HOMILIES--Sketches of Homilies on Sundays

Christ the King A

A town in Vermont was debating last week whether to ban all tobacco products from the town. People argued for the freedom of individuals to choose what they wanted; others argued for the freedom of towns and cities to determine their own laws. The spat in this little town helps us see how the environment we set up, by our laws and our understandings, comes to affect all our lives. What human environment do we want to live in? Crime has dropped steadily since 1985, but we can all remember before then, when we lived expecting to be mugged.

So if you could determine the rule of law of your world, what would that be? What would you emphasize? What would you discourage?

Today we celebrate how Jesus Christ, Risen from the dead, now our King, wants to set up the world of his followers and, indeed, the world of all humankind. We have this dramatic parable from Matthew 25 talking about the final judgment. But this parable really is a way to talk about daily life—after all, isn’t it daily life that is judged, and will be judged finally, at the end of time?

The sheep and goats gather. The King separates them, one group to be cursed, the other to be rewarded by entrance into the Kingdom. “I was hungry, and you gave me to eat.” Simple acts of compassion for people all round us constitute the kind of world that God wants us to establish. When we cannot see, and respond to, the desperation of those around us, then neither can we respond to God or the joy of God’s Kingdom. “As long as you did this to one of my least, you did it to me.”

We might be surprised that many of sheep did not even know they were serving God. This is Matthew’s great caution. He, the evangelist who talks most about Church and community, sends clear signals: we should not think we can hide behind the vestments and towers of our church lives. Compassion calls to every one of us; every act of love and kindness is done for the vast Kingdom of God, and therefore done to God and Jesus. It isn’t just be being in church and doing religious things.

We can think, too, this is all about politics, whether we are law-and-order types, or whether we are bleeding hearts; whether we think government should spend money to help others, or whether we think government should encourage people to help themselves. Just as we cannot hide behind church, neither can we hide behind politics. The hungry are the hungry, the thirsty remain thirsty, those isolated by illness and imprisonment stay abandoned, and the naked shiver no matter what. What Jesus has done is demand that the natural instincts we have for our families be extended to all of humankind.

It’s been two-thousand years. Surely these words of Jesus have inspired great and generous actions of care. But the world still sees too much indifference, neglect, and outright violent manipulation of the poor. Christ’s words have not changed the world; they only will if we put them into action.

I saw a YouTube of Buddy Guy, the great blues singer, with a 14-year-old, Quinn Sullivan, a prodigy guitar player. They were going back and forth, each one picking up the rhythm of the other, the notes and the beat. Between them they created an environment of musical intensity that swept the crowd.

I think Jesus wants something like that in our lives: that we, together, create an intense environment of love that transforms human life itself.

33 A

I had a professor in grad school who said something that has seemed all the more true as I’ve gotten older. “Reality is so deep,” he said, “that whatever kind of question you ask of it, you will get a response.” So ask a scientific question, or a philosophical question, or look at things poetically, or engage in mathematics, or look for social patterns . . . . or ask a religious question . . . these are all ways of approaching the depth of reality, even though they may appear contradictory.

Which makes me wonder if sometimes we can ask questions that blunt or distort reality rather than opening it up. If our biases, or our greed, or our fear, can shape the way we see things—and misshape the answer we get back.

The parable we have as we approach the end of the Liturgical cycle shows clear differences. The master gives three different sums for his servants to invest, “each according to his ability,” as the Gospel says. Makes no difference how much you think you have, in God’s eyes we always have enough. Two of the servants please the master. But the third one is clearly a loser. What went wrong?

Look at how the third servant sees his Master. “I knew you were hard, reaping where you did not sow.” He sees the Master as a harsh and demanding boss. That’s why he’s afraid. His fear leads him to see the Master in a certain way, and his reading of the Master leads him to fear. The question is: did he misread the Master? Did his fear distort things? Did his fear cause him to miss the whole point?

Clearly it did because the whole parable is about the generosity of the Master, and therefore about the abundance of gifts that God gives each one of us. And it’s about the way generosity multiplies itself, five getting five and becoming ten, two getting two and becoming four, and one should have gotten one to become two. Our fear of God, which some people preach as the way to make people religious, actually diminishes what God would do, rather than increase and deepen what God would do.

Paul talks about fearsome things in the second reading. Like many today, Christians in ancient times saw the end of the world as something fearful. But note Paul’s particular message: Christians are the ones not to be afraid of what happens in the night; we already live in the Day. Christ has become our Day. Christ has shown us what God is like, his mercy, his peace, his life, his love. Once we know God, then God multiplies the abundance of our lives by joining them with divine life.

The Scriptures suggest, too, that various ways of life help us see God, in particular marriage. The passages from Proverbs on the faithful wife suggest the ways in which we support each other by the simple goodness and generosity of our lives. Beyond the “charm” and “beauty” which offer only superficial readings of human life—as we see so clearly from Hollywood—the faithful presence of another helps ground our lives, and helps us see how God is bound up in our daily lives. Surely husbands and wives help each other see God, and see God’s love; this enriched seeing only multiplies the experience of love and life.

What blocks us from seeing God, especially the God of Jesus? Who helps us see God better? Do I let my spouse enrich what I see of God? Do I, by my way of life, enrich the vision of others? Do I turn the gifts I have into multipliers of God’s Kingdom? Or do I let my narrow fears actually diminish God’s action in my life, and in my world?

All of us have all the gifts we need. Engaging in God’s love makes our gifts grow, in our own hearts and in our relationships with others, far more than Wall Street makes money grow. At Mass today we once again receive the gift of his Body and Blood. How can we feel poor and fearful when we see how God has answered the deepest longings of our hearts in Jesus?

Dedication of St. John Lateran

[Start of Scranton Mission]

The first time I went to St. Peter’s in Rome, the experience was unsettling. It just seemed like a huge space filled with knickknacks from five centuries. After a few more visits, though, the place grew on me. I mostly enjoyed how people from all over the world—every nation— were interacting with the images, tombs, and the massive altar. St. Peter’s seems to work better than another massive church, the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception right down the street from me in Washington; the semi-modern mosaics and statues don’t grab me the same way. The church that struck me most, however, was San Marco in Venice. Most of us were able to get in without getting splattered by the hundreds of pigeons that fly outside; I had to help clean my sister off. But when I went inside, the brilliant light from the windows, the mosaics of gold all over the walls, the realization that here, for centuries, the Eastern and Western Churches met—I found myself drying my eyes because of the beauty of this space.

