Easter 2 (Sixth Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Acts 2:42-47; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

I am by nature a skeptical person,
so I’ve always felt a certain sympathy
for Thomas the doubter.
I generally think that if something
sounds too good to be true
then it probably is,
and certainly the news that Jesus
has been raised up by God from death,
trampling down death by death,
sounds too good to be true.

These past few weeks have provided
ample opportunity to be skeptical,
since the news we receive,
whether good or bad,
seems to be constantly shifting:
just wash your hands and don’t touch your face
and you will be fine;
stay at home, see no one, shelter in place;
masks are useless, don’t bother;
masks are a way to “flatten the curve,”
wear them whenever you go out;
the virus is only dangerous for the elderly;
the virus has killed many young people,
no one is safe;
we should be ready to “open up” in a few weeks;
we should be ready to endure this for many months.

Sometimes conflicting information is spread
because of malice or self-interest or wishful thinking,
but often it is simply the case
that we are dealing with something new
and our best, most-informed guesses
just turn out to be wrong.
And so, in the absence of knowledge, we doubt.
A general skepticism might seem like the wisest course,
and while I think that those
who are publicly violating stay-at-home orders
are mistaken, and dangerously so,
I can understand why they might be skeptical:
we have more time and means than ever
to consume what passes for news
but the messages we receive
are confusing and conflicting;
people we think we should trust
are telling us different and often opposing things.

Thomas is at least receiving a consistent message:
“We have seen the Lord.”
But perhaps he has heard alternative explanations—
that someone stole the body—
and doesn’t know which report to trust.
Perhaps, because he knows how much he himself
would like to believe that Jesus is alive,
he suspects that his friends have suffered
a collective hallucination brought on by grief,
and though they are sincere,
they are mistaken, and dangerously so;
they should remain behind locked doors,
sheltering in place,
safe from those who had killed their master.
Thomas’s response is one that speaks to the heart
of a skeptic like me:
“Unless I see…I will not believe.”
And not just see,
but “put my finger into the nailmarks
and put my hand into his side.”

When Jesus appears again, a week later,
he greets his followers with the words
“Peace be with you”
and he invites Thomas to believe:
“Put your finger here and see my hands,
and bring your hand and put it into my side,
and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”
But Thomas now doesn’t need to touch;
he immediately utters
one of the boldest confessions of faith
in the entire New Testament:
“My Lord and my God!”

What convinces him?
Is it simply seeing the risen form of Jesus?
I don’t think so.
We have in the Gospels numerous stories of people—
Mary Magdalene, the disciples going to Emmaus—
who see Jesus without recognizing him as the risen one.
Perhaps what convinces Thomas
that the one who stands before him
is not imposter or illusion
but truly Jesus risen from death
is the fact that on this night
Jesus has appeared just for him,
to lift from him the burden of doubt,
to open his eyes so that he can embrace
news too good to be true.
Jesus could have simply left Thomas in his doubts.
He could have left Thomas to struggle
with the dubious testimony of the other disciples.
But he makes a special encore appearance in the upper room
just for the sake of Thomas the skeptic.
It’s just such a typically Jesus-like thing to do.
It’s just what the good-but-impractical shepherd
who abandons the ninety-nine sheep
in search of the one who is lost
would do.
It’s just what the holy man
who squandered his reputation
by healing the suffering on the Sabbath
and eating with tax collectors and sinners
and speaking with the Samaritan woman
would do.
It’s just what the one
who loved his own in the world
and who loved them to the end
would do.
Thomas knows that it is truly Jesus
because Jesus has come back just for him,
so that he might have faith,
so that he might believe,
so that he might confess,
“my Lord and my God.”

The Gospel writer tells us
that he has written this story
so that we might believe in Jesus
and have life in his name.
He tells us this story
so that Christ might walk
through the locked door of our doubts
and we might believe
that Jesus is our Lord and God,
the risen one who comes back just for us,
who never abandons the lost sheep,
who finds us while we are yet doubting,
who loves us to the end.

We are living through an extraordinarily confusing time,
and we are struggling to know who and what to believe.
We must try to exercise prudence and wisdom
in discerning the truth during this time of crisis and fear.
But this is something each one of us can and should believe:
Jesus has died and been raised for me,
the powers of death have been put to death for me,
Jesus has return searching for me.
Let us cling to this faith in the midst of doubt and confusion
and may God have mercy on us all.

