Advent 3

Readings: Isaiah 61:1-2a, 10-11; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

On this Gaudete Sunday—the Sunday of rejoicing—
our scriptures seem most insistent that we should rejoice.
Isaiah tells us, “I rejoice heartily in the LORD, 
in my God is the joy of my soul.”
Paul commands us, “Rejoice always…
In all circumstances give thanks.”
Yet as the year 2020 stumbles to a close
many of us might look both outward and inward
and wonder if there is any joy to be found.
What joy is there in over a million and a half deaths
in a worldwide pandemic?
What joy is there in the prospect 
of another socially-distanced holiday?
What joy is there in the rancorous bickering 
and outright lying
that have become our public discourse?
“Rejoice”?
We might hear this as more oppressive than encouraging,
a demand that we squeeze out one more drop
from a sponge that was long ago wrung dry.

But God knows that we, on our own, 

are but dry sponges.
God knows that after many hard months
the reserves of joy within us
are depleted, and we are weary. 
It doesn’t matter if our reserves of joy are depleted,
because we are not the source of our own joy.
This is why Paul assures us that 
“The one who calls you is faithful,
and he will also accomplish it.”
The God who calls us to joy 
will accomplish that joy within us.

Now I know that it runs counter to our American ethos 
to say that our happiness can or should
depend on someone or something other than ourselves.
We Americans practically invented the notion of “self-help,”
the idea that we can, through hard work,
pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps 
into health, wealth, and, yes, even into joy.
To quote just one 
randomly chosen writer from the internet:
“Regardless of your personal circumstances, 
it is possible to find internal happiness, 
that form of happiness that feeds on nothing, 
except your own desire to find it.”
In my experience, such statements 
are typically followed by a list of imperatives:
eat healthy,
get exercise,
take a walk,
get off social media,
keep a journal,
declutter,
get a dog,
and so forth.

It’s really all just repackaging of the advice given years ago 
by that most American of self-help gurus, Henry Ford: 
“There is joy in work. 
There is no happiness except in the realization 
that we have accomplished something.”
Joy is only found in what you yourself can do.
It all seems to come down to this:
if your life feels sorrowful and joyless,
you’re just not trying hard enough.
There is nothing wrong with you
that a little more effort won’t fix.
So get to work: grab those bootstraps 
and pull.

But this is not the Gospel.
The Gospel is that none of us
finds joy from within ourselves
or through our own efforts;
we find it in the kingdom of God
that has drawn near in Christ.
The Gospel is not a call 
to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
The Gospel is that while we lay dead
in the sorrow of sin
God has come to our rescue.
The Gospel is not that things are not really that bad,
that they are not really beyond our capacity to repair.
The Gospel is that, yes, things are that bad,
but God is greater.

Despite what the self-help gurus will tell you,
we are not our own saviors,
we are not our own source of joy.
We are like John the Baptist 
who confesses that he is not the Christ,
but only points us to the Christ;
who proclaims that he is not the light,
but only bears witness to the light.
In confessing our inability to save ourselves
we can hear the words “rejoice always”
not as some shallow assurance that we can be okay
if we just try a little harder,
nor as some command that we cannot possibly fulfill,
but as the announcement of glad tidings of salvation,
the announcement that one is present in our midst,
whom we may not yet recognize,
who has come to fill us with joy and light
and peace that passes human understanding,
one in whom we can rejoice always, 
in every circumstance,
because in Christ there is 
no human circumstance
from which God is absent.
In Christ God has placed himself
in the midst of disease and death,
of sorrow and separation,
of conflict and division.
We rejoice always
because Christ is always with us,
even in our joylessness,
to share with us his joy.

Paul tells the Christians at Thessalonica,
“Do not quench the Spirit.”
Perhaps in our anxious efforts 
to bootstrap our way into joy
we smother the Spirit of genuine rejoicing.
Perhaps we need to let the darkness be dark
so that we can see the light 
that is coming into the world,
coming to save us.
In these remaining days of Advent,
let us pray that God’s Spirit would burn within us,
consuming our sorrow and bringing us light,
so that at Christmas we may see the one
who is already dwelling in our midst,
enabling us to share his joy.
And may God have mercy on us all. 