We American Catholics, as a people, are fixated on churches—mainly the buildings. We came as immigrants to a country that took a long time to welcome us. We built churches at enormous sacrifice; they represented us as a struggling-and-arriving people. Many of those churches had the only beauty that immigrant neighborhoods would see. At a time when many church buildings are now being closed, and many parishes are merging, all of this leaves us deeply disappointed.

It’s a bit of a surprise, then, to realize that our readings—special ones as we commemorate the founding Basilica of the city of Rome, St. John Lateran, and therefore our common church building—talk of two tragedies that involved the destruction of the two temples of the Jewish people. Ezekiel speaks of a new temple because the Temple of Solomon, built and adorned by the Jews in Jerusalem over a 350 year period, was leveled to the ground by the Babylonians. It was turned into rubble. And Jesus’ words in the Gospel reference yet another destruction, one which would occur when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD, demolishing Israel’s second temple, the last one it would ever have. Jesus’ purifying the temple is an image of the ongoing need for purification, of our not using our church structures to obscure where our hearts actually are.

These readings are given to us to both underscore the importance of our church buildings—but also to put their importance into perspective. Paul, in the second reading, says it so clearly: You are God’s building. Above and beyond any church building, however beautiful or huge it may be, the experience of the people comes first. And we know this is true because we visit Europe where spectacular buildings remain as museums because so many people do not attend any more. And this is becoming true enough even in America. While some dioceses are building churches, mostly in the south and west, many other dioceses are announcing the closing of parishes and churches.

So the question is: do we want to be church? Do we want to be the living stones that create the community in which God’s spirit lives? Do we want to be the vibrant people in and through whom the world can discover Jesus Christ? Do we want to accept our call to be disciples and to build churches, not with capital campaigns and marble, but with the fervor of our own faith?

St. Francis of Assisi heard famous words shortly after his conversion: “Build my Church.” He though it referred to the broken-down chapel where he would meditate and pray. He eventually saw that the words meant he was to start a revolution, calling a complacent Church back to burning love for Christ. Given our modern life, and the statistics of church attendance all through the United States, maybe those words are also addressed to us: “Build my Church.” Transform it from a church of learned cultural behaviors to a church of living disciples, drawing people to Christ’s love by the way we live.

That is the opportunity we have in Scranton this week when many of your churches come together for a joint Mission. It’s not my Mission—it’s our Mission, what God is doing in the lives of us Scrantonians. We have to let God call us to renewed discipleship as we renew our experience of conversion, of prayer and worship, of community, and of service to others in the name of Christ. We have to let Christ make us Church once again.

One of the exciting things about Ezekiel’s image in the first reading is the flowing of the water from the temple. The water doesn’t sit stagnant in a pool; it flows—and it grows as it flows. This represents, of course, baptism. But it also represents the effects of baptism—to create followers of Jesus who bring him to the world, until it is flooded with his love. It’s time to stir the water, to turn on the taps, to swim in the water of the Holy Spirit, and to inundate our lives, our world, with the glory of God.

It’s time to be Church in a new way.

All Souls

We don’t know what to do about Ebola in the United States. Try to downplay it, because it’s only a few cases, and you get attacked for negligence; try to underline its terror, and you are dismissed as a fear-mongerer. Ebola, however you look at it, has everyone spooked for one clear reason: we see death out of control. And, for a society like ours that works so hard to deny death, it forces the smiley-face mask we wear off our faces. We think of the Bubonic plague, epidemics of typhoid or cholera, of movies like “Contagion,” and for a few rare moments in our culture we actually get to look death right in the face.

Death uncovers just how frail our lives are. Extend the years as we can, develop all the medical devices technology can invent, transplant all the organs we want—we know we are prolonging what is inevitable: whether quickly or slowly, whether this week or in five decades, we will be experiencing the final moments of our lives.

One effect of this on us is to make all of life seem as vaporous as death makes it seem: we start to think that we are nothing more than pieces of matter, energized for a short time, here to grab what we can and perhaps lessen the world’s pain; and who are we to make more of life than this? Are we so greedy and grasping that we think we deserve more than the 80 years or so that life gives us? “All We Are Is Dust in the Wind,” went the song Kansas sang in the 1970s. Let’s get over our illusions and grow up, says our culture.

But the un-dusty and un-molecule part of us keeps gnawing at us: why are our hearts haunted with the infinite, our dreams so deep and broad, our loves so unbounded, our hopes so ordered to a horizon that seems endless?

And it is to this dimension of our lives that God speaks to us in Jesus. Jesus takes on our very vaporous existence, wears the flimsiness of our skin, tastes the bitterness of our death, and declares himself Way, Truth, Resurrection and Life. Most of humanity over our history was content to think of life as a slender few moments of experience: we’re here, we’re gone. And what did that sober dose of realism do for us? Not much. Philosophers declared life as “nasty, brutish, and short.”

What God gives to us in Jesus is not some imaginary denial of human reality, but the embrace of a divine love that shapes and redefines human existence itself. Whatever we think about human life, once we are in relationship with God, then the calculation is not done just on our side, on the frailty of our flesh. Rather, God enters the equation, filling with divine hope and life what is lacking in us, taking the dreams and hopes that haunt us into divine life, and giving them a reality in God that they could never claim for themselves.

Catholic cultures celebrate this day differently; Mexicans visit the cemeteries, have dinner with their beloved deceased, in the “Day of the Dead.” Other cultures have Masses celebrated and put flowers on tombstones. Today’s feast is rare—we celebrate All Souls on Sunday. But it gives us an unusual opportunity: to reflect on our human origins, our destinies, our fears, and our dreams. But, having done that, to then bring them to our God who shows us, in Jesus, just what God makes of our death; and how divine life overpowers the worst of plagues and fears because, in Christ, Love is stronger than Death.