Easter (Fifth Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Acts 10:34a, 37-43; 1 Corinthians 5:6b-8; John 20:1-9

Yesterday brought the sobering news
that the United States had surpassed
every other nation in the world
in the number of deaths
from Covid-19.
Even taking into account
the large size of our population,
the number of deaths
in hotspots like New York has been staggering.
And for someone who has lost a loved one
it doesn’t really matter much
what the per capita death rates are;
it is that one death that devastates.
But even as we continue
the seemingly endless journey to peak mortality,
people have begun discussing what it will mean
to “reopen” the country:
to restart our economy,
for people to return to work,
for students to return to school,
for churches and other places of public gathering
to resume ordinary activities.
But one thing is clear:
there will be no sudden return
to so-called normal life.
It may be months still
before public Masses can be celebrated,
before children can go to school,
before we can dine in restaurants.

The idea was floated a few weeks
that Easter would be a nice time
for life to return to normal.
The symbolism, it might seem,
would be lovely.
But, apart from the obvious error involved
in calculating the progress of the pandemic,
and differing opinions on how long
before social distancing measures
can begin to ease up,
I think the idea of Easter as a moment
when everything returns to normal
is a theologically dubious one,
and this for two reasons.

First, it is a mistake to think of Easter
as a moment, as an instant.
Of course, there is a moment
when he who was dead rises from the tomb,
but Easter is not simply
about Jesus’ return to life.
Or, rather, it is about that,
because if it is not about that
it is not about anything.
But it is not only about that.
Easter is the ongoing activity of resurrection
brought about in us by Jesus through the Spirit.
In today’s Gospel,
Mary Magdalen, Peter, and John
all see the empty tomb
but, we are told,
“they did not yet understand the Scripture
that he had to rise from the dead.”
The reality of resurrection
that Jesus lived
was not yet fully real in them.
It seems that resurrection takes time,
and because it takes time
it involves patience,
and patience is our suffering time’s passage.
The raising of Jesus from the dead
is the decisive moment:
a corner is turned,
a new reality does begin,
a new world is opened up,
but all this begins as a tiny seed
planted in the earth of humanity,
and we are still living
through the time of its growth.
Resurrection unfolds slowly
and in often hidden ways;
the new life rises in us
not on our timetable
but on God’s.

Second, it is a mistake to think of Easter
as a return to normal.
As Paul tells us, we do not celebrate this feast
“with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness,
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
Jesus is not simply resuscitated,
but transformed,
the reign of God is fulfilled in him.
As they come to share in this transformation,
the lives of Jesus’ friends
do not return to normal:
Peter did not return to his nets;
Matthew did not return to his tax collecting.
As the reality of resurrection grows
the world should become for us
stranger and stranger
until the life we live
is taken up completely
into the risen life of Christ.
As resurrection grows within us
moments of unexpected grace
should become the new normal;
acts of extraordinary charity
should become the ordinary stuff of living;
lives lived against death and for God
should become our daily lives.

If Christians truly are an Easter people,
then we who bear the name Christian
can perhaps bear witness to the watching world
about what it truly means to have hope for new life.
In the days and weeks and months ahead
we can let our resurrection faith
inform our daily living.
We can show what it means
not to look for quick fixes
but rather to willingly suffer time’s passage.
We can show what it means
not to hope simply
for a restoration of the status quo,
but to think of how our world
might go forward in ways
that are more just
and more compassionate.
Whatever lies on the other side of Corona Time
is not, to be sure, the reign of God.
But perhaps it can be a world
that is just little kinder, just a little fairer,
just a little more aligned with the truth
that Christ is risen and death is defeated.
May Christ make this new life true in us
and may God have mercy on us all.

Good Friday

Readings: Isaiah 52:13—53:12; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42

Perhaps it is a sign of our fallen state
that we seem to treat suffering as a zero-sum game:
we act as if the validation of one kind of suffering
somehow requires the negation of other sorts of suffering.
This has particularly struck me during these days of Corona Time.
A single person, suffering from isolation,
is told by those struggling to homeschool their children
that they don’t know how easy they have it.
Those who speak of the tedium of staying at home
are rebuked by others in the name of those essential workers
who must put their health at risk by leaving home
to provide for our food or medical care.
The pain of priests who cannot minister
the sacraments to their people
is pitted against the pain
of those deprived of the sacraments.
It is almost as if there is not enough suffering to go around;
as if the recognition of one person’s suffering
could somehow deprive another person of their right to suffer.
It sounds foolish, of course, if you put it that way.
But nonetheless we do persist in feeling
that our particular form of suffering
might be invalidated if we recognize
someone suffering from different circumstances.
We treat suffering as if it were a measurable commodity
and not a mystery.

