and to our world.
And then speak:
become the voice that cries, like John the Baptist,
"make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God."
Become the one through whom God speaks
words of comfort to a world in exile.

Ask. . . listen. . . speak.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.

Dedication of St. John Lateran

OK, why are we celebrating the anniversary
of the dedication of somebody else’s church?
And why this church?

The Basilica of St. John Lateran was given to the Church
by the Emperor Constantine
shortly after he legalized Christianity in the early 4th century.
It was dedicated as a place of Christian worship on November 9, 324 AD.
It, and not St. Peter’s Basilica, as many people think,
is the cathedral of the city of Rome
and thus the home church of the bishop of Rome — that is, the Pope.

St. John Lateran is obviously of great historical significance.
But, if I can be honest with you for a moment,
it is a building that just doesn’t do much for me.
St. Peter’s Basilica has the kind of glitzy baroque appeal
that wouldn’t be out of place in Las Vegas.
Particularly the elements designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini,
while certainly over-the-top,
expresses a certain characteristically Catholic exuberance
that will not be held back by the bounds of good taste.
St. John Lateran, though a very ancient building,
got a baroque make-over by Bernini’s great rival,
Franceso Borromini, in the 17th century.
Perhaps this shows my preference for the passionate Bernini
over the rather cerebral Borromini,
but I find his redesign of St. John’s rather cold and uninviting.
While grand, it is too calculated, too lacking in feeling —
it is big in a way that dwarfs the human soul, rather than inspiring.
So, while I hate to say it, it just doesn’t do much for me.
Indeed, I must admit that I much prefer
our own beautiful and tasteful and human-scaled Corpus Christi
to either St. John’s or St. Peter’s.

But, of course, the Church doesn’t ask me, or you,
to join in celebrating the anniversary
of the dedication of St. John Lateran
because it "does something" for us,
because it appeals to us,
because we happen to like it.
The Church asks us to join in this celebration
because St. John Lateran in Rome,
no less than Corpus Christi in Baltimore,
is our church.
This feast is one of those that reminds us that we are Roman Catholics —
that we are children of the Church of Rome and heir to her history.

The Church asks us to join in this celebration
because the cathedral church of the city of Rome
is a symbol of our unity as Catholics,
a unity that extends throughout the world
and down through the centuries.
The Church asks us to join in this celebration
because those who have worshiped at St. John Lateran,
from the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century
down to the humblest Roman worker worshiping there on this day
are our brothers and sisters in the faith.
Their church is our church, whether we like it or not.

It is, I think, a happy accident of the Church’s calendar
that the feast of the dedication of St. John Lateran
falls seven days after All Soul’s Day,
so that when we celebrate All Souls on a Sunday,
we celebrate this feast on the following Sunday.
Last week we celebrated the unity of the Church in its threefold form:
the Church triumphant in heaven,
the Church militant on earth,
and the Church suffering in purgatory.
As Fr. Rich preached last week, All Souls day reminds us
that we are invisibly united in prayer with those who have died.
This week we celebrate another sort of unity:
a unity that we have through time and space
in our shared adherence to the Catholic faith,
in our common celebration of the sacraments,
and in our recognition of the apostolic leadership
of the bishop of Rome and those bishops in communion with him.
This unity is not the invisible, spiritual unity
that we celebrated on All Souls Day.
Rather, it is the visible, tangible unity
of doctrines and laws and institutions and even buildings
that are for us the outward signs of our inner unity.

Of course, we do not join in this celebration
because this visible, tangible unity is always easy
for us to accept and celebrate.
Indeed, our Catholic faith is sometimes hard for us to believe,
and often even harder to live;
our sacramental celebrations sometimes seem flat and lifeless;
our Church leadership can at times seem obtuse or cowardly
or more intent on making the Church
a marketplace for various agendas
than a house of prayer for all people.
Sometimes the Church in her visible, tangible form
strikes me as being as unlovely as the church of St. John Lateran —
cold and uninviting,
unsuccessfully remodeled over the years,
enlarged beyond the human scale,
not living up to my expectations,
just not doing much for me.

But this feast reminds me that my life as a Catholic
isn’t really about what I find appealing,
either in buildings or institutions.
This feast reminds us that part of our faith is that the Church,
in both her inward reality and her outward forms,
is the temple in which God’s Spirit dwells.
The celebration of this feast is a challenge to love our fellow Catholics
as those who, along with us,
are the stones that are being built into that living temple.
And the stones of this temple are bound together
by a love that we live not just inwardly,
but also in the sometimes clumsy outward forms
that are our visible bonds of unity.