30 A

It’s on YouTube. It’s called “A Wedding Surprise,” a video that went viral, seen by over 33,000,000 people. It’s a wedding in Ireland—Chris and Leah O’Kane are getting married. It begins with voices from Sonlight Ministries finishing a song; we see one girl lean over and whisper to her fellow singer. Then Fr. Ray Kelley get up and solos a song called “Hallelulia,” adapting the lyrics to Chris and Leah. When Father finishes, the whole congregation stands and applauds. One of the YouTube comments, “I’m 67 and have been to many weddings, but this is the most beautiful one I’ve seen.”

Although fewer people marry today, and fewer still marry in the Church, people, and our culture, still see weddings as the most precious instances of love. Perhaps at a time of widespread marital failure, we applaud more those who dare to marry—such a bold statement of commitment it has become. If we use the word “love,” we relate it most on occasions like this—flowers, gowns, tuxedoes, receptions, and a young couple fully in love.

But the joke goes: what happens after the honeymoon. We had Jackie Gleason in the 1950s embodying a less elegant form of love in the Honeymooners: “One of these days, Alice, pow, right in the kisser.” And Carroll O’Connor channeled Archie Bunker in the 1980s playing a husband that his wife, Edythe, just has to endure. We can so easily see romantic love at the wedding; where is it in daily life?

The Scriptures today are challenging us to link ideas of love even more fundamental than romantic love. Jesus, who has been questioned left and right by his religious opponents, now receives a question that was widely discussed in his time. “What is the greatest commandment?” Jesus answers, to the satisfaction of everyone—but he nuances his response. Loving God with all one’s heart, soul and strength—that is the greatest. But then he sneaks in his twist: “The second one is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”

How easy for us to separate realms. In one area we have love of God, with all the sacraments and scriptures, with all our prayers and piety. Most of this happens for us Catholics in Church, with a smaller trickle of God-love seeping into our week. There can be a huge gap between Sunday morning and all the other days. But in another realm we have the loves of our lives, primarily family and friends, and occasional acts of charity in response to crises and emergencies. As November comes, our hearts soften to the poor and homeless; we will give them gloves, coats and turkeys, which we call “charity.”

But Jesus is saying there are no separate realms. Love of God and love of all humankind are inherently woven together. We can’t be saying pious prayers to God while ignoring the suffering right in front of our noses. And when we reach out to others in love, we are also loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength. Perhaps some people do not even know that, when they stretch themselves in care to others, they are loving God as well.

Yet, how could it be otherwise? To love God has to mean we love the ones God loves. And the bedrock of our faith in Jesus Christ is that God loves everyone: in our very being, in our struggles and growth, and in the destiny God has invited everyone to attain. We cannot love God without also loving God’s beloved. This is clear in the first reading, from the Hebrew Scriptures, where God tells the Jews that obedience to him means care for all, especially those likely to be exploited. “I am compassionate; I will hear their cry.”

So it’s great that Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie finally got married, and George Clooney followed soon after. Maybe Kim Kardashian will walk down the aisle again too. And we’ll surely get invitations to weddings of relatives and friends. We enjoy these; weddings make us happy. But we are only seeing a part of the mystery, a hint of the reality: that God is Absolute Love, and we know this God only by loving absolutely in return as God shows us in Jesus.

29 A

The same question, in different circumstances, can mean very different things.

“How are you?” I could say this to someone I just met . . . or to a co-worker on Monday morning . . . or to a good friend I haven’t seen for a while . . . or to someone just finishing chemotherapy . . . or to someone who is dying. Same question. Very different meanings.

I can say “I am a Yankee fan” in the Bronx and get one reaction; I could say it in Boston and get an entirely different reaction. Circumstances matter.

“Should we pay the tax to Caesar?” Jesus is asked by people who are out to get him. We need to remember the circumstances of this question: Jesus has entered Jerusalem, the city he knows where he will die. He’s already had several arguments with his enemies, the religious leaders of his day. And he’s in a city occupied by foreigners, the Romans. How he answers could mean whether he lives or dies.

“Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” he replies. First he had them show him a coin. This was a coin that they used as a matter of course. If they are going to accuse Jesus of having dirty hands, their hands are already dirty. They had already developed many arrangements for working with the Romans. They didn’t care about the tax; they cared about their power.

Politics can always be complicated. Look how it works in the United States, how parties struggle with parties, each demanding loyalty, and each promising what they cannot deliver. Politics can only do so much in life. It can help in some ways, but it cannot change life itself. We have the image of Cyrus in the first reading . . . a political figure. Why is Isaiah praising him? Not because he is a King, but because he has become an instrument in God’s plan to free the Jewish people from captivity.

“Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but to God what belongs to God.” Here Jesus is challenging his listeners. What are you giving to God? What are you willing to give to God? Jesus, after all, is willing to give his very life for the will and plan of his Father. Jesus knows his enemies have all surrounded him, but he will accept his destiny because to give God less than everything is unworthy of God.

Jesus escapes his trap, but his question still remains. Perhaps we are afraid to give God everything. Maybe God will ask what I don’t want him to ask. Maybe God will ask me to give up patterns of sin. Maybe God will ask me to serve others more than myself. We are afraid of Jesus’ question. But is it not the truth that once we have given God everything, then we receive everything too—everything in love, in peace, in hope, in life? God asks but God gives without limit.

This week can be a time for us to sort out our values, to ask ourselves where God ranks, to inquire whether we put our stock in money, or in entertainment, or in political power—but whether we don’t yet put our stock in God. Paul says his Gospel comes in action, with conviction, not just in words. That’s the risk of religion: we can stop with words, but not follow up with the actions of our lives.

Married people know that the vows they make change as their love deepens and as they face life’s circumstances. The vows mean more. The same is true with our relationship with God. It has to change, to deepen, to continue to transform us as we live . . . .otherwise we haven’t really given our lives to God as Jesus invites us to.

28 A

“What are you going to wear?” “I don’t know, but I think it’s a fancy place.” “You mean I have to wear a tie? I hate wearing ties.” “You know it’s a big wedding and you don’t want to look out of place do you.” “I guess not.”

