Holy Thursday

Readings: Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-5

It is often said that John’s Gospel is the one
that presents most clearly Jesus’ divine glory.
After all, John begins his Gospel
by speaking of Jesus as the Word
who is in the beginning with God and who is God.
In John’s Gospel Jesus speaks at great length
about his relationship as Son
to the one he calls “Father,”
whose glory he shares and reveals.
And even as John begins his account
of Jesus’ final meal with his disciples
he tells us that Jesus was,
“fully aware that the Father
had put everything into his power
and that he had come from God
and was returning to God.”
As his hour drew near, Jesus knew
that God the Father was his origin and his destiny
and, as the eternal Son of the Father,
God had put everything in his power.
Surely, this was greatness and power and glory
such as the world had never seen.

But John’s Jesus is also a strikingly human figure.
He is someone who celebrates at a wedding reception
and weeps at the tomb of his friend Lazarus.
He is someone whose spirit is “troubled”
when he predicts his own death
and when he predicts Judas’ betrayal.
He is not just strikingly human,
but he makes himself into
a particular kind of human being:
he takes up the position of the lowliest,
the most menial of human beings:
At the last supper, before his farewell discourse
at which he would reveal his intimacy
with God the Father,
“he rose from supper
and took off his outer garments.
He took a towel and tied it around his waist…
and began to wash the disciples’ feet.”
Jesus the master becomes a servant to his disciples.

St. Augustine saw in these actions
not simply an act of service
but an enacted parable of the meaning
of Jesus’s whole existence:
Jesus removes his outer garment
to symbolized his emptying himself of his divine glory,
and ties the towel around his waist
to symbolize his taking
the form of a servant (Tractate 55.7).
At the last supper the exalted Word of God,
in whose hands the Father has placed divine power,
uses those hands to wash his follower’s feet,
the most humble of tasks.

This humility that Jesus shows at the Last Supper
is a foreshadowing of the humility
to the point of humiliation
that he will show on the cross.
But for John, the humiliation of the cross
is paradoxically Jesus’ supreme glorification—
it is the point at which supreme divine power
is revealed in the weakness of a love
that is willing to die for the truth.

The 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote,
“We do not show greatness by being at one extreme,
but rather by touching both at once
and filling all the space in between” (Pascal, Pensées 560).
John’s Gospel is a gospel of extremes.
Jesus is the exalted, all-powerful, all-knowing God made flesh
and he is the servant who performs the most lowly of tasks.
Touching at the same time the highest divine glory
and the deepest human humility,
Jesus fills all the space in between,
revealing his glory in his supreme act of humility.
You do not understand the true greatness of Jesus Christ
until you know both his glory and his humility.

But knowing this, we are freed
to be honest with ourselves about ourselves—
that is to say, to be both humble and glorious ourselves.
When we discover the glorious humility of God
we no longer have to try to convince ourselves
either that we are too good to wash the feet of others,
or that our feet are too dirty to let others wash.
To quote Pascal again:
“Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride,
and before whom we humble ourselves
without despair” (Pascal, Pensées 245).
Because Christ reveals to us a God
who stoops to wash our feet,
filling all the space in between humility and glory,
as we share tonight in his act of humility,
freed from both pride and despair
we can touch his glory,
the glory that is revealed
in these days of cross and resurrection,
the glory that we share in mystery even now,
the glory with which we too
will one day shine in God’s kingdom.

Palm Sunday

Readings: Mark 11:1-10; Isaiah 50:4-7; Philippians 2:6-11; Mark 14:1-15:47

On Ash Wednesday, as Lent began,
many of us received a cross of ashes on our foreheads
with the words, “remember that you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
We began our Lent marked with the sign of Jesus’s cross
and a reminder that, however long our life might be,
death is a reality from which none of us escapes.
Now, as Lent is ending, we return to the cross
and the story of how even Jesus, the incarnate Son of God,
entered into the mystery of death.

And what has happened in our lives
between Ash Wednesday and now?
Some of us, perhaps many of us,
have prayed and fasted and given alms.
Others of us have done other things:
remodeled our kitchens, lost loved ones,
been sick or hospitalized, attended funerals,
watched the third season of House of Cards on Netflix,
started or ended relationships, gone on trips,
gone to work, shoveled snow,
attended school or church or the symphony…
all of the stuff of life that doesn’t stop happening
just because it is Lent,
just because we have been marked
with a reminder of the reality of death,
just because we are supposed to be preparing
by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving
to celebrate Jesus’ saving death and resurrection.