In some ways this is a failure of imagination on our part.
If I am suffering from prolonged confinement with my family,
I can’t imagine how someone could suffer from living alone;
I suspect they must simply be complaining.
If I am putting my health at risk to provide essential services,
I cannot imagine how not leaving the house for days on end
could count as real deprivation.
If I am hungering to receive Christ in the sacraments
I can’t imagine that my priest is livestreaming his private Masses
for any reason other than to taunt me.
And this failure of imagination is understandable,
because while suffering sometimes has material causes
and unmistakable outward manifestations,
at its heart it is something hidden and inward;
it is a spiritual affliction,
whatever its outward cause or sign.
It may be true, as a philosopher once said,
that the human body is the best picture of the human soul,
but the depths of the soul’s suffering
are not unfailingly depicted on the surface;
it seems still to be the case that we often fail
to grasp fully, or grasp at all, the suffering of others;
we fail in our knowing of how it is
in their particular situation.

Today, the letter to the Hebrews reminds us
that in Jesus, “we do not have a high priest
who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,
but one who has similarly been tested in every way,
yet without sin.”
In Jesus, God knows how it is
to be in our particular situation.
We believe that, on the cross,
Jesus took on the whole of the world’s suffering,
not in order to satisfy in God a divine lust for vengeance,
but so that our suffering might be know from within
by the God who loves us and desires our good.
The cross is the event of divine compassion:
God suffers in the flesh in order to inhabit our suffering,
so that we may “confidently approach the throne of grace
to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.”

Jesus knows your suffering, and knows it is real.
Jesus, the one without sin,
does not see your suffering as in competition with his;
indeed, your suffering is his suffering.
And he calls us who have been known by him
to see the suffering of others as he sees it:
to press beyond the limitations of our imaginations
and inhabit their suffering
as Jesus has inhabited ours.
He calls us to listen for their suffering
and to hear it without needing to judge it
or to rank it against other suffering.
He calls us to know as he knows
that the forms of suffering
are as varied as those who suffer,
but the remedy for our suffering
is the one love of God.
He calls us on this Friday we call good
to a deeper compassion
rooted in the compassion of the cross.
During the days and weeks ahead,
let us pray to grow in compassion.
And may God have mercy on us all.

Palm Sunday (Fourth Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Matthew 21:1-11; Isaiah 50:4-7; Philippians 2:6-11; Matthew 27:11-45

It is surely a function
of the extraordinary times in which we find ourselves
that the word that leaps out to me,
in both the Palm Gospel and the Passion narrative,
is the word “crowd.”
The scene of residents of Jerusalem
jostling together with Passover pilgrims
to hail Jesus as the one who has come
in the name of the Lord
fills me with a not-so-vague sense of unease.
As I picture the scene I feel an irrational impulse to yell
“social distancing!” and “stay at home!”
and to try to make the crowd disperse.
Of course, the fact that it is also a crowd
that cries out for Jesus’ crucifixion a few days later
suggest that this is not simply an irrational fear.

Even apart from epidemiological concerns,
we are all familiar with the dangerous mob mentality
that can overtake groups of people,
whether this happens in a physical crowd,
like the mob in the Praetorium calling for the death of Jesus,
or, as is equally likely today, a virtual crowd,
like Twitter mobs that “cancel”
those guilty of various transgressions.
There is a kind of anonymity in a crowd
that seems to give license to people
to give free rein to the worst impulses
of fallen human nature.
A mob mentality can lead me to do or say things
that would otherwise be unimaginable,
because I can lose myself in the crowd
and convince myself
that somehow it is not really me
who is doing or saying these things.
Surely the mob that calls for Jesus’ death
was not composed of uniquely evil people.
And the mob can make us think
that we are somehow immune
from the consequences of our actions.
There is something deeply chilling
when those calling for Jesus’ death
cry out, “His blood be upon us
and upon our children”
because it shows a scoffing disregard
that seems to think that the mob absolves us
from any real moral responsibility.
It is almost as if the crowd is responding
to the idea that they could be held accountable
for murdering an innocent man
with a collective “whatever.”

But not all crowds are murderous mobs.
The deadly and demonic crowd
is only one possible form
that groups of people can take.
Even as we might currently feel unease
at the very thought of large groups of people
congregating in one place,
there is in us still a healthy longing to gather,
a desire to be a part of something larger than ourselves,
to find our place among a multitude.
Mobs may become murderous,
but there are also life-giving assemblies of people,
the crowds of humanity that we miss terribly in these days.
This includes the crowds who assemble
for sporting events or concerts or lectures.
For Christians it above all includes
that supernatural assembly that we call “church.”
Indeed, in these coming holy days
we are not simply recalling and celebrating
Jesus shedding his blood for each of us as individuals,
but also how, through his death and resurrection
and the giving of his Spirit,
he has called to himself,
as John sees in his apocalyptic vision,
“a great multitude that no one could count,
from every nation,
from all tribes and peoples and languages,
standing before the throne and before the Lamb,
robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.”