Conversations like this go on all the time because we are conscious of how we dress. We are afraid of overdressing, being the only one at a pool party wearing a suit; and we are afraid of underdressing, wearing short pants and a t-shirt to a formal event. It isn’t just that we don’t want to stand out. More, it’s that we want to show how much we respect the event, the hosts, and the other guests.

Our Gospel ends in a pretty stark way. Here’s one of the men dragged in from the street who goes to the wedding party without the wedding gown. The king gets furious. “My friend,” he says, but this is full of irony. “How is it you came in here without a wedding garment?” Then the man is thrown outside, and the image is one of being condemned—“weeping and gnashing of teeth”—one of regret.

We can understand this final scene only when we see the shape of the whole Gospel passage. It’s all about being invited to something important. The King is throwing a banquet for his son. As the invited guests—these represent once again those who think they have a monopoly on faith and piety—come up with excuses, the King only get angrier. Look at what these people are preferring to my banquet—a farm, a business—and these people at least had the decency to try to come up with an excuse! Others didn’t even bother to make an excuse. And others—like the tenants in the vineyard last week—turn to violence: they will do anything to keep from accepting the invitation.

The King destroys the city—obviously a reference to the destruction of Jerusalem which happened before Matthew’s Gospel was fully finalized. But what happens next is the crucial point: the King sends out servant after servant, to the highways and bushes, bringing in anyone who would come, “the bad as well as the good.” This is about the guests who come—the whole riff raff of humanity God has called into his Kingdom—people like you and me. But it is also about the banquet and the invitation. The Gospel is screaming at us: don’t you know how important the banquet is? How can you say no? How can you not know?

We have a strong pointer to the meaning of the banquet in the first reading. Isaiah paints one of the most enticing and hopeful images anywhere in all the Scriptures: God is preparing a banquet, a banquet on a mountain, rich and lush. This banquet will heal humankind of its greatest diseases: our distance from God—that’s why we are on the mountain—and our distance from each other. God tears away the veil we place between ourselves as individuals and nations. This veil leads to death—and death God will destroy at this banquet of life. “Behold here is our God, right here, saving us, giving us life.”

Most of us are vaguely aware of the banquet to which Jesus invites us. We often go about our daily chores as if these were unconnected with the deep drive inside of us for fullness of life. Paul says that our God will supply whatever we need—but do we know we need it? Do we hunger for the Kingdom? Do we hunger for the fullness that can only come from God? If we believers can be so blasé about God’s invitation, what about the rest? The only way we can be thrown out of God’s party is by not recognizing how important it is, and just how much we need it.

So it’s time to dress up, to realize that we have been invited, to clean ourselves up for the banquet of God. And it’s time to realize that we are also the servants God sends to invite all the others. “Hey, come on, entrance is free and God has prepared the greatest meal for us.” Indeed, we banquet here at Mass today so we can one day share the heavenly banquet, the feast of joy that will not end.

27 A

People usually hate paying rent. “Why do I pay and, in the end, I get to keep none of it?” The housing bubble of 2008 was, to some extent, the result of the “ownership” philosophy that America had large adopted. Renters feel perpetually cheated. The water is dripping, the socket doesn’t work, the walls need painting: the owner can never do enough. “I’m paying all this rent, and what does the owner do for me?”

Of course people pay rent when owning is out of reach. I lease a car I cannot afford; I rent a house that’s beyond my income level to purchase; I can even lease furniture because monthly payments are doable.

Yet we probably have never been as reluctant to pay rent as these tenants in the Gospel today. Of course, this is a parable, meant for us to think about. But, at its root, the renters think they can be owners. They think giving some of the wine to the owner is too difficult. They want it all. As Jesus narrates the tenants’ behavior, it’s pretty clear he is referring to the religious leaders of his day, and to his upcoming rejection as God’s messenger and teacher. In fact, it is their rejection that leads to God’s rejection.

So Jesus parable follows upon Isaiah’s in the first reading—this very common image of Israel as a Vineyard. God lavishes so much upon the vineyard. All God wants are a few grapes. Yet God’s investment doesn’t pay off. We think of what teams lavish on their quarterbacks. But Robert Griffin III still get injured; Eli Manning doesn’t deliver as New Yorkers want him to; and the Rex Grossmans don’t quite make it to the top. We expected more. What happened?

Of course, God has lavished quite a bit on us. Sure we are never satisfied with ourselves, but the gift of life, of the ability to love, of finding purpose, of bringing joy to others, of not only knowing God but also being in relationship with God—these are nothing to sneeze about. And look at the gifts God has given to his Church: the Scriptures, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, all of the sacraments, but especially the Eucharist, our great traditions of charity, of education, of moral vision.

So if we have been gifted by God, what are we doing with them? Are we like underperforming athletes, renters who let the property go down, a stock that underperforms and loses money in the end?

Part of the issue, of course, is that we don’t recognize our gifts, appreciate our gifts, and realize how much we need to be gifted in the first place. We are tenants, renters, because of God’s utter generosity to us. At the deepest level of our being, everything is given, everything is grace. By ourselves we can make no claims—we cannot even demand our own existence. It all comes from the one who decided to plant a vine, and, even more, to cherish it. It’s only arrogance that lets us think that we only need ourselves, and that we can take care of ourselves. We can’t. We totally rely on God’s gifts because we are only products of God’s generosity.

So let’s see the positive side of being a tenant. Let’s see everything the greatest landlord of all has given us. Instead of crabbing, we can appreciate and give part of what’s been given us back to God. That’s what we do every time we come to Mass. We get close to what lies at the heart of the human mystery: knowing that everything is given to us, we say “Thank You,” not with our mere words, but in the very person of Jesus Christ who is our thanksgiving to the Father in the Spirit.

Is God disappointed in us? What disappoints God isn’t that we are imperfect or limited; God made us this way. What disappoints God is when we overlook the gift—and gifts—central to our lives, presume to take God’s place, and will not give God the minimum God expects, that is, being people of praise and thanks.