Whether we have experienced Lent
as a time of intense preparation for Easter
or simply as five weeks of ordinary life,
or as—what is most likely—something in between,
the love revealed in the cross of Jesus
has still embraced our lives,
even if we have let it slip from our minds
as we celebrated and grieved and worked and rested.
Now we stand at the threshold of Holy Week
and the invitation is renewed to let our lives be marked
by the mystery of divine love
revealed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus.
If you have fasted and prayed and given alms this Lent,
then let the liturgies
of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil
crown your noble efforts
with the priceless gift of God’s grace.
If you have let the everyday concerns of life
sweep you along,
forgetting that you are dust,
barely noticing that it was Lent,
much less praying or fasting or giving alms,
then even more let the grace of these celebrations
sweep you up into the mystery of God’s love.

We have the holiest days of the year ahead of us,
and God is inviting all of us,
whether we have kept Lent well or badly,
to embrace these days and let them embrace us,
so that we might hear resound in the depths of our hearts
the good news that though we are but dust
the breath of life can be breathed into us once again.

Lent 3

Readings: Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Corinthians 1:22-25; John 2:13-25

I found myself thinking this week
about the word “lapidary.”
I’m not sure it’s a word
that I’ve ever spoken aloud (until now),
and though I’ve read it on a number of occasions
I think I have had only the vaguest sense of its meaning—
the idea that it described a statement composed of few words.
And my vague sense was correct: it does mean that.
The term comes from the Latin lapis or “stone,”
so a lapidary statement is one
that is suitable for carving in stone.
It is a monumental statement,
a statement that is short and eloquent,
because carving stone is difficult
and whatever you carve in it
is going to be around a long time,
so you better make sure it’s something worth saying.

In our first reading, from the book of Exodus,
we hear proclaimed what is perhaps
the most famous set of lapidary statements ever:
the ten commandments.
They are quite literally lapidary,
for we are told a bit later in Exodus
that God gives Moses stone tablets
upon which are engraved
the words of the commandments.

Presumably God chose these words carefully.
But the pithiness of the commandments
is directed not so much to the stone of the tablets
but to the stone of our human hearts—
hearts grown hard in sin,
hearts that seek to make themselves
impenetrable to God’s word.
Some of the commandments are particularly pithy:
“You shall not kill.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.”
Each of these commandments
is only two words in Hebrew.
When we hear these commandments
and inwardly squirm,
feeling accused,
feeling even convicted,
this is the feeling of God’s lapidary word
being carved into the stone of our hearts—
monumental words that we cannot forget,
even if we try.
And we do try.

In our Gospel reading
Jesus comes to the Temple in Jerusalem,
the holiest place in all of Israel,
and finds it turned into a place of commerce.
Only hearts grown stony could forget so thoroughly
what the Temple was supposed to be:
a place of meeting between God and his people,
a “thin place” where heaven and earth touch,
where one could enter into
the life-giving communion of humanity with God.
Now the Temple is a place of monetary exchange:
a place where those who have get more,
where those who have not are exploited,
where the true God, the living God, is forgotten.
Into this place of stony hearts
Jesus comes as God’s lapidary Word:
a Word who is pithy and piercing
in both speech and action:
“stop making my Father’s house a marketplace”—
stop treating God as an idol whose grace
is turned into a commodity to be bought and sold.

As then in Jerusalem,
so now in our own lives:
Jesus the Word comes to carve himself
into the stone of our hearts:
a Word of power and wisdom that
can pierce our hearts,
can overturn the tables of business as usual,
so that God’s commandments can reach
to their very core of our hearts,
so that they can be healed of sin.
In the Middle Ages spiritual writers spoke
of the experience of “compunction,”
which literally means being punctured,
but was used to speak
of the experience of repentance,
the experience of God’s word penetrating
to the core of our hearts,
calling us back into relationship
with God and each other,
calling us to let God remake
the temple of our heart
into a “thin place”
where heaven and earth can meet.
Let Lent be a time to hear that call,
to let Jesus,
God’s lapidary Word made flesh,
pierce our stony hearts,
so that he might live in us,
and we in him.