34th Week in Ordinary Time II—Tuesday (Vietnamese Martyrs)

Readings: Revelation 14:14-19; Luke 21:5-11

We are all familiar 
with images of the Grim Reaper,
the hooded figure of death 
carrying a scythe in its hands
and coming to collect the harvest of souls.
This figure is rooted in the imagery 
of the Book of Revelation,
which depicts a final harvest 
in which first “one like a son of man”
and then “another angel”
use their scythes to reap the earth,
after which the angel throws his harvest 
“into the great wine press of God’s fury.”

This is pretty terrifying stuff.
And puzzling as well.
Interpreters differ as to exactly what
the writer of Revelation is telling us.
The one like a son of man 
seems to be Jesus himself.
But who is this second, 
grimly reaping, angel?
We don’t really know.
And what do the two harvests symbolize?
Does the first represent the righteous,
whom Christ takes to himself
and stored like wheat in barns,
and the second the unrighteous,
who are crushed in God’s anger?
Again we don’t really know.
Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel
that it is perfectly right 
that we should not know.
 
Apocalyptic visions of the end
are not given to us 
as a timetable or itinerary
but to fire our imaginations
with a vivid sense of God’s power to save
and an urgency about our own lives,
a reminder to be prepared at every moment
to give an accounting before God
of what we have done with our lives.
Living as we do 
amidst war and rumors of war,
amidst plague and famine,
we should take comfort 
in God’s almighty power and loving mercy.
We should remind ourselves 
that the time of reaping comes for all of us
and pray that it may be for us a time of grace.
If we live at every moment seeking Christ’s reign,
then we have no need to fear.

We should look to the example 
of St. Andrew Dūng-Lac,
a Vietnamese priest in the 19th century
who lived in a time of persecution of the Church
and who ministered, often in secret,
to his fellows Vietnamese Catholics.
Arrested several times, 
he persevered in his ministry
until finally he was beheaded in 1839.
St. Andrew lived his life knowing
that the time of harvest would come,
and yet he trusted that Christ, 
the one like a son of man,
would on that day gather him to himself.
May the prayers and example of St. Andrew
help us to live our own lives
ready at every moment
for the harvest of Christ’s kingdom.
And may God have mercy on us all.

Christ the King

Readings: Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15-17; 1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 28; Matthew 25:31-46

The folk singer Woody Guthrie 
once wrote a song
entitled “Christ for President”
that goes, in part, like this:
“Let’s have Christ for president,
Let us have him for our king.
Cast your vote for the carpenter
That they call the Nazarene…
Every year we waste enough
To feed the ones who starve.
We build our civilization up
And we shoot it down with wars.”

Guthrie’s words find an echo in, of all places, 
the words of Pope Pius XI from 1925, 
when he instituted this feast of Christ the King,
partly in response to the growing secularism of society,
but also in response to fascist movements
that substituted worship of the nation and its leader
for the true worship of Christ.
Both the open disbelief of secular atheism
and the manipulation of religion 
by fascists and nationalists
are seen by Pius as rejections of the reign of Christ
in the hearts and lives of people.
He paints a picture of a world consequently in crisis:
“seeds of discord sown far and wide… 
bitter enmities and rivalries between nations,
which still hinder so much the cause of peace… 
insatiable greed which is so often hidden 
under a pretense of public spirit and patriotism…
a blind and immoderate selfishness… 
the unity and stability of the family undermined; 
society, in a word, shaken to its foundations 
and on the way to ruin” (Quas Primum n. 24).
Woody Guthrie and Pope Pius seem to agree
that our private and public lives would be better
if Jesus were in charge.

While we might take some comfort in the fact 
that we seem to have navigated the last century
without the world falling into utter ruin,
we ought also to be sobered 
by how the ills enumerated by Pope Pius
find such familiar echo in our own day.
We still see seeds of discord 
sown far and wide;
we still see bitterness and rivalry 
between and within nations;
we still see the pretense of patriotism 
used as cover for greed and selfishness;
we still see families struggling to stay together
amid political, economic, and cultural forces 
that would tear them apart.
And we might add to this a global pandemic
that has not only killed 1.4 million people worldwide,
but has also revealed, as it runs its course,
some of the darker aspects of human nature,
as well as a presidential election that promises 
to leave people in this country
ever more divided, 
ever more entrenched in their ideologies,
ever more unwilling to presume 
good will in their neighbors.