26 A

Ray Rice, formerly on the Ravens active roster, is only the last of a long list of bad boys. Tiger Woods is perhaps the most famous recent one, and people do not know what to do with Adrian Peterson who did to his sons what was done to him, and probably has been done from time immemorial. Even in our Italian family, the belt came out regularly. In similar manner, Time Magazine last Sunday had a list of political bad-boys, starting with Gary Hart and going on down to Mark Sanford of South Carolina. The list of bad girls doesn’t get as much coverage except for the blurbs about Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton. Bad girls, bad boys—can they ever come back?

Some do, but many don’t. John Edwards is back being a lawyer, but Bill Clinton gets lots of political applause. It’s hard to know what, in our public relations machines of today, makes a comeback possible. But it’s not hard to see what makes a comeback possible in the eyes of God. Jesus clarifies in this parable, the decisive element in how we stand before God. One son says “yes” but doesn’t go into the vineyard. The other says “no” but changes his mind and goes. What is decisive in the eyes of God is changing our minds and following his way.

Jesus addresses this parable, and a few others in this section of Matthew, at the religious leaders of his day. The “first son” in the parable clearly can be taken as the leaders of the chosen people. The “second son” are all those with bad reputations who, in the end, open their hearts to change, to God, and to the Kingdom. This should make us all worry because, clearly, being religious, even being devout, does not qualify for instant success. Rather, even the religious can miss the point. So what does that make of us religious folk? Are we doing the will of the Father? Are we working in the vineyard or being pouty children?

Clearly Jesus is not against religion. He encouraged all kinds of devoutness on his followers. Everything we do as Catholics ultimately goes back to him. But our religious practices do not substitute for serving God; rather, they are the necessary, helpful resources for doing the Father’s will. If the actions do not follow, then the religious gestures are empty.

So what does God want? What is his will? We have seen this in a variety of ways as we’ve read Matthew’s Gospel this year. We are to live with such trust in God that we are then freed up to serve each other, generously and openly, in love. We have read the Beatitudes, Jesus’ teaching on riches, Jesus’ instruction about prayer and hypocrisy; we’ve heard Jesus parables. So also did the bad boys of ancient times. The key issue is: have our lives changed? And am I willing to continue changing?

On the one hand, many believers, especially in mainline churches, who baptize their children, don’t realize and appreciate the many ways conversion has happened in their lives. On the other hand, all of us don’t appreciate the need for ongoing conversion in our lives. This is the message today’s Gospel gives: yes, we can always listen, we can always enter the vineyard. We are never permanently stereotyped as bad, or lost, or fallen-away. God writes none of us off. As Ezekiel tells us, although we are affected by the lives of others, each of us will stand in judgment for our own lives: the things we did, but also the deep decisions we never got around to making.

Jesus points his listeners to the actions of conversion that outright sinners were doing in his day. In a way, this is our invitation to look at those being deeply touched by faith today and learn from them. If millions have joined Evangelical churches, what can that tell me about taking my own personal faith more seriously? If Muslims carry around their prayer rugs, what does that say about my commitment to prayer? If millions are joining prayer groups, what might that say to me? If millions roll up their sleeves to help others in need, what lesson do I take? Instead of being defensive and protecting ourselves from these signs, we have to ask ourselves what these signs mean for us in our own lives. “Even when you saw what God was doing in their lives, you still did not change.”

Paul gives us the most radical image of Jesus: emptying himself until he dies the most shameful death of crucifixion as a sign of God’s love and grace for the world. This emptying of Jesus is like the experience of conversion: putting the Father at the center, and doing this again and again, indeed every day. We empty ourselves of ourselves so our hearts can be filled with God’s.

The media will keep showing images of those who don’t meet our modern ideals, shaming them, and asking if they can make a comeback. But God says every day, every moment, is comeback time. Every moment is an opportunity to say “Yes” and do it.

25 A

“Oh, no you don’t.” These four words swarm into our minds when we see someone jump ahead of us in line. “I was here first,” we say. We are all like that, but particularly New Yorkers who think that their time is the most precious commodity in the world . . . and anyone who keeps them waiting is evil incarnate. The Department of Motor Vehicles, the doctor’s office, waiting to see an agent in the bank—hey, I was here first. Why is so-and-so going ahead of me? Just about the only place we don’t want to get picked is . . . jury duty, of course. Please, pick the person next to me.

So we resonate well with the Gospel because we, like the laborers in the vineyard, all have an innate sense of fairness. We should all get treated equally, from the slices of pie mom cut when we were kids to the buzzers restaurants give us when it’s crowded And it does seem unfair, these sluggards coming in at 5 in the afternoon, making the same daily wage as the early-morning crowd. It’s as if Jesus pushes our faces into the issue to see what we think. “My ways are not like yours, my thoughts are not like yours” we hear from Isaiah in the first reading. You bet they aren’t.

But what if Jesus isn’t talking about fairness; what if he’s using fairness to talk about something else? Like what? “Are you envious because I am generous?” What if Jesus is giving us a test, not about fairness, but about grace and graciousness? What if God is overwhelmingly generous to every one of us, but we only realize when we are in trouble, when we are in need, when we get a break?

After all, it could be that tomorrow laborers might be standing around, but be called in a very different order. Who says it’s me who works all day every day? Who says God doesn’t give me a break? Or many breaks, for that matter. Or, if the shoe was on the other foot, who says my neighbor might not be quite happy to see me get the daily wage, because my neighbor knows that I need it? If I don’t resent generosity shown me, why do I resent it shown to others?

God’s ways are not like ours, because ours are based on our insecurity, our need to control, and our need to put ourselves first. Faith is God’s totally-free gift to preserve us precisely from these delusions about ourselves. As long as we think the world should operate in accord with the narrowness of our instinctual minds, just so long will the Kingdom of God seem remote. Only when we are wishing every single human being the fullness of life and love—only then will we have the mind of Jesus. Only when we wish every person the same thing we wish for our children, and ourselves, only then will we begin to grasp the freedom of the Kingdom of God. And why aren’t we? Why not?

Paul, in the second reading, already knows this freedom. Imprisoned, he’s facing the prospect of his death. And, as he does so, he shows death cannot shake him because he has already received the greatest gift . . . the gift of union with Christ. Should he die? Should he live? It makes little matter. He will continue working in the vineyard, happy to suffer a few years more, for the sake of those he loves, and those whom God loves, and those who have yet to know God’s love for themselves.