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Deuteronomy 18:15-20; 1 Corinthians 7:32-35; Mark 1:21-28

St. Paul’s words this morning,
from his First Letter to the Corinthians,
may not fall pleasingly upon our ears,
at least not the ears of those of us who are married.
While the unmarried are
“anxious about the things of the Lord,”
a married man or woman is
“anxious about the things of the world,”
seeking to please his or her husband or wife,
and thus is “divided”—
seemingly not fully committed.
It sort of makes us married folks
sound like second-class Christians.
And if you are a Catholic of a certain age
(you know who you are)
it may remind you of the days
when it was implied or often stated
that the true Christians
were the celibate priests and sisters
and that if you were serious about your faith,
if you had a “vocation” or “calling,”
you had better avoid the worldliness of marriage.

In Paul’s defense,
I would note that if we place this passage
in the context of his letter as a whole,
he is in fact defending marriage
against those Christians in Corinth who were arguing
that no Christian should be married,
that marriage and all that went with it—
managing households, owning servants, raising children—
was part of the old creation that was being swept away
by the new creation in Christ,
which would soon reach its consummation
in the return of Jesus to judge the living and the dead.
While Paul commends the fervor of these enthusiasts,
he tells them, a bit earlier in the letter,
that while he might “wish everyone to be as I am”—
that is, celibate—
“each has a particular gift from God,
one of one kind and one of another” (1 Cor. 7:7).
In other words,
celibacy is a divine gift and calling,
but so too is marriage.

Yet it is undeniable that while Paul
affirms the goodness of marriage,
he holds celibacy is special esteem.
And it is undeniable that in the tradition of the Church
the consecrated life of poverty, chastity, and obedience
has had—
and continues to have—
an indispensible role in the life of the Church.
But what exactly is that role?
What distinctive things do those who vow themselves
to a life of celibate chastity
bring to our common life in the Body of Christ?

Let me try to answer that question
from my perspective as a married person.
I don’t think, as was sometimes implied in ages past,
that those who undertake celibacy
necessarily achieve a surplus of holiness
that makes up for my lack of holiness,
a lack brought about by my married state.
I have known a fair number
of celibate men and women over the years:
some have seemed to me quite holy;
some were noticeably not.
But what they have done, all of them,
is to remind me,
by their very act of promising themselves to celibacy,
that the call of Jesus is a call to radical love,
a love that reaches into the roots of our being,
a love so radical that one might for its sake
renounce other perfectly legitimate forms of human love.
By responding to Jesus’ radical call in their lives
by promising themselves to a life of celibate chastity,
they have challenged me, in my own life,
to find a response
that is as radical
as the call I have received.

At least for me, it takes something as drastic,
something as strange,
something as shocking
as a promise of celibacy
to drive home just how radical
my own calling has been.
The writer Flannery O’Connor,
in explaining why her novels and short stories
often had such appalling plot twists,
noted, “to the hard of hearing you shout,
and for the almost blind
you draw large and startling figures.”
For me, celibacy is a large and startling figure
that pulls me up short,
that makes me ask myself,
“What do I do in my life
to respond to the love of Jesus,
the love that gave up everything for me—
for me—
even to the point of death on a cross?”
I think in our society as a whole
the life of celibate chastity
serves as a large and startling figure.
In a culture in which sex is a valuable commodity,
used for everything from selling products
to affirming our self worth,
the act of giving up something so valuable
seems shocking, unthinkable.
It is perhaps one of the few things
that you could tell someone about yourself
and elicit the response, “You’re what?”

Celibacy is a sign of contradiction
because it reminds us
that we do not live for this life alone,
but for the Kingdom of Jesus Christ,
and we live for that kingdom by clinging to God’s grace
and by that grace being transformed
into the likeness of Jesus.
This is an easy thing to forget,
and we need things that grab our attention,
things that startle and even shock us.
So we owe a debt of thanks
to our fellow members of Christ’s body
who have, by the consecration of their lives,
become living signs and reminders
of Christ’s call to radical love,
the love that opens its arms on the cross
to embrace me, and you, and all of God’s creation.

Epiphany

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

You may not know that the first American city
with gas street lights
was our own beloved Baltimore.
The brainchild of the painter Rembrandt Peale,
who also founded Baltimore’s first art museum,
the first street lamp was lighted on February 7, 1817,
and the papers of the day tell us,
“that the effect produced
was highly gratifying to those
who had an opportunity of witnessing it,
among whom were several members
of the Legislature of the State.”
A monument to this lamp stands to this day
on the corner of North Holliday and East Baltimore Streets
(at one end of a rather notorious strip known as The Block).