But this feast of Christ the King 
offers us more than simply an occasion to reflect
on the dreary catalogue of the world’s ills and failings.
It also offers us a vision of a world renewed
by the royal power of the risen Christ,
who presents to his Father, 
as our liturgy today says,
“a kingdom of truth and life,
a kingdom of holiness and grace,
a kingdom of justice, love, and peace.”
This feast proclaims Christ’s kingdom
present even amid the sorrows of our world.
Indeed, this is a kingdom 
that is present most intensely
in the places of greatest sorrow.
It is present in the hungry homeless person
waiting for a meal.
It is present in the convicted criminal
confined in isolation.
It is present in the unwelcomed refugee
waiting at our border.
It is present in the Covid patient 
struggling to draw a breath.
It is present in these places of sorrow 
because Christ is present there.

This is the great scandal of the Gospel,
over which so many of us stumble.
We think that Christ the King 
must be sought among the sleek and strong
and cannot possibly identify himself
with the wayward, the wicked, or the weak.
But that is precisely what he does 
throughout his ministry.
As the prophet Ezekiel foretells:
“The lost I will seek out,
the strayed I will bring back,
the injured I will bind up,
the sick I will heal, 
but the sleek and the strong I will destroy,
shepherding them rightly.”
And we who would be servants 
of Christ our King must seek him out,
not in places of power
but in those places of sorrow:
by feeding the hungry,
visiting the captive,
welcoming the stranger,
caring for the sick,
seeking to share their lot
so that we might have a share in Christ.
For it is in doing these things
that we find ourselves heirs to his kingdom:
“Come, you who are blessed by my Father.
Inherit the kingdom prepared for you 
from the foundation of the world.”
As Pope Pius writes, the Kingdom of Christ,
“demands of its subjects a spirit of detachment 
from riches and earthly things, 
and a spirit of gentleness.” 
Those who serve Christ as King,
“must hunger and thirst after justice, 
and more than this, they must deny themselves 
and carry the cross” (Quas Primum n. 15).

The great scandal of the Gospel
over which we stumble,
both as individuals and as societies,
is that true power and authority
are not found in the sleek and the strong
but in the crucified and risen one,
the one whose glorified body 
still bears the marks of torture
so that he might unite to himself 
all those who suffer 
the torments of hunger and thirst,
of rejection and captivity,
of illness and deprivation.
To embrace the Kingdom of Christ
is to embrace such weakness;
it is to deny ourselves and carry the cross,
serving Christ in those places of greatest sorrow.
This is the way to true life in Christ’s kingdom,
for Christ our king has come 
to vanquish death by his cross,
and has been raised up 
as sign and promise of that victory.

So let’s have Christ for president,
let us have him for our king,
let us ask him for the grace
to seek him out in places of sorrow
so that when he comes to judge the world
we might hear him say to us with joy,
“Come, you who are blessed by my Father.”
And may God have mercy on us all.

33rd Week in Ordinary Time II--Tuesday

Readings: Revelation 3:1-6, 14-22; Luke 19:1-10

In the Book of Revelation,
Christ dictates to John the Seer 
letters to seven churches.
While offering to some words of encouragement,
these letters are not entirely good news.
Today, we hear perhaps the two harshest:
to the Christian community at Sardis—
“you have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead”—
and to the Christian community at Laodicea— 
“because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold,
I will spit you out of my mouth.”
In both these cases we have communities
that are smug and self-satisfied,
thinking themselves on fire with the Spirit
when in fact their spirits have cooled.
These are perhaps the toughest nuts to crack:
those who are convinced that they know 
what God wants of them
and are equally convinced 
that they are doing it in exemplary fashion.

But the letters end on a hopeful note.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”
Christ is not deterred by our spiritual coldness;
he does not give up on us.
He keeps pounding on the door of our hearts;
he keeps asking us to let him in. 
And he promises, 
“If anyone hears my voice and opens the door,
then I will enter his house and dine with him,
and he with me.”
It is not too late even for those 
whose hearts have grown cold.
But to heed his knock, 
we must first know our neediness.