This crowd is no mob,
but rather those gathered
by an unimaginable divine goodness
that inspires us to act in faith, hope, and love.
This is the crowd for which we long.
The Christian doctrine of the communion of the saints
says that neither time nor distance
can break the bonds
that the Spirit has forged between us.
Jesus has died and risen
and given us his Spirit
so that we can remain united with him
and with each other
even when we are physically separated.
So let us celebrate the holy days of this week
with hearts renewed in hope,
even as we long for that day
when we see each other,
no longer dimly as in a mirror,
but face to face.
And may God have mercy on us all.

Lent 5 (Third Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Ezekiel 37:12-14; Romans 8:8-11; John 11:1-45

As we continue our great national experiment
in “social distancing” and “self-quarantining,”
some of us might be feeling
as if we know just a little
what it meant for Lazarus
to be confined in his tomb.
It not simply that we are entombed
within the walls of our homes
for most of the day;
it is the loss of the moments,
casual or calculated,
of embodied human contact
with which our days were formerly filled:
handshakes or hugs of greeting,
lunches with friends or colleagues,
friends visiting in our homes,
dinners out in crowded restaurants,
even face-to-face meetings to conduct business.
And for Christians, of course, there is the loss
of gathering for worship as a visible body,
shoulder to shoulder,
offering praise to the holy Trinity
and receiving into our bodies
the living flesh and blood of the Lord Jesus.

The tragedy of death is not simply
the cessation of biological functioning.
It is also the fracturing of human community,
the loss of bodily connection among people.
The poignancy of the loss of Lazarus
is conveyed in John’s Gospel
not by his dead body,
which lies hidden from sight,
but by the grief of his sisters,
who display for us the raw wound
of human connection torn apart by death.
We see it even in Jesus himself,
who weeps at Lazarus’s tomb
in witness to the devastation that death wreaks
upon the bonds of human love.
Even for those who believe,
as the Church’s liturgy for the dead proclaims,
that for Christ’s faithful “life is changed not ended,”
who believe that we are still united in love
with those who have entered into death’s mystery,
there is still the loss of that day-to-day contact
that lies at the heart of grief.
The resurrection that will restore to us
the embodied presence of the other
lives in us as hope, not as possession.

And so too during this time of pandemic:
even as we know that the lives of our friends and families
continue while we are separated from them,
even as we know that we can still communicate at a distance
and that this time of separation will one day end,
there is for now the loss of that ordinary embodied presence
in which our lives had once been immersed.
In some small way,
in this time of enclosure
we are tasting the loss that death brings,
the confinement and constriction of life,
the absence of embodied presence to others.

This past week the Church celebrated
the feast of the Annunciation,
which draws our attention
to another kind of enclosure
and another kind of embodied presence:
the Son of God coming to dwell
for nine months within Mary’s womb.
Unlike the tomb,
which cuts us off from bodily presence,
the womb is a place of most intimate presence
as the child develops within the mother’s body;
because of this intimacy
the womb is a place of life and growth,
not of death and decay.
And we might say that—
by way of anticipation in the raising of Lazarus,
and supremely and for all time
in his own rising from the dead—
Jesus transforms the tomb into a womb,
a place of death into the place
from which life springs forth.
What we celebrate at Easter,
and anticipate this Sunday in the story of Lazarus,
is precisely this transformation.

I suppose it might be a nice bit of symbolism
if we could, as some have suggested,
choose Easter as the date on which
we would end this experiment in confinement.
It would be nice if Easter Sunday could be the day
on which we emerged from our exile
to be restored to bodily presence with each other.
But to do this would not only be to foolishly ignore
the realities of this global pandemic,
it would also be to deny the ways in which
the risen Lord is already transforming
our time of confinement from tomb into womb.
To limit our contact with others for their sake
and the sake of the common good
is already to embody life in the midst of death.

I have been amazed at the level of concern and creativity
that people have shown in responding to this crisis,
from formerly technologically inept pastors
streaming messages of hope to their flocks
to people sewing protective masks at home
to support depleted hospital stores.
For the love of God poured into our hearts
cannot be confined by walls or held at a distance.
The grace of God can transform this time of confinement
through the same power by which Jesus called Lazarus forth.
Let grace grow in us as Christ grew within Mary’s womb
and let us be reborn by the power of Easter
to lives of greater faith, greater hope, and greater love.
And may God have mercy on us all.

Lent 4 (Second Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

It is typical of the irony
that pervades John’s Gospel
that it is not the man born blind
who cannot see,
but rather the other people in the story.
They cannot see Jesus for who he really is:
the power of God made flesh.
The blind man, however, sees divine power
at work in his healing.
Just as God, in the beginning,
scooped up the clay of the earth
and formed Adam and breathed life into him,
so too Jesus takes clay
and rubs it into the blind man’s eyes
to heal and restore him to fulness of life.
The bystanders, however, cannot see this;
they are blind to the presence in their midst
of the life-giving God.