Before EZ Pass, I just knew every lane I chose would end up being the slowest. “What’s the matter with that jerk,” I’d say whenever people fumbled for coins. I was entitled, wasn’t I? But we are all really entitled to only one thing—to everlasting union with God, the greatest gift we could ever receive. Not to getting A’s, or the fastest service, or the biggest salary, or the most FaceBook likes. And we are entitled to this union with God, in Jesus, only because it comes to us as God’s free, abundant, and grace-filled gift. That is the one precious wage worth striving for.

So let’s spread the news . . . God is not cheap . . . and let’s spread it by the way we live.

Sept 14, 2014: Triumph of the Cross

Ever since the start of the 17^th century, our ability to see small things has been growing. Of course, Galileo gave us the telescope, but he also had a hand in building a microscope, a project that Dutch lensmakers seem to have perfected. A man named Antoine van Leeuwenhoek helped doctors understand what power a microscope can bring to medicine. Then x-rays. Then MRI’s. Then electronic telescopes. Then the amazing technologies we have to examine almost every part of the body.

If we can see it, we think, maybe we can fix it. We see blue or yellow snake-like images of the Ebola virus; it’s right there, in front of us. Surely we can kill it, we think. We have machines that can read out our genes, telling us what the tiniest elements of our bodies are like. With that information, maybe we can re-arrange what’s wrong with us and make it better. If we can see it, maybe we can fix it?

But how do you see the human soul? How do we examine the human heart? We have sociologists and psychologists who can ask questions and often pick up trends going on inside a life or a culture. But can we look into—not my mind or my soul—but the human soul itself?

The feast we have today, the Triumph of the Cross, give us an instrument through which much of the human soul can be seen. At first glance, it is not pretty. The death of Jesus points precisely to the lesion that is woven throughout humankind’s spirit: our inability to accept the goodness and love that is offered. In its place, we often resort to rejection and violence. In the cross, we see what people did to Jesus, both from political and social angles—the innocent one who comes proclaiming a new Realm of love, now treated like garbage, humiliated to the point of total shaming, an object of torture and scorn.

Surely special circumstances wove their way through that terrible moment in history. But we all know that the anger, the envy, the betrayal, the fear, the violence, the rage—these have all coursed through us at one point or another. When we look at the cross, where Jesus emptied himself of everything in love, as St. Paul puts it, we surely see a part of ourselves.

In the first reading the Jewish people are saved by looking on the image of a bronze snake. Scholars do not know what historical event this story points to, but the Gospel invites us to look on Christ, on his cross, for our healing, just as ancient Israel looked on the bronze seraph. To let the cross be a microscope to help diagnose the sickness in our hearts. But to let it be, as well, a remedy.

For, beyond our violence and envy, our cruelty and weakness, the Cross also shows us something else: in the dying Jesus, we have the gift of God’s love given to us. “God so loved the world that he gave his Son”—to the world, to the church, but also to me. Jesus, God’s love made flesh, is a gift given to me. If I can receive this gift, maybe I can find an antidote. Maybe the ways of Christ can cure my soul; maybe the blood of Christ can absorb the disease of my sin—of our sin—and transform it into divine love. Come, look on the cross, and see what it tells us, and what medicine it gives us, what hope it promises.

I was one of the few people—to judge from the audience size—to see Calvary. It’s a gripping move and certainly not family entertainment. But the priest, surround as he is by the doubts and debunkings, by the postures and denials, of modern life, stands tall. Through the haze of post-modern doubt we see, so often, in this film religious images that seem to hold everything together—the bible, prayer book, holy water fountain, candles, altars, and, most of all the cross. The movie is, ultimately, about hope, about the triumph of the Cross even in today’s cynical rejection of belief, a triumph of faith over a deadening doubt.

If we can see, maybe we can find healing. If we can look upon the cross more openly, what wholeness can it bring to our lives?

23 A

“We will never forget.” I saw these words painted on a mural in New York City this last weekend. The paint looked a little dimmed, but it was pretty clear what the reference was: New York will never forget the attack of September 11, 2001, even with the passage of more than a dozen years. Some things we make a point of not forgetting, particularly our grudges. From Ferguson, to Watts; from the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust; from the Spanish Armada to the Crusades—we all have long memories.

So what might reconciliation mean? Are we supposed to forget atrocities, crimes against humanity, the Hittlers and Atillas of the world? Is finding peace a kind of Alzheimer’s applied to the pains of the past—our pains, the pains of our nation, the scars of history?

There seem to be two components in reconciliation from our readings today. From the Gospel we learn that reconciliation comes not from forgetting, but from facing the issues in front of us. And from Ezekiel we learn that we are all involved in the pursuit of justice, in making the world better; no one is excused because our lives are intimately connected when it comes to the good of the society around us.

“If your sister or brother offends you….” Don’t crab behind their back. Don’t trash the person before the office staff. Don’t give the details on FaceBook. Go and talk, bring someone along to help set the stage. Maybe you can change a mind, or have a meeting of minds, and reconciliation can happen.

We’ve seen this, say, after the Apartheid regime in South Africa, how Archbishop Tutu conducted forums in which people could come and clear the air—air the dirty laundry, make public what would otherwise be hidden and fester. And the key here is the acknowledgement of wrongdoing. “I did wrong. I should not have done that. I am sorry.” These words for us today are almost as hard for us to say as the words “I forgive you. I want to make peace.” We are blocked on both fronts.

Ezekiel gives us part of an answer here because he tells us that the good of the world around us is the responsibility of us all. If we can help each other do good, Ezekiel says, then all our lives will be saved. If we can make the effort to touch the heart of another, then both of us will be saved. But this can happen, I think, only if we all recognize that we are all in need of forgiveness. We can easily think of Ezekiel as giving the goody-goodies permission to shame others. But Paul’s letter to the Romans, which we’ve been reading for almost two months on Sunday, has made clear that we are all culpable, that we all need mercy and, in today’s passage—that mercy is shown in the power of love.