Unlike the self-satisfied churches of Sardis and Laodicea,
Zacchaeus, in today’s Gospel, 
knows that there is something wrong with his life.
A tax collector who had grown wealthy
off of the pain and misery of others,
he recognizes in Jesus a call to conversion.
Jesus stand at the door of his heart and knocks:
“Zacchaeus, come down quickly,
for today I must stay at your house.” 
At these words 
the self-satisfied, righteous people
in the crowd begins to grumble
that Jesus is, once again,
hanging around with sinners.
They think their lukewarm piety
is somehow superior to Zacchaeus’s 
heartfelt repentance.
But Jesus can see that Zacchaeus
has truly opened wide the door to him:
“Today salvation has come to this house.”
Unlike the grumbling crowd,
unlike the spiritually dead church of Sardis,
unlike the lukewarm Laodiceans,
Zacchaeus knows himself to be lost,
and so can also know what it means to be found.

Jesus still stands knocking at the door.
Can we hear him?
If we open the door,
if we remove from our hearts
the obstacles of sinful self-satisfaction,
then we truly will feast with Christ
in our sacramental sharing in his eucharist;
he will truly enter into our hearts
and into the heart of the Church.
“Whoever has ears ought to hear
what the Spirit says to the churches.”

32nd Week in Ordinary Time II--Wednesday (Martin of Tours)

Readings: Isaiah 61-1-3; Matthew 25: 31-40

Today is both Veteran’s Day
and the memorial of St. Martin of Tours,
a 4th-century monk and bishop 
who was himself a veteran,
though, according to the accounts of his life,
a highly unusual one.
As a young soldier he gave half of his cloak to a beggar,
only later to have a dream in which he saw Christ,
now clothed in the half-a-cloak,
telling him that in clothing that beggar
Martin had clothed Jesus himself.
This prompted Martin to be baptized 
and, eventually, after his baptism, to tell the emperor,
“Up to now I have served you as a soldier: 
allow me now to become a soldier to God…
I am the soldier of Christ: 
it is not lawful for me to fight” (Life of St. Martin ch. 4). 
When he was accused of cowardice for this,
he volunteered to stand unarmed 
on the front line of battle.
In God’s providence, the enemy army surrendered
before Martin had to face such a trial.
An unusual veteran indeed.

Martin then became a monk and later a bishop,
serving his flock with great dedication,
especially the poor and the suffering,
for he knew from experience 
that in serving them he was serving Christ.
His friend and biographer, Sulpitius Severus,
writes that, as the end of his life approached,
Martin placed his life in God’s hands:
“unconquered by toil, and unconquerable even by death…
he neither feared to die nor refused to live” (Ep. 3).
Martin, I dare say, had learned 
the great secret of the Christian life:
to know that in life or in death 
we belong to the Lord.
Such faith frees us from fear, 
so that we can pour ourselves into
the life to which God calls us,
and we can pour ourselves out
even into the mystery of death.

I think of St. Martin and his example of courage
as I ponder the newly released Vatican report 
on the case of former-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick,
a cleric who rose to great heights of power
and who used this power to abuse a series 
of seminarians, young men, and boys,
aided and abetted by others in the Church
who turned a blind eye to his crimes.
I think of the contrast 
between St. Martin and these false shepherds.
I think of the contrast between his courage
and their cowardice,
between his dedication to the people entrusted to him,
and their use of their office to satisfy their own lusts, 
between his ability to see Christ in the least of these
and their blindness to the abuse of the defenseless.

I have no ready explanation for such evils,
nor any easy remedy for what ails our Church,
nor words sufficient to comfort
the victims of clerical abuse.
But we do have the promise 
of Christ’s enduring love 
and power to heal,
and we have the intercession 
of St. Martin, Christ’s brave soldier. 
Let us ask him to pray for justice 
for victims of abuse,
and conversion for our Church’s pastors,
that they might serve Christ’s flock
with courage, dedication, and insight,
and may God have mercy on us all.