But they are not simply blind
to the divine reality before them;
they are equally blind
to the human reality of the man Jesus heals.
One of the odd details in John’s telling of the story
is the confusion, after Jesus has healed the man,
over whether this is in fact the same person
who had begged for alms in their streets,
or someone else entirely.
Perhaps they had never really seen the man.
Perhaps they had seen simply a blind beggar—
not a person
but a category of people:
“the unfortunate” or “the disabled”
or maybe “the annoying” or “the threatening.”
The language used by the people in the story
is revealing: “His neighbors
and those who had seen him earlier as a beggar
said, ‘Isn’t this the one who used to sit and beg?’”
Notice that they do not identify him
as a particular person who is known and named,
but as a faceless member of some collective group:
the beggars or the blind.
Having seen him before simply as a blind beggar,
they cannot now recognize him
when he is no longer blind and begging.

Jesus, however, can truly see the man,
for he sees with divine vision.
As we are told in the first book of Samuel,
“Not as man sees does God see,
because man sees the appearance
but the LORD looks into the heart.”
Jesus’s love and compassion for the man
is not a generic love for those that suffer;
it is the LORD’S highly particular love
for this man and his unique story of suffering
and it is this love that heals.

We who are Christians are called to have
what Saint Paul calls the “mind” of Christ;
to see with what we might call the eyes of Christ.
We are called to see the unique story of each person,
to have compassion on the unique suffering of each person,
to love with a love that is not vague and generic
but concrete and specific.
This is, of course, a challenge.
One of the ways in which our hearts
keep the world’s horrors at bay
is not to focus too clearly on the details,
to keep the pain of the physical suffering
and social marginality of others
confined in large categories:
the disabled, the poor,
the unemployed, the dispossessed.
But everyone in those categories
suffers the horrors of the world
in their own particular way,
a way that cries out
for our recognition
and our compassion.

The difficulty of hearing and answering those cries
has been driven home in the past week,
as we have seen the unfolding
of the corona virus pandemic
around the world.
Over three-thousand deaths in China,
nearly five-thousand deaths in Italy,
over fifteen-hundred deaths in Iran.
These numbers will grow larger,
and may grow much larger,
and in order to manage our anxiety
we can be tempted to turn those deaths
into abstractions,
faceless numbers to feed into
some calculation of risk and benefit.
Some of us even speak
of acceptable levels of death
that we should tolerate to ensure
that life can continue as usual
and our economy remain healthy.
This is a view, I think, that requires us
to blind ourselves to the truth
that each person lost has a story
and the loss of each
is an immense tragedy.
One of the ways we seek to manage our fear
is to let our vision of this horror lose focus,
to make ourselves blind to the fact
that behind these numbers
are real people who suffered:
someone’s mother or father,
brother or sister,
son or daughter,
friend,
co-worker,
teacher,
student.

The human mind simply cannot take it in,
and we can perhaps be forgiven
for retreating into abstractions.
But not as man sees does God see,
for the LORD looks into the heart.
God knows the story of each one who has died,
just as Jesus knew the story of the blind man.
And to believe your story known by God
is to hope for a share in God’s eternity.
And we who bear the name Christian
are called to see as Christ sees
is some small measure;
we are called to not let the world’s pain
go out of focus,
but to confront that pain
by concrete acts of compassion
by which those who suffer
can know themselves as seen.
We do not have God’s capacity
to look into the heart of each and every person,
but we must still resist the impulse
to let their deaths become abstractions.
Look at the numbers and remember:
each is a person.
We are called to mourn the loss
of each one who has died,
and to hope for each one that greatest of hopes—
that God will breathe once more
the breath of life eternal into lifeless clay
and open their eyes to see God’s face.
And may God have mercy on us all.

Lent 3 (First Sunday in Corona Time)

Readings: Exodus 17:3-7; Romans 5:1-2, 5-8; John 4:5-42

Among the many new things that the coronavirus
has brought into our lives
is the phrase “social distancing.”
This is the term for one of the key prescriptions
for slowing the spread of the coronavirus
to the point where cases of Covid-19
do not overwhelm our medical facilities.
The idea is that you literally “keep your distance”
from other people to reduce the chance
of being infected or infecting others.