In the Baptistry of the unlovely church of St. John Lateran,
where the Christians of Rome have been baptized since the 4th century,
there is an ancient inscription that reads:
"There is no barrier between those who are reborn and made one
by the one font, the one Spirit, and the one faith. . ."
It is this unity that we are called to celebrate this day.

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

On Friday, the good news
was that the trading day on Wall Street closed
with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down only 128 points.
The bad news
was that this ended a week in which the Dow lost 1874 points,
over 20% of its value.
This week Russia, Indonesia and the Ukraine
suspended trading on their stock exchanges
to try and prevent the instability of US financial markets
from infecting their economies
and the country of Iceland teetered on the verge of bankruptcy.
And, in what is certainly the most ominous sounding bit of news,
the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index,
known as the "fear gauge,"
climbed to a fifth-consecutive record level.
I must admit that such news makes my own "Volatility Index,"
my own personal "fear gauge," begin to rise,
not least because I’m not exactly sure
that I completely understand the financial news
with which I’m being bombarded,
nor do I really feel that I am in a position
to even begin to evaluate the proffered solutions:
should the government intervene
and, if so,
is the right amount of money being spent on the right things?
I just know that when I made the mistake this past week
of opening the quarterly report
from my TIAA-CREF retirement fund
it seemed that I had somehow lost a lot of money
without ever having the pleasure of spending it
and I could feel my volatility index — my fear gauge —
rising to record heights.

Why regale you with news of the business world
and of my own personal anxiety?
Because I suspect that many of you
have also looked at your retirement plans
or stock portfolios this week,
or at least been subjected to the ever-rising tone
of anxiety about the economy in the news media.
Some might even have more immediate worries
of losing a job or a home.
And I suspect your fear gauge is also rising.

What consolation can the word of God offer us today?
Our Gospel reading for today seems to depict a situation
in which the volatility index is off the charts,
with invited banquet guests
killing those who bring them their invitations
(wouldn’t a simple "no thank you" have sufficed?),
and the king who is throwing the banquet retaliating,
not just by killing the invited guests,
but by destroying their entire city.
You just want to say, "OK, everybody take a deep breath."
But our other readings sound a quite different note,
a note of confidence,
a note of faith
that we will be able to weather the storms of life,
a note of hope
that our fear gauge does not have to grow inexorably higher.
In our second reading, from Paul’s letter to the Philippians,
Paul tells us that he has learned the secret
of living in abundance and of being in need,
of being well fed and of going hungry.

Of course, the ups and downs of Paul’s fortune
do not have to do
with the ups and downs of the stock market
but with the fact that he writes from a Roman prison
and does not know if he will ever see freedom again.
Still, as different as Paul’s problems may be from ours,
we might be interested in knowing
what the secret of his equanimity is,
what the secret is
that keeps his fear gauge in the lower numbers,
despite the rather dire situation in which he finds himself.

His secret is not, as we might first suspect,
that he has simply detached himself from life,
so that he does not care and has no opinion
about how he would like things to turn out.
Paul would have been quite familiar with such a strategy,
since it was the one taught by the Stoic philosophers of his day:
one preserves oneself from life’s fortunes
by not clinging and not caring.
But it is not this path of stoic indifference that he takes;
rather, his secret, which he quite openly shares, is this:
"I can do all things in him that strengthens me."
Paul’s secret for controlling his fear gauge
is not to keep himself from caring,
not to keep himself from clinging,
but to care passionately about and cling tightly to
the one who, as he puts it,
"will fully supply whatever you need."
Paul believes, with Isaiah in our first reading,
that "the Lord God will wipe away
the tears from every face."
Paul believes, with our psalmist,
that "the Lord is my shepherd" and "I shall not want."

But notice that this hope about which Paul cares passionately
and to which he clings tightly
does not promise that Paul will not be in need
or that he will not be hungry;
it does not promise that he will ever be released from prison.
Paul’s secret is his faith that in Christ he has a hope
that can never be defeated by life’s circumstances,
because in Christ God has come to share our circumstances,
so that in all our circumstances —
whether imprisonment or financial loss
or any other situation that sets our fear gauge rising —
we can find the presence of God that will sustain us.
If we can fix our eyes on what Paul calls
God's "glorious riches in Christ Jesus,"
if we see the circumstances of our lives
as pervaded by God’s sustaining presence,
then we can find hope and we can conquer fear,
no matter what storms batter us.