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

Whatever your desired electoral outcome,
I dare say that for many of us
these past few days
have been days of anxious waiting:
hitting the refresh button on vote counts,
watching to see states on the map
get colored in as blue or red,
waiting to form a picture 
of what the next four years might look like.

And even though an outcome has been projected,

there seem to be many uncertainties in the days ahead,

as we wait to see how we will mend our fractured nation.

But we should be pretty good at waiting by now,
since the past eight months 
ought to have taught us 
something about waiting:
waiting for a vaccine or better treatments,
waiting to see what is closed or opened,
waiting for life to return to normal,
waiting to see what “normal” looks like
in a post-pandemic world.  
Even prior to this remarkable, terrible year
our lives have been marked by waiting:
waiting for a child to be born,
waiting to hear about a college application,
waiting for a diagnosis,
waiting for a loved one to die.
You would think by now 
we would be pretty good at waiting,
but I suspect most of us have not really learned 
the art of waiting wisely.

In Jesus’ parable of the waiting virgins—
who, as far as we can tell, were to serve
as attendants at a wedding—
the groom whom they await
takes an inexplicably long time to arrive.
And when the cry finally comes at midnight
“Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!”
those who had not anticipated such a long wait
awake to find their lamps flickering toward darkness
and, running out to buy more oil, 
they miss the moment of the bridegroom’s arrival,
and return to find the door barred
and themselves shut out.

How were they unwise?
What was their folly?
Were they foolish for failing to bring enough oil?
Perhaps, but the bridegroom did, after all, 
arrive much later than expected.
How were they to know?
It seems to me that their folly is found
principally in the panic that falls upon them
when they hear that the bridegroom has arrived.
They are so consumed by the rather trivial point
that their lamps might not be burning
that they leave just as that for which they have waited
in now coming to pass:
the bridegroom has arrived 
and the joyous celebration can begin.
The wise virgins show their wisdom
not simply by bringing enough oil—
though their awareness that things 
might not go as planned
is certainly a mark of wisdom—
but by staying focused on what really matters,
by keeping constantly in mind
what it is they are waiting for:
the bridegroom’s arrival.

Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians also speaks of waiting.
The first generation of Christians generally thought
that the risen and ascended Christ would soon return 
to usher in the reign of God in its fullness. 
Like the virgins in Jesus’ parable,
they had no idea 
that the one for whom they waited
would delay so long.
Paul writes to the Christians at Thessalonica 
because they have begun to wonder
about the fate of those who have died 
while waiting for Christ’s return:
like the foolish virgins, they have begun to panic:
will those who died somehow miss out 
on the fullness of God’s reign?
Paul addresses their fears by assuring them
that whenever it is that Christ returns
their beloved dead will be raised to reign with him
since Christ himself is life.
So, he tells them, they should not grieve 
like those who have no hope;
not that they should not grieve—
after all, death deprives us for a time
of those whom we love—
but that their time of grief should be marked 
by the wisdom that waits in hope for Christ’s return,
a return that may seem long delayed
but will occur in God’s good time.

Paul’s words to the Thessalonians echo Jesus’ parable:
be prepared for the time to be short,
but also be prepared for the time to be long,
“for you know neither the day nor the hour.”
Wait wisely for what will come:
you may mourn your waiting, 
grieve the bridegroom’s delay,
but you must also mourn with hope.
For the wise know this: 
time, like all things, belongs to God
and it is used by God to unfold God’s will for us.

If we wish to wait wisely in these anxious days
we need always to remember 
that ultimately that for which we wait,
for which our flesh pines and our soul thirsts,
is not simply the result of some election,
not simply the end of some pandemic,
not simply the resolution of our daily anxieties,
but is the Lord himself,
who will come to redeem our time of waiting,
to give life to the dead and end to our mourning,
to balance the scales of justice 
and wipe away every tear.

What does it mean to wait wisely?
It means in some sense knowing how to prepare 
for both the long haul and the sudden ending,
how to stand at the ready without wearing ourselves out.
It means knowing how to suffer time’s passing
as we await what is to come
without growing bitter, 
or panicking, 
or lashing out at others,
or losing sight of what matters most.
It means knowing that all time is God’s time,
the future is God’s future;
it is not something that we possess and control,
but something that we receive from God as a gift.
And the giver of this gift will not fail us.
May the God whom we await have mercy on us all.
 