No doubt one reason that witnessing
the lighting of this lamp
was highly gratifying
is because we humans are not by nature nocturnal creatures:
we have evolved in such a way that the light of day
is the environment in which we most naturally
live and move and have our being.
In Scripture and tradition, the darkness of nighttime
represents everything perilous about life,
everything outside of our control,
everything from which we pray God to protect us.
In the opening verses of the book of Genesis
God speaks the words “Let there be light”
and pushes back the chaotic darkness
in order to make a place for us.
In contrast, one of traditional names for the devil
is princeps tenebrarum—the prince of darkness.
As an old Scottish poem puts it:
“From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!”
St. Augustine imagined our final heavenly rest in God
as a Sabbath day would never be ended by night.
Night and day, darkness and light, are powerful images
of peril and salvation.

This morning we read from the book of the prophet Isaiah,
“Rise up in splendor, Jerusalem!
Your light has come,
the glory of the Lord shines upon you.
See, darkness covers the earth,
and thick clouds cover the peoples;
but upon you the LORD shines,
and over you appears his glory.”
God chose the Israelites, the family of Abraham,
to receive his promise of light,
to be an island of light in a world of darkness. 
Yet God’s chosen people did not receive
God’s light and glory
simply to bask in its protecting glow;
rather, they were to reflect that glory
so as to themselves become a light
by which other peoples, other nations, might walk—
a light of divine goodness
that presses back the night of evil.
In our Gospel reading, Matthew uses the story of the Magi
as a way of symbolizing that God’s promise of light
has now through Christ been shared with the Gentiles,
those who are not physical descendants of Abraham;
the story of the Magi shows that people of all nations
have become, as St. Paul puts it,
“coheirs, members of the same body,
and copartners in the promise in Christ Jesus
through the gospel.”
Through Jesus, the light of God s
preads deeper into the night of sin.

Today, through technology,
we have colonized the night
and turned it into day that is 24/7.
Beginning with that first gas street lamp,
we have illuminated everything.
For most of us, the night no longer holds hidden terrors:
we no longer need to huddle together
amidst the encircling gloom of nightfall,
we no longer fear the darkened path along which we stumble.
Every dark place can be made bright with a flick of a switch.
But even if our electrified, light-polluted nights
have lost their power
to symbolize all those things
that we fear,
that are beyond our control,
from which we seek protection,
this does not mean that we have vanquished
everything perilous in life,
that we have brought all things
under our control,
that we no longer need God’s protection.
The very fact that the monument
to the first street lamp in our country
is located on the edge of
one of the seedier areas of our city
reminds us that the night
of evil and violence and human degradation
remains with us regardless of our technical mastery
of light and darkness.
We see it in the news and, alas, find it in ourselves,
beyond the reach of any technological solution.

This night cannot be vanquished
with the flick of a switch.
This night can only be vanquished
by the true light,
the light that God promised to the Israelites,
the light that the Magi sought in Bethlehem,
the light that God bestows upon us
in his word and sacraments.
The light that we celebrate on this Epiphany
has been given to us,
not to be kept as a private possession
with which to keep our personal night at bay,
but as something to be joined to the light of others
so that the glory of God might saturate
the dark places of our world
and the true light of God revealed in Jesus Christ
might lead all people
to that Sabbath day that has no end.

Holy Family

Readings: Genesis15:1-6, 21:1-3; Hebrews11:8, 11-12, 17-19; Luke 2:22-40

Abraham was already an old man when God called him.
At seventy-five, he probably thought himself
well past his sell-by date.
Yet God called him forth from his homeland
and promised that he and his wife Sarah,
who had been childless for many decades,
would have descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky.
It seemed an unlikely scenario,
but, as the letter to the Hebrews tells us,
“he thought that the one
who had made the promise was trustworthy.”
He had faith in God’s promise,
and from him and Sarah
came forth the nation
into which Jesus Christ was born.

Simeon also was an old man
who had received God’s promise:
in this case the promise
was that he would not die
before seeing God’s anointed,
the one who would fulfill the promise
that God made to Abraham and his descendants
that through them all the families of the world
would be blessed.
He lived in hope,
as he grew weary and weak with the years.
Yet his weariness did not prevent God’s Spirit
from leading him to the Temple in Jerusalem
on the day that Mary and Joseph brought Jesus there
to offer the sacrifice of redemption for their firstborn.
His weariness did not prevent the Spirit
from giving him eyes of faith,
with which to recognize in the Christ child
the one for whom he and his people
had waited for so many years.