This, of course, is easier said than done;
it requires that we cultivate a capacity
to pay attention to God’s presence in our lives,
a capacity that is planted in us by God’s grace,
that grows through prayer,
that is nourished through the sacraments.
But perhaps we might start
by simply attending to our own personal volatility indexes,
and when we feel our fear gauge rising,
to make our own prayer be the words of Paul:
"I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me."

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Once, while boarding an airliner in Turkey,
I noticed a round blue and white and black object,
about four inches across,
hanging on the wall of the aircraft’s cabin .
I had seen similar objects, in a variety of sizes,
all throughout Turkey:
hanging from rear-view mirrors and around necks,
kept in pockets and purses.
When I asked, I had been told
that they were amulets to protect against the evil eye.
You see, throughout the Mediterranean world
there is widespread belief in the evil eye:
the belief that by looking enviously
upon someone else’s good fortune
one could curse that person with the evil eye,
even if one did not intend to do so.
Being the modern, Western, sophisticated,
academic type person that I am,
I of course scoff at such folk beliefs. . .
though I think I felt just a little bit more secure
knowing that my flight from Istanbul to Kayseri
was protected from the evil eye —
a sort of backup safety system.

Apparently people in Jesus’ world
believed in the evil eye as well;
indeed, the evil eye crops up
in our Gospel reading for today,
though our translation hides it.
Where it says,
"Are you envious because I am generous?"
the original Greek actually says,
"Is your eye evil because I am good?"
As today, so in Jesus’ day,
the eye that looked upon another’s good fortune with envy
was thought to be an evil eye
that brought tragedy upon others.

In fact, in Matthew’s Gospel,
Jesus mentions the evil eye twice:
in addition to today’s Gospel reading,
Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that,
"The eye is the lamp of the body.
So, if your eye is single,
your whole body will be full of light;
but if your eye is evil,
your whole body will be full of darkness."
Notice that Jesus contrasts having an evil eye
with having a "single" eye,
which means, more or less,
the same thing as being "single minded"
or "keeping you eye on the ball" or,
to use another phrase from the Sermon on the Mount,
being "pure of heart."
Being "single-eyed" is a way of characterizing those
who live their lives focused on God.
So what Jesus is saying
is that if you live your life focused on God —
if you are "single-eyed" —
then you will be filled with light.
But if you are evil-eyed —
if you live your life resenting the good fortune of others —
then you will be filled with darkness.

Notice that what Jesus is saying
is something different
from the standard belief about the evil eye,
according to which
looking upon someone with envy curses them.
Jesus is saying that the evil eye,
in fact, only harms the one who is envious,
the one who casts an evil-eyed glance at another.
When we resent the good fortune of others,
it does no harm to them;
rather, we are the ones who are harmed,
we are the ones who are filled with darkness,
who lose our focus
and so experience a kind of blowback of our own envy,
who find ourselves being made miserable
by the happiness of another.

We can see this at work in today’s Gospel.
Those who worked all day and were paid a fair wage
are so filled with envy at the landowner’s generosity
toward those who came at the end of the day
and were paid the same amount
that they can not see
that they have been justly rewarded for their labors,
and cannot rejoice in the generosity bestowed on another.
The evil eye is blind
to the magnificent, glorious generosity of God,
which means that it is blind to God,
because God is nothing else
but pure, unbounded generosity —
or, as the first letter of John puts it,
God is love.
And if we are evil-eyed,
if we can see the good fortune of others
only as a injustice to ourselves,
then we find ourselves filled with darkness so deep
that even the pure light of God’s love
looks like darkness to us.

Of course, we ought not be too hard
on those laborers who had worked all day.
After all, the evil eye seems to be part
of the fallen human condition in which we all share.
Which of us has not on occasion felt
that twinge of jealousy at the good fortune of another?
Which of us has failed to see God’s generosity
simply because it fell upon someone else?

But thanks be to God that God is so generous.
In the end, today’s Gospel
is less about the envy of the workers
than it is about the generosity of the landowner.
And we know that God is generous
in bestowing light upon us,
in prayer,
through the sacraments,
and in our encounters with others.
The Gospel — the good news — for today
is that God’s grace, God’s generosity,
is powerful enough
to overcome the darkness with which the evil eye fills us,
powerful enough to burn away the envy and resentment
that blind us to God;
for God’s light shines brightly
even in the darkest places of our lives.
Our Gospel gives us hope that it is God’s generosity,
and not human envy,
that will have the last word.