31st Week of Ordinary Time (II) -- Tuesday (Martin de Porres)

Readings: Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 14:15-24

In the parable of those invited to a feast
Jesus paints for us a picture 
of people who are too wrapped up in their own lives—
their own acquisitions and accomplishments—
to join in the joy of the kingdom of God,
the great feast of heaven.
And he suggests that it is precisely the lowliest among us—
the poor and the crippled, the blind and the lame,
those who in our worldly judgment 
seem to have acquired and accomplished nothing—
who will be the ones whose hearts are open 
to responding to God’s invitation.

The humility that Jesus commends in his parable
is something that he himself lived out.
St. Paul tells us that Jesus, 
though he was the eternal Son of the Father
and heir to all the riches of God’s eternity,
emptied himself into our history,
joined himself to the lot 
of those without acquisitions, 
those without accomplishments,
the poor and the crippled, the blind and the lame,
taking upon himself the death of a slave: death on a cross.
But God his Father raised him up,
calling him forth from the poverty of death
into the riches of the eternal feast,
exalting him beyond all powers of heaven and earth.

The humble welcomed to God’s feast:
this seems simply to be how God works.
It is not the powerful, 
with all their acquisitions or accomplishments,
but the poor and the wounded 
who find themselves welcomed to the feast 
and exalted to eternity.

We see this in the saint we remember today: 
Martin de Porres.
Born in Peru during the colonial period,
because he was of mixed race 
he was not allowed under Peruvian law
to join the Dominican order,
so he lived with them as a servant.
Eventually allowed to join as a lay brother,
Martin faced racist discrimination 
from some of his fellow Dominicans.
But he persisted, 
not out of a desire for acquisitions and accomplishments
but because he had heard God’s invitation to the feast,
and who was he to refuse such an invitation.
He became a great friend to the poor and the outcast,
and God greatly exalted him,
numbering him among the friends of Christ.

Today is election day:
a day dominated by people 
with many acquisitions and accomplishments
who are asking us to help them 
acquire and accomplish even more.
I sometimes wonder what our politics would look like
if we took the parable of the banquet 
as the key to how to acquire God’s favor,
if we took Jesus and his friend Martin
as our models of true accomplishment.
At the very least, it should remind us
that it is not the powerful of the world
who hasten the coming of God’s kingdom.
but rather the humble and the meek,
who spend their lives in loving service
of God and neighbor,
and who are open to hear God’s invitation:
“Come, everything is now ready.”

30th Week in Ordinary Time (II)—Tuesday

Readings: Ephesians 5:21-33; Luke 13:18-21

“Wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.”
That statement from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians
is not a sentiment that goes down too well
with most people in our modern egalitarian society.
Many quite rightly recognize that such scriptures
have been used, at times, to persuade women 
to stay in abusive situations,
or to coerce obedience to those 
who will not honor their full sharing 
in the image of God. 
Such statements seem, 
at best, culturally out-of-step
and, at worst, downright harmful.

St. John Paul II, writing in 1988, 
noted that Paul’s statement
is “profoundly rooted in the customs 
and religious tradition of the times.”
No one in the late ancient world
would be at all surprised at the idea
that women ought to be subordinate to men;
this was nothing new.
But, St. John Paul notes, 
this statement is prefaced, 
by something that is truly innovative:
“Be subordinate to one another 
out of reverence for Christ.”
Notice: this is not addressed just to wives,
but to husbands as well.
As Christians, husband and wife are both called 
to put the needs of the other ahead of their own,
and to do so to honor the example shown by Christ.
This is a call for all Christians
to serve each other out of love for Jesus;
this is the truly radical 
and counter-cultural message of the Gospel.
St. John Paul writes,
“This is a call which from that time onwards, 
does not cease to challenge succeeding generations; 
it is a call which people have to accept ever anew.”
To love and serve others rather than oneself
is as counter-cultural today as it was in the first century.
It is a way of living that rejects the worldview
that says you should look out for number one
and seek always to bend others to your will.