Anna the prophetess had, like Simeon,
grown old in God’s service.
We might imagine the grief she felt
when she was widowed after only seven years of marriage,
grief that led her to seek solace and hope in God.
At eighty-four, Luke tells us,
she never left the Temple area,
but led a life of fasting and prayer.
With her prophet’s eyes, she too, like Simeon,
recognized in the child Jesus
the arrival of God’s salvation
and she too offered up
a prayer of thanks to God.

So what is it with all these old people
in our readings today?
Isn’t Christmas about baby Jesus?
Isn’t it about something new, not something old?
Isn’t it about life that is just beginning,
not about life that is nearing its end?
So much of our celebration of Christmas
is tied up with images of childhood—
often highly sentimentalized and unrealistic images
of innocent, cherub-like tots
nestled all snug in their beds,
while visions of sugar-plums
dance in their heads.
So the presence on this feast of the Holy Family
of such emphatically old people
as Abraham and Simeon and Anna
can seem just a bit jarring.
This is particularly true in a culture like ours,
which seems to prize youth so highly
and to relegate the elderly to the margins,
seeing them as economically unproductive
and perhaps a discomfiting reminder of our own mortality.
Some even speak of those who are old and sick
as having “a duty to die”
so as not to drain resources
that could be used by the young
or burden them with their care.
And some elderly people internalize this way of thinking:
suffering from social isolation
imposed not only by their own infirmity,
but also by a culture that wants to hide them away,
they come to see their own lives as useless.

But this is not how God sees things.
God does not see age or weakness or infirmity,
but the potential of the human spirit
to be transformed and renewed by God’s Spirit
at every stage of life’s journey.
When God wanted to establish a people to be his own
he did not choose parents who were young and fertile,
but Abraham and Sarah:
old and barren—
as the letter to the Hebrews says, “as good as dead”—
yet fruitful in the hope of God’s promise of life.
When God wanted the Messiah’s arrival
heralded in God’s Temple
he did not choose fresh-faced prophets
who could relate to the young,
but Simeon and Anna:
sight failing with the passage of many years,
yet gifted with the eyes of faith
to recognize God’s salvation.
Where we may see only the infirmities of old age,
God sees disciples who are reborn in the Spirit
each and every day:
in God’s Spirit the eyes that have grown dim
can have the keenest of spiritual sight;
in God’s Spirit the body that is failing
can still show forth the glory of God,
even in its weakness.

The Holy Family of God’s people is, we might say,
a multi-generational family
in which young and old live together
within the household of the Church,
sharing with each other our unique gifts,
gifts that are bestowed on young and old alike.
When I think of my own parents,
of my elderly friends,
of parishioners here at Corpus Christi,
I think of the gifts of wisdom and experience
that age can bring.
But even more I think of the gift of the Spirit,
the Spirit that makes the young see visions
and the old dream dreams,
the Spirit whose love binds all of us—
young and old and in-between—
into one Holy Family of God.
May the prayers of Abraham and Sarah,
Simeon and Anna,
assist us as the Spirit works within us
to make us into a community
in which the gifts of all
are welcomed and valued.

Advent 2

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11; 2 Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

“Be prepared.”
It’s the motto of the Boy Scouts,
so it must be good advice.
The founder of the Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell,
explained this motto back in 1908:
“Be prepared in mind by having disciplined yourself
to be obedient to every order,
and also by having thought out beforehand
any accident or situation that might occur,
so that you know the right thing to do at the right moment,
and are willing to do it.
Be prepared in body by making yourself strong and active
and able to do the right thing at the right moment, and do it.”

“Be prepared.”
It might also be thought of as the motto of John the Baptist,
with whom St. Mark associates the prophetic words:
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”
Be prepared, so that you will know and do
the right thing at the right moment.

It is therefore surprising, perhaps,
that people in Jesus’s day
proved to be so thoroughly unprepared for him:
that when the right moment came—
that moment in human history
when God’s promise of comfort and salvation
was to be fulfilled—
almost no one was prepared to do the right thing.
In Mark’s Gospel in particular,
as we shall hear in our Sunday readings
over the course of the next year,
not only did the crowds and the religious leaders of the Jews
fail to do the right thing at the right moment,
but even Jesus’s closest followers,
even Peter who had confessed Jesus to be God’s anointed,
were unprepared when the moment of Christ’s passion came.