In today’s Gospel, which tells of Jesus’ encounter
with the Samaritan woman at the well,
we hear of a different kind of social distancing.
The woman is surprised
to have Jesus ask her for a drink
because, we are told,
“Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.”
Jews and Samaritans viewed each other as heretics
who practiced deviant forms of the religion of Israel.
But more than that, Jews considered Samaritans
to be in a sense “unclean,”
sources of a kind of religious contagion.
For the Jews, social contact with a Samaritan
was a risk to one’s religious purity.
This is why the Samaritan woman is so shocked
to have Jesus ask her for water;
it is as if you asked to drink from the water bottle
of someone with a deadly disease.
This sort of social distancing sees the other,
at best, as one beyond my sphere of moral concern
and, at worst, as a threat to be contained or eliminated.
It is a phenomenon that is still with us today,
manifest in divisions of race and economic class,
of nations and generations.
We see it when people act as if
the pain and struggle of those who are different
must be kept at a distance,
lest they infect us.

What do these two kinds of social distancing
have to do with each other?
The first sort is a necessary and life-saving measure
to slow the progress of this disease.
But the second sort of social distancing,
the kind that separated Jews and Samaritans,
the kind that separates races and classes in our own day,
rather than being a life-saving measure,
is a death-dealing way of life.
It is death-dealing to those we keep at a distance
because it seeks to make us immune to their struggles
and deaf to their cries of suffering.
It is death-dealing to us as well,
because it requires us to harden our hearts,
to deny any natural compassion for
and solidarity with our fellow human beings.
It makes us less human,
less fully alive with the love that is God.

Jesus breaks through
this death-dealing social distancing
by the simple act of asking
the Samaritan woman for a drink of water.
Jesus bridges the social distance
between Jew and Samaritan,
breaking down the dividing wall
that separated them,
so that he can offer her the water of eternal life.
He does this not only for the Samaritan woman
but for all of us who were far from God through sin,
our hearts hardened to both God and neighbor.
Paul writes in today’s second reading,
“while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”
In Jesus Christ, God has opened his heart to us
and crossed the distance separating us,
and he calls us to do the same.

So we can distinguish between
the social distancing that we must undertake
in these extraordinary circumstances
and the social distancing that we must overcome
by throwing caution to the wind
and stepping across the dividing lines
of race and class and age and nationality.
Lent is a time to examine our consciences
and return to the Lord;
this public health crisis also calls for us
to examine our consciences.
I may be confident that I am healthy enough
to carry on my life as usual
and run the risk of getting sick with Covid-19,
but do I spare a thought for the elderly
or the physically frail person
with whom I come in contact
and whom I might infect?
I may feel a sense of relief
at the closing my children’s school
as a measure to protect them from infection,
but do I spare a thought for
the single working parent who will be left
without childcare if the schools close?
I may not worry about my ability
to receive excellent medical care
should I fall ill,
but do I spare a thought for the uninsured
or for those in medically underserved areas?
The death-dealing social distancing
that runs throughout our society
makes it easy to think only of ourselves
and to make ourselves blind and deaf
to those who are most vulnerable.

Our Catholic tradition calls us to care
not only for our individual well-being,
but for the common good of all people.
Now is the acceptable time to embrace that tradition.
It is not only prudent that we adopt practices
of physical social distancing in order to slow
the spread of a potentially deadly disease,
but it is something that love demands.
And it is imperative that we
who are followers of Jesus
reject the social distancing that blinds us
to the needs of those most vulnerable.
Moses struck the rock in the desert
with his wooded staff
and life-giving water flowed forth.
In this season of Lent,
in this time of crisis,
may the wood of the cross
strike our stony hearts
so that the life-giving water of God’s love
may flow forth from us
to quench the thirst
of those most in need.
And may God have mercy on us all.

Ash Wednesday

Readings: Joel 2:12-18; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18

On this Ash Wednesday,
and throughout the Lenten season,
the Lord invites us to become
a broken-hearted people.
“Rend your hearts and not your garments….
Between the porch and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep,
and say, ‘Spare, O Lord, your people’…”
The Lord invites us to become a people
whose hearts are not merely broken,
but broken open—
broken open to God,
broken open to our true selves,
and broken open to our neighbors.

This is the purpose
of the traditional disciplines of Lent:
the disciplines of prayer,
of fasting,
and of almsgiving
about which Jesus speaks in our Gospel.
These are practices through which God’s grace works
to break open hearts that have closed in on themselves.

In prayer, our hearts are broken open to God.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux wrote that prayer
is “a cry of recognition and love…
which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus.”
When I pray, I invite Christ into my heart
and find my heart being stretched
so as to contain the infinite love of God.
For a heart hardened by sin or indifference
this expansion of the soul
involves a certain sort of breaking,
as I struggle with the tedium and distraction
that seem so often to accompany my prayer.
This is all part of the breaking open
and breaking through
that we must endure
if we are to receive God’s love.
During the Lenten season
we are called to embrace
the hard discipline of prayer
so as know the love of God.