“Be subordinate to one another 
out of reverence for Christ.”
This brief statement, these ten words, 
are like the mustard seed from which
the Kingdom of God can grow;
it is the yeast that can leaven
the loaf of our world.

“Be subordinate to one another 
out of reverence for Christ.”
If we plant these words in our marriages,
if we knead them into our friendships,
our workplaces,
our churches,
our politics,
then even now 
the reality of God’s reign
will begin to show itself
in our midst.
 

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Reading: Exodus 22:20-26; 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10; Matthew 22:34-40

Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
These, Jesus says, are the two great commandments.
It sounds pretty simple.
Of course, anyone who has tried to love
either God or neighbor, 
much less both,
quickly discovers that this 
is a fairly complicated affair.

How do we love God,
when God can seem so distant and mysterious,
so difficult to know?
Who is the neighbor that I am supposed to love?
Is it anybody and everybody?
Does it include my enemies?
Is it okay to love some more than others?
Does love mean accepting people as they are
or does it mean working to help them be better?
And how exactly do these two things—
love of God and love of neighbor—
relate to each other?
Can I do one without the other?
What if my love of God 
seems to come into conflict 
with my love of neighbor?
Which has priority?

We might continue to multiply questions,
but at some point the questions must end
and we have to get about the business of loving.
After all, love of God and neighbor is presented by Jesus
not as a helpful hint but as a command,
and our questions can become a kind of evasion.
There are many things we can come to understand
by stepping back and pondering them,
but we can only discover what love means 
by stepping in and actually doing it.
But how do we go about stepping in
to loving God and neighbor?

The best way to step in to loving God 
is by praying.
Because God is perfect, 
God needs nothing from us;
but, because God is good, 
God desires that we give him ourselves.
God wants us without needing us,
precisely so that we can flourish
and be united to God in eternity.
And the way we give ourselves to God
is by giving God our time, 
for time is the fabric
from which our lives are fashioned.
To step in to loving God,
offer God your time in prayer.
Offer it without worrying too much 
about whether you’re doing it right.
Just ask for what you want
and give thanks for what brings you joy;
God will let you know whether or not 
you’re wanting or enjoying the right thing.

My son the musician tells me 
that bad practice is infinitely better 
than no practice at all.
It’s the same with prayer:
flawed prayer,
distracted prayer,
misdirected prayer,
angry prayer,
bored prayer,
rote prayer—
it’s all better than no prayer.
For in our flawed prayer
God comes to help us,
and God’s Spirit prays within us
with sighs too deep for words.

What about loving our neighbor?
How we step in to loving our neighbor 
is as varied as the neighbors we love.
Our reading today from the book of Exodus
calls our attention to those neighbors 
most in need of our love,
but whom we might be inclined 
to step back from.
The foreigner living in our land,
the widow and orphan who have no protector,
the person in need who is subject to exploitation,
all those whom we can easily overlook.
We tend to think of the word “love”
as finding its natural home 
in our circle of family and friends.
But the law of love calls us 
to cast a wider net.
Indeed, the way to step in 
to loving our neighbor
often involves us stepping out
of our immediate circle.
And this means seeking justice 
for those most in need,
those most fragile and vulnerable,
those most unprotected and friendless,
no matter who they are.
As the philosopher Cornel West puts it,
“Justice is what love looks like in public.”
Concern for the needy stranger
in whom Christ himself is present
is the standard by which we will be judged.

Of course, the love we show our neighbor
through the pursuit of justice
can be as flawed and frustrating
as our attempts to love God through prayer.
I think we Catholics can feel this 
particularly during election season
as we confront what is, 
in light of the standard
set by the Church’s social teaching,
an array of less-than-perfect choices.
Even more frustrating is the fact
that the needs and the interests 
of those crying out for justice—
the widow and the orphan,
the alien and the poor neighbor—
might not seem always to align 
and the justice we can achieve
is only a rough approximation
of the justice God calls us to.
But just as flawed prayer 
is better than no prayer,
our stumbling pursuit of justice
is better than injustice.
We do what we can,
trusting that God’s Spirit 
will work in us and through us.