I think reconciliation can be hard for us because we are so afraid of shame: to keep from being shamed ourselves, it’s easier to shame and blame someone else. But is that not why Christ came to bear the fruits of our sin, to bear our shame: he wanted to liberate us from this environment of shame and move us to an entirely different environment, that of love. Love bears each other’s burdens, even the burdens of sin and shame, for the sake of bringing wholeness to everyone, and the world.

So there’s the story of the old man driving his elderly wife, complaining and muttering. They are going back to the restaurant where they had lunch. It seems she’s forgotten her glasses and he is quite peeved. He walks into the restaurant, steaming, when the hostess recognizes him and says, “Oh, thank God you came back. You left your credit card and your medications at the table.” And his wife stands there, smiling to herself, as her husband turns red in embarrassment.

More than being ready to accuse each other, is there a way we can find Christ’s path of love and, carrying our brokenness and pains, bring healing and wholeness to our lives?

22 A

There’s a Liberty Mutual commercial on TV: a man sitting in front of the Statue of Liberty talking about his mixed feelings when he gave his daughter her first set of car keys. It’s exciting of course—the child is growing up—but it’s also frightening because the keys give the daughter entry into a powerful machine which can be both helpful and dangerous. I know I had the same feeling when my god daughter started driving: what might happen as a result of getting those keys?

Keys to a car; keys to a house—how many people have rented their houses to others, only to regret it later? “You should see the shape they left the house in?” was a remark I just heard about friends who let another friend use the house. To receive keys is to take responsibility, hopefully for the better. We hear in today’s first reading how irresponsible Shebna was, and how the keys to the palace would now be given to Eliakim—one who would manage the palace with integrity.

Peter receives the keys to the kingdom of heaven. He is to be the foundation for a new community of Jesus. “I will build my church” means “I will form my new congregation”—the word for “church” refers not to a building but to a community called together by God. Jesus, now seeing the rejection of his ministry and teaching, is calling for a new community, one that would put his teachings and values into practice. Peter, wobbly as he is, becomes the leader of this new assembly.

And what would the basis of that assembly be? “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” Peter’s response, on behalf of the twelve, make clear what has been unclear, and what would remain yet unclear for a while longer. Peter confesses Jesus is the Christ—but does he know what this means? Like so many of his contemporaries, his idea of “Christ” was simplistic, magical, and triumphalistic. “I will give you the keys” says Jesus—the future tense. Peter will see the Christ only when Jesus gives his life in love; only on the Cross, and in the Resurrection, will Peter know what his profession means.

The keys Peter receives are “to the Kingdom.” We think of the “pearly gates” as we popularly say it, some huge Hilton Hotel in the skies, with puffs of clouds and an endless party going on. We also have the popular image of Peter serving as the bouncer to heaven, keeping out the baddies and letting in only the good. But the Kingdom to which Peter has access is the reign of God’s gracious love, transforming each human life, and transforming the world. It’s not a future Kingdom that comes after we are dead; it’s a living Kingdom, a community, transformed by divine love given in the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

More than the keys to a house or a car, we are given keys to a Kingdom for which we are all responsible. Peter shows the kind of responsibility we all have—to engage even the forces of death—so that God’s Kingdom, God’s new community, might shine. Peter would end up giving his life for the Kingdom, as would many of the early followers of Jesus. Christians are giving their lives, literally, throughout the world for the sake of this new community of Jesus. How much are we willing to give our lives so that God’s vision, Jesus’ Kingdom, might come about?

“Do not tell anyone I am the Christ,” says Jesus. Because people misunderstood what the title meant back then . . . and perhaps we still do not understand it still. It’s not like a coronation; it’s not like winning the lotto. It’s a title of service, of sacrifice, of self-giving.

I heard on Car Talk last week a man discussing how his 18 year old didn’t want to drive. Tom and Ray, the hosts, thought that might not be a bad thing. “Most 18 year olds should not be driving,” they said. Jesus gives Peter the keys—do you want them Peter? Do you want the burden, the privilege, the responsibility? And Jesus says the same to us about our own faith: do you want the keys, do you want the name “Christian,” do you want to be “Christian” as I am willing to be the Christ?

20 A

I’ve been hearing it all my life. “Don’t go down 63^rd street or the Spanish people will jump you.” And the Puerto Rican mothers would say, “Don’t do down into the 50s, the Irish are gangsters.” And we knew what parts of New York were Italian mobster havens, didn’t we? Walk in Harlem in the 1980s… are you nuts? And it even plays out in the suburbs, with our gated communities, our high end developments, or “areas that are changing.” All my life I’ve been hearing it: this was a great neighborhood until “they” moved in.

Our Gospel reading is shocking. We need to let it hit us in the face. Jesus comes into contact with a non-Jewish woman from Syria-Phoenicia, and she wants a healing. Jesus, very clear on his mission to bring the Kingdom of God into full view among the Jews, God’s chosen people, puts her off. His line is almost insulting: we don’t take food for children and throw it to the dogs do we? But she’s a sharp as he is: “Even the dogs get the crumbs. That’s all I’m asking for. Some crumbs.” And she gets that, and more, because of her faith—faith which crashes down any barrier.

Ever since the beginning Christians have been confronting and engaging with people who seem different: we hear it throughout our readings during the year—Samaritans, people from Crete, Ethiopia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greeks and eventually Romans. And it wasn’t always comfortable. As the Gospel shows, there was learning on both sides as Christians found their faith lived in out in new cultures and languages. I’m thinking of West Side Story where generic Tony meets Puerto Rican Maria, and then follows the explosion.

But the threads of God speaking through the Jewish people to the world have a long pedigree as we see in Isaiah’s startling vision: non-Jews from around the world will find their place in God’s people—the Temple will be a house of prayer for all peoples. We Catholics see this vision fulfilled in us. In the second reading, Paul continues his thoughts to the Romans about Jews and Gentiles. God, in Jesus, has now opened salvation to everyone, without restriction. He longs for the days when chosen and so-called non-chosen will see that, in Jesus, God has chosen all.