In fasting, our hearts are broken open
to our true selves.
To fast is to sacrifice those material things
that we seek to substitute for the love of God,
and that we use to distract ourselves
from our own neediness and fragility.
To let myself feel hunger or longing or deprivation
it to let my heart be broken by the recognition
that I am dust and to dust I shall return.
To surrender my illusion of self-sufficiency
is also to have my heart broken open
to the possibility of hope, not in myself,
but in Jesus Christ crucified and risen,
who breathes his Spirit
into this creature of dust.
As the philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote:
“Jesus Christ is a God
whom we approach without pride,
and before whom we humble ourselves
without despair” (Pascal, Pensées n. 245).
In the Lenten season
we are called to embrace
the joyful discipline of fasting
so as to know our true selves
and our need of God.

In giving alms and in other acts of charity,
our hearts are broken open to our neighbors.
Hearts broken open to God in prayer
and to our own needy selves in fasting
can be hearts truly open
to the needs of others.
Knowing the love that is God
and my own self as dust
brought to life by God’s breath,
the need of my neighbor breaks my heart,
for I see that he or she
is no threat to my prosperity,
but rather one like me:
the underserving recipient
of God’s gift of life,
a fellow beggar
at the banquet of God’s love.
Released from the compulsion
to use our material goods
to shore up our self-worth,
we are freed to use those goods to alleviate
the heartbreaking suffering of our world.
In the Lenten season
we are called to embrace
the Godly discipline of almsgiving
so as to know our neighbor
as God’s beloved.

Rend you hearts and not your garments:
not for show,
nor merely out of duty,
but so that you may know the love of God.
Let us embark together on this holy season
of prayer and fasting and almsgiving,
so that we may discover
what it means to love as God loves,
with hearts broken joyfully open.
_______________________
Click here for video of this homily.

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

The image of America as “a city on a hill”
enjoys bi-partisan approval in our public discourse.
Ronald Regan, in his final address to the nation in 1989,
said, “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life.”
Barack Obama, speaking on 2006 while still a Senator,
said of the Pilgrim settlers of New England,
“they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill.
And the world watched, waiting to see
if this improbable idea called America would succeed.”
The image of the city on the hill is evoked to speak of
what is sometimes called “American exceptionalism”—
the idea that our nation’s unique experiment in democracy
bestows on it an almost messianic mission
to be a beacon of freedom,
bringing light to those in darkness.

The source of this image
is a sermon preached in 1630 by the Puritan John Winthrop
to the pilgrims departing England for the New World.
He told them, “wee must Consider that wee shall be
as a Citty upon a Hill,
the eies of all people are upon us.”
It is worth noting that Winthrop’s sermon
and its image of a city on a hill
lay forgotten for centuries,
being revived only in the mid-twentieth century,
during the Cold War,
to underscore the unique value of American democracy
in the struggle against totalitarianism.
But, of course, John Winthrop, in 1630,
had no idea about the Cold War.
Indeed, in 1630 he had no idea
about the United States of America,
which would not exist for another 150 years.

So what was he speaking about?
In speaking of a city on the hill,
he is referring not to a nation
that would one day emerge on this continent,
but to the words Jesus address to his followers
in today’s Gospel,
which our translation renders as,
“A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.”
Winthrop invokes these words
to remind the small group of Christians
setting out to establish a colony
based on Christian principles of justice, mercy, and love
that the world would be watching them
to see if they could in fact live by those principles.
For Winthrop, what would make this little community
become a shining city on a hill
is the justice and mercy that they show to their neighbors
and the love that binds them together as Christ’s body.
He quotes in his sermon the very same passage from Isaiah
that we have read this morning:
“Share your bread with the hungry,
shelter the oppressed and the homeless;
clothe the naked when you see them,
and do not turn your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn….
and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.”
Though they certainly failed at times to reach this ideal,
particularly in regard to their native neighbors,
this was the standard by which they wished to be judged.

As our national politics grow ever more fractious and more brutal,
and we are tempted to anger or hatred or despair or apathy,
it is good to recall the true meaning of the phrase “a city on the hill.”
The city on the hill is no earthly nation, but is the body of Christ:
it is those disciples who have been knit together by the Spirit’s grace
into a living organism animated by justice, mercy, and love;
it is God’s pilgrim city journeying through time to our eternal rest.
As much as we may rightly love our earthly homeland,
as much as we might value its democratic institutions,
we should never confuse the United States of America
with the true city on the hill.
As much as we may love our country,
it is, like all nations, at its best
a place of temporary and relative justice.
And, perhaps paradoxically, we serve our country best
if we do not confuse our love for it
with our loyalty to our true homeland,
God’s heavenly city.