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples two questions:
First, he asks them, "who do people say that the Son of Man is?"
In this question, he is asking for information;
he wants a report concerning the facts of the situation;
he wants to know what they hear people saying.
But his second question is different: "Who do you say that I am?"
With this, he is asking a different sort of question:
not a question about the facts of the situation,
but a question about their faith.

But what is "faith"?
Sometimes it is easier to say what something is not that to say what it is,
and this seems to be the case
when we are trying to understand the nature of faith.
St. Thomas Aquinas says that there are two things that faith is not.
First, he says, faith is not knowledge,
or at least not the kind of knowledge we have
when we see that something is true,
like the disciples seeing or hearing what people are saying about Jesus.
Rather, faith is holding on to something that we cannot see the truth of,
something that remains obscure and mysterious.
But, second, Aquinas also says that having faith
is not the same thing as having an opinion —
such as, "yellow is a nice color" or "isn’t that a cute baby?" —
because faith isn’t just a matter of expressing our feelings about something,
but has to do with things that we believe are true,
things that are so true that we are willing to stake our lives on them.

When Jesus asks his disciples, "who do you say that I am?"
he is not asking for their opinions about him or how they feel about him.
He is asking for their faith;
he is asking whether they believe that he really is
the one that they can stake their lives on.
And in Peter’s reply, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God"
he is not reporting something that he sees,
nor is he merely stating an opinion;
rather, he is confessing his faith;
he is saying that he has staked his life on Jesus
as the fulfillment of God’s promises,
even though he cannot yet see them fulfilled.
He is saying that Jesus is the truth in whom he trusts.

We have another example of what faith looks like
in our second reading.
So often in our Sunday readings the second reading is from Paul
and is a snippet of a much longer letter
and we need to read a bit more to get the full sense.
So for those of you who have not read
Paul’s letter to the Romans in its entirety this week,
let me give you the larger context:
Paul is writing to the Christians in Rome
to introduce himself and his understanding of the Gospel.
Our reading today is the conclusion of a lengthy section of Paul’s letter
in which he grapples with what is for him a central question of faith:
if Jesus is in fact the Messiah of Israel,
for whom the Jewish people have been waiting,
why, then, have so few recognized him as such?
Paul considered himself to the end to be a Jew,
so for him this is a very personal question:
why has the messiah been rejected
by the vast majority of his fellow Jews?
More importantly,
what is God doing through this unexpected turn of events?
How can this possibly fit into God’s plan of salvation
for the Jewish people and the whole world?

Paul wants to see what God is doing in history
and so he wrangles with these question for three long chapters
in which intellectual struggle combines
with personal anguish over the fate of his people.
In course of those three chapters of struggle
Paul gains at best a very misty view of what God is up to:
hints, analogies, metaphors —
answers that will do, perhaps, for the time being.
But the real answer to Paul’s anguish
arrives in his recognition that,
though he cannot see a clear answer to his questions,
through the gift of faith he is able to remain
absolutely confident of one thing:
God is at work in history to fulfill his promises to the Jewish people
and God is working
with a wisdom that surpasses
our human powers of comprehension
for their salvation.

This is not Paul’s opinion; this is the truth that he holds onto by faith
because, like Peter,
he has found in Jesus Christ the truth in whom he trusts.
And so Paul concludes his mighty struggle to understand God’s ways
with a confession of faith
in which he acknowledges that he cannot see
and yet still will stake his life and ministry
on the truth of God’s justice and mercy:
"Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How inscrutable are God’s judgments
and how unsearchable God’s ways!"

Paul makes this confession of faith in the context
of his struggle to understand
how God’s ultimate plan of human salvation is working itself out
amidst the obscure and confusing events of history.
And we, too, who gather here this morning,
are invited and empowered by God’s grace
to make this confession of faith our own
as we struggle to see how God is working
in the obscure and confusing events that surround us.
How is God at work in the deaths of 153 people
in this week’s plane crash in Spain,
or the over-2000 civilians who have died
in the conflict between Russia and Georgia?
Or, what is God up to in the protracted and painful illness
of my husband, my wife, my child, my friend?
Where is God’s justice and mercy?
Or, how does this unforseen opportunity, this new friendship,
this sudden move across the country, or even across the world,
fit into God’s plan for my salvation,
and God’s salvation of the world?
These are questions to which we often cannot see the answers —
and we may for the rest of our lives
have nothing but hints, analogies and metaphors —
but because, like Peter and like Paul,
we have found in Jesus the truth in whom we trust,
we can say,
"Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How inscrutable are God’s judgments
and how unsearchable God’s ways!"