But perhaps we should not be surprised.
In the very first sentence of his Gospel,
Mark hints that the story he is about to tell
will be so strange,
that no one could have been prepared for it:
“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.”
He first tells us that this story is “gospel”—“good news”—
which in the ancient world was a term used to denote
the announcement of a royal birth
or a victory in battle.
And then he tells us that this good news
concerns Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God:
one who shares the nature of God
in the way that a child shares
in the nature of his or her parent.
Perhaps after this opening
we should be prepared to hear a story
that is not like your typical story,
since it is, after all, the story of the Son of God.
But just when we have prepared ourselves
to hear a marvelous story
of the mighty deeds
and the triumphant victories
of the Son of God,
Mark proceeds to tell us a story
of misunderstanding and rejection,
a story of betrayal and abandonment,
a story of suffering and death,
and a mysterious message at an empty tomb.
Who would have predicted that the story of God’s Son
would take such a form?
Who could have possibly,
in the words of Robert Baden-Powell,
“thought out beforehand
any accident or situation that might occur”?

It seems that the point that Mark is making in his Gospel
is that no matter how much we prepare,
no matter how thoroughly
we think things out beforehand,
no matter how strong and active
we make ourselves,
we are never prepared for Jesus:
we are never prepared for the surprising story
of the eternal Son of God
who takes on the form of a servant
for us and for our salvation.
We are never prepared because we inevitably think
within our human categories,
according to our human notions
of what the right thing is
and when the right moment.
But Jesus comes precisely to overturn
those categories and notions:
to make us rethink
what we have thought out ahead of time,
to undermine our idea of what it means to be strong.

Yet Mark’s Gospel also bids us,
“prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”
Indeed, the Church gives us this season of Advent
as a time of preparation for the coming of Jesus.
So how do you prepare for the one who is
the one for whom you can never prepare?
Perhaps we prepare not by making plans,
but by making space.
Not by thinking things out ahead of time
but by opening a place in our hearts and minds
for the Word of God that comes to us in Jesus Christ.
Not by becoming strong and active,
but by making our hearts soft and pliable to God’s Spirit.

This is, of course,
the most difficult sort of preparation there is,
particularly in the season of frenetic activity
that leads up to Christmas.
But this is the challenge of Advent:
to clear some time in our busy lives,
to make some space in our crowded minds,
to prepare a way into our hearts
for the one for whom we can never prepare,
but who comes to us to shock us,
to surprise us,
to delight us with his love.

Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Proverbs 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-31; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6; Matthew 25: 14-30

In today’s Gospel the master says to the servant
who buried his single talent in the ground,
“You wicked, lazy servant!”
But was laziness really the servant’s problem?
After all, digging the hole to bury the money in
must have required some effort—
perhaps even more effort than putting it in the bank,
which was the master’s suggestion.
I think the servant was speaking truthfully
when he said that it was out of fear
that he buried the talent in the ground.
After all, his master was a demanding person
and while a talent was a lot of money
(about a thousand dollars),
he had still been given less
than the other two servants,
so he had less margin of error
and had to be careful.
According to rabbinic law
if someone entrusted you with something and you buried it
then you could no longer be held liable for its loss,
since you had taken the safest course of action
(far safer than entrusting it
to the speculation of bankers).
The servant’s problem was not laziness, but fear:
a fear of a master who would hold him
to an exact accounting
and a fear of losing what he had
in the pursuit of something greater.

This parable is not, obviously, about how we need
to be industrious entrepreneurs with our money,
and about how laziness is a great evil.
Nor is it simply, I think, about how we need
to be industrious entrepreneurs
with the spiritual gifts that God has given us
and about how spiritual laziness is a great sin.
I think it addresses a deeper question of how we see God:
whether we see God as one who’s chief interest
is exacting from us what is owed,
or as one who wants to say to us,
“Come, share your master’s joy.”
The problem is not spiritual laziness.
As shocking as it may seem
in the context of contemporary American culture,
Jesus is not calling us to work harder,
to invest more wisely,
to put in more hours,
or to “lean in”
so that we can “have it all”
(spiritually speaking, of course).
Rather, Jesus is calling us to dig up the gift
we have buried in our fear—
the gift of the good news of Jesus himself—
and unleash it on the world.