We cannot let the imperfection 
of our love of God and neighbor
become an excuse for stepping back
from the love that Christ commands.
The Spirit calls us to step in
and be not afraid.
Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind;
love your neighbor as yourself.
Trust in the Spirit to aid you in your weakness
and to bring to completion
the good work begun in you.
And may God have mercy on us all. 

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10a; Psalm 23; Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-10

You get the feeling that there must be
some sort of backstory.
A king sends messengers
to invite you to his son’s wedding
but you, for some reason, refuse.
The king sends more servants,
and this time you kill them.
The king then sends an army
that kills you and burns down your city.
What the heck is going on?
Why are all of these people
acting in such inexplicable ways?
I know that there can be
a lot of tensions around weddings,
but this is ridiculous.

Of course, we have no way
of knowing for sure
what the backstory might be:
perhaps long-standing hostilities
between the king and the invitees;
perhaps some cultural context
that is now lost to us.
But we don’t need to know the backstory
in order to get the main point of the parable:
God is inviting us to the banquet of life,
the wedding feast of the Lamb,
and if we refuse that invitation
we do so to our own detriment.
Jesus draws on the imagery
with which the prophet Isaiah speaks
of the fullness of life that God wishes for us:
“a feast of rich food and choice wines,
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.”
Why would we refuse?
What would keep us from saying, “yes”?

But that is in fact what we do.
Like the people in the parable
we often respond to God invitation
with either indifference or even violence.
Throughout history, we human beings
have studiously ignored God’s invitation
to live the values of God’s kingdom:
the values of compassion and peace,
the values of concern for the weakest among us,
the values of generosity and self-sacrifice.
We human beings have even sought to eliminate
those whom God sends to remind us of this invitation,
not least Jesus himself, whom we hung on a cross.
I think today we can simply read the news
and see that we continue to shout each other down,
demonize those with whom we differ,
ignore those most in need,
and treat life as if it were a game
that you win by defeating those who differ
and grabbing all you can for yourself.
When God is offering us abundant life
why would we act in such inexplicable ways?
So we might ask, what is our backstory?

Our backstory is what Isaiah calls
“the veil that veils all peoples,
the web that is woven over all nations.”
Our backstory is the story of fear,
the story of mistrust and lack of faith,
the story that is told in Scripture
of our first ancestors
who were offered the abundant life of paradise,
if only they would trust in God to provide,
but who instead sought to become
their own gods, their own providers;
it is the story of faithless people
who preferred slavery and death
to reliance on God’s goodness;
it is the story of wars waged
in order to win for ourselves
what God wants to give us without cost.
This is our backstory;
this is who we are:
offered life, we chose death
rather than trust in God to provide.

But our backstory is not the whole story.
The good news of the Gospel
is that our past is not our destiny:
in Jesus God is writing for us a new story,
a story in which God will destroy death forever
and wipe away the tears from every face.
The parable of the wedding feast
should be read as a warning,
not a prediction.
Through God’s grace,
our story can be the story,
not of the old Adam,
the story of fear and faithlessness,
but the story of the new Adam,
the story of Jesus Christ,
who entrusted himself
fearlessly and faithfully
to the hands of his Father
and won victory over death.
The story of Jesus,
the story of God’s beloved
whom fear and death could not defeat,
can become our story.
And with this as our story
we can say with the psalmist,
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want….
Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side.”
With this as our story we can say with Paul,
“I have learned the secret…
of living in abundance and of being in need.
I can do all things in him who strengthens me.”
We can become living signs of the abundant life
that God wants all people to share in;
we can be God’s invitation
to the wedding feast of the Lamb.

I am convinced that so much
of what plagues our world
grows out of fear and mistrust:
fear and mistrust of each other,
but even more fear and mistrust of God.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that the Lord will provide for all peoples
a rich feast, a banquet of abundance.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that only goodness and kindness follow us
all the days of our lives.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that God will fully supply whatever we need,
in accord with his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.
But this does not have to be our story.
Let us pray today that God, through his Spirit,
will draw us into the story of Jesus,
the story of God’s reign,
so that we can hear and answer
his invitation to the banquet of life.
And may God have mercy on us all.