Only if our hope is rooted in something
that transcends the empires and nations
built on the shifting sands of this world
can we find the justice, mercy, and love that we need
in order to care for the public things of our earthly life
without succumbing to bitterness in our losses
of vindictiveness in our victories.
Only if we obey Paul’s injunction to fix our hearts
on Jesus Christ and him crucified
will we be able to free ourselves from the partisan hatreds
that perpetually tear this world apart;
only if we commit ourselves to Jesus’s way of the cross
will we be able to show the watching world
the power and wisdom of self-sacrificing love.
If we who claim the name Christian remove from our midst
oppression, false accusation and malicious speech;
if we bestow our bread on the hungry
and satisfy the afflicted;
then light shall rise for us in the darkness
and we can be,
in fear and trembling at our weakness
but in hope and confidence in God’s power,
light for which the world in darkness waits.
___________________________
Video of this homily.

2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 49:3, 5-6; 1 Corinthians 1:1-3; John 1:29-34

“If you see something, say something.”
This is the vaguely Big Brother-ish
post-September 11, 2001 slogan
of various U.S. security agencies,
encouraging Americans to keep
a suspicious eye on each other.
But, in a very different sense,
it might also serve
as the slogan for today’s Gospel:
“John the Baptist saw Jesus
coming toward him and said,
‘Behold, the Lamb of God,
who takes away the sin of the world.’”
John saw something
and he said something.

A prophet is someone who is gifted
with a keen eye and a persistent voice.
And John the Baptist—
the last prophet of the Old Covenant—
has a particularly sharp eye.
He reads the signs of the times
in the light of Scripture,
and he keeps his eyes open,
looking not for potential threats,
but for the savior
whom God has promised to his people.
He also speaks out persistently,
crying out in the wilderness of fading hope,
“prepare the way of the Lord,”
unafraid of the religious and political leaders
who would silence him.
The prophet sees something
and he says something
so that others can see what he sees.

And what John the Baptist sees is the Lamb of God.
Others might have seen simply a young man
of undistinguished background
from an unimportant northern village,
who had no particular potential or promise.
But the keen eye of John, the eye of faith,
sees in Jesus the fulfillment of the promise of God.
John sees something and says something
so that we can see what he sees:
“Behold”—look! see!—“the Lamb of God,
who takes away the sin of the world.”

In acclaiming Jesus as the “Lamb of God,”
John evokes a host of images from the Scriptures of Israel:
the Passover lamb whose blood marked the doorposts
of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt,
sheltering them from the angel of death;
the lambs sacrificed every morning and evening
in the Jerusalem temple to offer honor to God;
the servant of the Lord prophesied by Isaiah
who would be “led like a lamb to the slaughter”;
even the scapegoat that symbolically bore
the sins of the Israelites out into the wilderness.
John says what he sees in Jesus
so that we can see it too:
here is one who would bear away
not just the sins of the people Israel,
but the sins of the entire world,
who would rescue us
from the ancient curse of death
that afflicts the human family,
so that, as God says in our first reading,
“my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

A prophet has a keen eye and a persistent voice,
and John’s voice persists even today,
in the words of our liturgy:
when we sing the Gloria, John still acclaims Jesus
as “Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father”;
when the bread of Christ’s body is broken,
John still implores the Lamb of God
who takes away the sins of the world
to grant his mercy and his peace
to us and to our troubled world;
when the priest invites us to communion,
John’s words still invite us to see what he saw:
“Behold the Lamb of God.”

Do we see it?
Do we see the Lamb of God,
the bearer of all our sins and sorrows,
present in his gathered people,
present in his word proclaimed,
present in the gift of himself in the Eucharist?
Perhaps it takes the keen eye of the prophet
to be able to see the Lamb here present
within the motley assembly of the Church,
within the often puzzling words of Scripture,
within the simple gifts of bread and wine.
But John tells us that Jesus has come
to baptize us with the same Spirit
that descended on him at his baptism,
to give us the eyes of a prophet,
eyes of faith to glimpse the Lamb
now present here in mystery.
This is what the gift of God’s Spirit does:
makes us able to see the Lamb of God
who is here with us now,
veiled in sacramental signs.

So if we see something,
do we say something?
Do we keep to ourselves
what we see with the eyes of faith,
or do we, like John, speak out,
perhaps at cost to ourselves,
so that others can see what we see?
We, no less than John,
have been given a prophet’s eyes
to see what is hidden
and a prophet’s voice,
to say what we see.
We, no less than John,
are called to be,
in fear and trembling
and with all due humility,
Christ’s heralds to others
so that they too might praise Jesus
as Lord, Lamb, and Son;
so that they too might implore his mercy and peace
on our broken and warring world;
so that they too might know themselves
graciously invited to the banquet of life.
If you see something, say something,
because the world waits to know
what can be seen with the eyes of faith.
______________________
Click here for the video of this homily.