To do this, we must let our fear be replaced by love.
If we act out of a conviction that God’s desire
is not to exact his due
but to have us share our master’s joy
then we become radically free
from the fear of loosing what we have
and radically free
for taking risks for the sake of God’s kingdom.
Indeed, according to the logic of God’s kingdom,
it is only if we risk all we have
that we can keep anything.
Perhaps more than any other,
love is a treasure that can be lost through fear.
We can keep it only if we risk its loss
by opening our heart to another
and setting that other’s good above our own,
never knowing ahead of time whether our love will be returned
or will be met with indifference and even hostility,
just as the love of Jesus was met with the scourging pillar,
the crown of thorns, and the cross.
The path of love might seem imprudent
but it is only if we take the risk of Christ
that we can share in the resurrection of Christ
and hear the invitation,
“Come, share your master’s joy.”

We should be willing to risk everything
for Christ’s kingdom of love.
But what does this mean in the concrete?
Well, it might mean in part something as simple
as installing showers for the homeless
in the public restrooms in St. Peter’s Square,
as the Vatican announced it would do this week.

And what about us, here at Corpus Christi?
We might feel as if we, being such a small parish,
are a bit like that servant
who was given but a single talent.
We have limited resources,
so perhaps it would be wisest
to focus on preserving what we have
and not to risk new ventures.
But this is the path of fear,
not the path of love;
this is not the path of resurrection,
which is the path of risk.
Not to put too fine a point on it,
but if Jesus is right, and he usually is,
we will lose everything if we seek only to maintain,
if we fearfully bury out talent in the earth
rather than thinking of new ways
of living our Christian life together
and proclaiming the Gospel
in our neighborhood and city.
With our new small Christian communities
and outreach to immigrant children
we are beginning to do this,
but we must always be looking for new risks to take.

If God is truly the one revealed
in the cross and resurrection of Jesus,
what risks can we undertake
for the sake of God’s kingdom?
We must always be asking ourselves what new thing
the God who desires nothing more
than that we share his joy
is calling us to do,
is calling us to be.
I believe that we are being called to be,
by God’s grace, true to our name:
Corpus Christi, the body of Christ;
by God’s grace we can be the body
that opened itself in love on the cross
and was raised by God to new life
to bring life and faith and healing to the world.
As the parent of teenagers,
I never thought I'd utter these words,
but get out there and engage in risky behavior.

An All Saints / Wedding Homily

Readings: 1 Corinthians 12:31–13:8a; Matthew 5:1-12a

I’m not sure S______ and J______ were aware of it at the time
but the day that they chose for their wedding
is one of the great feast days of the Catholic Church: All Saint’s Day.
The saints are those who have, as St. Paul put it,
fought the good fight,
finished the race,
kept the faith;
they are those holy ones who have received the crown of glory
and are even now enjoying life in God’s eternal kingdom.
Some of these saints are known to us and named as individuals,
and many of them have special days each year
on which we remember them.
But we believe that there are many saints
whom we do not know,
whom we cannot name,
and so we have this feast day to remember
all of those holy people
who lived out their lives in God’s service
quietly and out of the world’s sight.

Our two readings give us a picture of what it means to be a saint.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells us
the qualities possessed by those who are blessed
and what rewards await them:
they are “poor in spirit,”
meaning that they humbly know their need for God,
they are meek, and they hunger and thirst for righteousness,
they are merciful,
pure of heart,
and peacemakers.
They are the ones to whom God will grant his kingdom:
they will be comforted,
shown mercy,
and called children of God.
St. Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians,
draws all of the virtues of the saints together
into the one virtue of love:
a love that is patient and kind,
that does not seek its own interests,
a love that bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things,
a love that can fight the good fight,
finish the race,
keep the faith.

But how does one become a saint?
Is it simply a matter
of trying really, really hard to be a good person?
While that is, of course, important,
becoming a saint is really something much more mysterious.
It is mysterious because it is something
that God’s grace does to us,
something that is brought about
by the mystery God’s love at work within us.

S______ and J______, today you enter in a new way
into the mystery of God’s love.
In the Catholic tradition we believe marriage to be a sacrament,
meaning it is both a sign and a cause of God’s grace.
In other words, your married life together
will both make God’s love present to you in a special way
and also show that love to those whom you meet.
But even more,
if you open yourselves up to the grace
that God gives you in your married life together,
you can become saints.
Your marriage can make you
into one of those people we celebrate today,
those who in their everyday lives fight the good fight
in the cause of love and mercy.
My prayer for you on your wedding day
is that the years ahead
be filled with joy that comes from God’s grace,
the grace that can transform you together
into the holy ones of God.

Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 5:1-7; Philippians 4:6-9; Matthew 21:33-43

In both our first reading from Isaiah
and in our Gospel from Matthew,
we hear about vineyards.
And in both Isaiah and Matthew the vineyard is representative
of the people of God:
those whom God has called into his covenant of love.

But there is an interesting difference:
while Jesus’ parable is addressed to and focuses on
those whom the owner has put in charge of the vineyard—
“the chief priests and the elders of the people”—
Isaiah’s oracle makes no mention of leaders or caretakers,
but focuses on the vineyard itself.
In Matthew, the leaders of God’s people Israel
are held responsible for their failure
to give God his due and to respect his emissaries.
It is a powerful indictment of religious leaders
who use their positions for their own benefit
and forget that they are here to serve God and God’s people.
In Isaiah, however, it is the vineyard itself that is at fault;
it is the vineyard, not those who are put in charge of it,
that is accused of producing wild grapes
that are bitter and unfit for consumption
rather than the good fruit
that is a source of joy and nourishment.
It is the vineyard itself
that must bear God’s rebuke,
not those who tend it.

So what does this mean for us, who are God’s people,
the vineyard that God has planted and protected,
in which God has erected the winepress of the sacraments
and the strong tower of God’s Word, revealed in Christ?
On the one hand, it means that those into whose care
God has entrusted the Church
must never forget
that they are but tenants, caretakers;
Church leaders must carefully tend
what God has planted,
always remembering that it is God’s Church, not theirs,
and all the spiritual fruit that the Church produces
must be returned to God to do with as he will.
According to Jesus’ parable, when the tenants forget
whose vineyard it is that they are tending
the result is violence directed at God’s messengers,
and, ultimately, God’s Son.
I suspect that the result of such forgetting today
is less obvious.
Some Church leaders may treat God’s vineyard
as something to exploit for their own personal gain.
But a more common result of forgetting whose vineyard it is
is an overdeveloped sense that what grows in the vineyard
is something that they must control.  
Of course, part of the good stewardship
that leaders should exercise
is tending the life of the Church
in ways that will make her
fruitful and pleasing to God.
But this is something different from trying
to micromanage the spiritual growth of the vineyard
so that it produces the fruits that they desire,
forgetting that it is God’s vineyard
and that it is God to whom
the harvest of its fruits is owed
and who will judge
which are pleasing and which are not.

But in reflecting on the meaning
of Jesus’ parable of the vineyard,
we ought not forget the vineyard of Isaiah.
Remember, in Isaiah no fault was found
with those tending the vineyard;
rather the vineyard itself was faulted
for producing bitter, wild grapes.
At various times and places
the Church may have good or bad leadership,
and we may not even agree
on what constitutes good or bad leadership—
I might think that Pope Benedict was a careful, thoughtful leader
and that Pope Francis is dangerously off-the-cuff,
while you might think Pope Benedict was a stodgy old coot
and Pope Francis a refreshing breath of fresh air
(I should note that both are excellent Popes
compared to some of the Popes of, say, the 10th century).

At the end of the day, however,
while it is better to have good leaders than bad,
you who are the people of the Church
have to stand on your own two feet
and take responsibility for your life as Church.
Dissatisfaction with the leadership of the Church
is no excuse for disengaging or producing bitter fruit.
If we want to be a vineyard that produces good fruit
then we must make it happen—
by which I mean that we must let God make it happen in us;
we must let the Holy Spirit fill us with, as St. Paul said,
“whatever is true, whatever is honorable,
whatever is just, whatever is pure,
whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious.”
At the end of the day,
the kind of fruit that the Church produces
is as much the responsibility of you who are the vines
as it is of any bishop, priest, or deacon.

God has planted us in this vineyard
so that we might bear good fruit
and God has given us what we need to do so:
the consolation of the Spirit present in our community
and manifest in our commitment to each other,
God’s word and sacraments to strengthen us,
and the peace of God that surpasses all understanding
to guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
God has provided all of this to us in abundance.
Now let’s bear some fruit.