So where do we see ourselves as followers of Jesus? Are we the persecuted chosen folks with a strange and hostile world around us? Are we believers who kind of live just like everyone else, hiding our faith, or even stifling it? Are we the interface between grace and everyday life, bringing the Gospel to life by the way we live, engage with others, and reflect God’s grace? We should make no mistake. God has not called us to be disciples to keep faith to ourselves. We have been baptized precisely to be agents of the God’s Kingdom in the world—not looking down on people, thinking we’re better, but helping them see the signs of God right in their midst.

We’ve been called to pray for Iraq today—but whether it’s Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Central African Republic, Harlem, Baltimore or St. Louis: enough of this group in opposition to that group. God is in favor of us all, and wants to bring salvation to all. He sends Jesus to say that. And Jesus sends us to continue the message.

19 A

We have had two stories dominating the news over the past several weeks. One is the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation, the other is the Ebola crisis in three West African nations. The conflict in the Mideast brings us daily reports of rockets, shelling, bombs, and deaths. The story from West Africa brings us reports of daily heroism and sacrifice on the part of health professionals and assistants, even to the point of potentially giving their lives. Dr. Kent Brantly, and his co-worker, went over to Africa as “Christian missionaries,” people showing Christ’s love in the midst of humankind’s darkest fears. Which story will have the lasting impact? Which one shows true power?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now in its third version, and the fighting has been going on one way or another since 1948. The setting up of Israel as a nation after World War II was the direct result of centuries of hatred handed out to Jews, Christian included. Can it be, though, that simple acts of generous human kindness, done in the name of the Kingdom of God, can ultimately outstrip even centuries of violence and sin? If we doubt this, I only ask you to think of Francis of Assisi, Rev. Albert Schweitzer, Rev. Martin Luther King, Doctors without Borders, Mother Teresa, and, ultimately, Jesus Christ.

The first reading has to catch all our attention. Elijah is being chosen as an instrument to call Israel back to integrity, particularly by confronting its leaders. He is hiding in a cave, seeking a sign from God. Notice that all of the explosive symbols of God’s presence are rejected: God is not in the fire, nor the storm, nor the earthquake. So much for the fire-and-brimstone God that people keep constructing. Rather God comes as a gentle breeze, a whisper—so quiet but enough to empower Elijah for the rest of his ministry.

How we recognize God is also the topic of the Gospel. The disciples have been with Jesus in his healing, in the multiplication of the bread, and now, with Jesus finally getting a little quiet time by himself, they set sail on a Lake some of them have known since childhood. Here come the wind and rain—rather like the fire and earthquake of Elijah. But here also comes Jesus. Would his disciples recognize him?

Not easily, it turns out. Peter, instead of seeing Jesus as the one solution to the disciples’ fear, feels a need to test the waters. “It’s a ghost,” they shout—how many of us have not recognized God’s love in our lives because it seemed like a fantasy, something unreal? “If you are the Christ,” Peter says, betraying his ultimate lack of faith. Not “because” or “I clearly see you are Christ,” but “if”—one of the biggest hedge words we can come up with. No wonder he begins to sink. “Save me,” he says; “O you of little faith,” says Jesus back.

The scriptures invite us to examine where we think we are seeing God’s action—whether God remains the distant One who threatens, or the present One who saves? What are the gentle breezes in our lives that reveal God? Might it be the life-long fidelity of people who have given themselves to each other? The unlimited hope we see in the eyes of every child? The self-less generosity that lets strangers give their lives for others? The efforts to negotiate rather than blast? Our quiet moments of prayer? Do we find God in the gentle moments of our lives, or does our anger and fury often hide the divine from us?

All around us, every day, the waves of conflict swirl in our lives. We are like the disciples, out on a boat, wondering if we will survive and who will save us. Jesus comes walking by, “Do not be afraid. It is I,” he says, reaching out gentle hands of love and support. The winds are raging, but he stands before us. Which one will get our attention? Which one will capture our heart?

18 A

In the old days, before there were energy drinks, mega-vitamins, and non-stop Starbucks . . . in the old days we had Geritol. The commercials were hilarious. A middle-aged person would be drooping, wondering how to get through the afternoon. “Tired Blood” some official-looking person would say, as if giving out a professional diagnosis. “Tired blood,” I would think, trying to imagine how blood gets tired. We needed more iron to augment our blood cells. But however that worked, if we just added Geritol to our diet, all that tired blood would go away and we’d have all the energy we’d need.

I hear a lot of tired blood in the readings we have today. Isaiah is talking to exiles in Babylon, trying to stir up hope. Paul is writing to people who will suffer persecution, saying that nothing can defeat them. Jesus sees John the Baptist assassinated and is looking for a place to grieve. People flock around Jesus, unable to leave him alone and filling him with pity. And the disciples wring their hands, wondering what they can do for this crowd.

“Give them some food themselves,” Jesus challenges them. I can see them rolling their eyes, shrugging their shoulders, and saying under their breath: “We don’t have any resources ourselves. We are tired. We are hungry. We are empty. What do you mean—we should give them something to eat? We have nothing to give.”

It is just this spiritual sense of depletion that Jesus wants to address. He knows that all of us, even when we are serving in his name, can come to the end of our ropes. He has every right to feel at the end of his rope himself—with the murder of John the Baptist, don’t you think Jesus knows that he is next on the list? But Jesus pushes the apostles beyond their exhaustion, Jesus pushes us beyond our sense of emptiness and self-pity, to the basic discovery we have to make in life: with God there is always abundance, with God there is always fullness.

We keep wondering how everyone ate from those five loaves and two fishes. If we could figure this out, wouldn’t this be an end to our economic problems? Free food for everyone! But the feeding, however it happened, is like the parables we’ve been reading over the past few weeks—but here a parable spoken not with words but with human hunger, human flesh. Just as bread fills a body, so God’s Word sustains your life. Just as this bread is inexhaustible, so God’s life is inexhaustible. Just as you can chew and swallow this fish, so you can always trust in my Father.

God is free. The resources of his love are free. “Come to the water,” sings Isaiah. Why are you paying the limited capital of your worry and anxiety when you have the boundless abundance of my love and life? “I will renew my covenant,” says Isaiah. God renews. God restores. God is always there. This is Paul’s point to the Romans: the victory has already been won, and no threat, no evil, can take it from us. God is with us on this side of death, and on the other side of death as well.

We should be feeling this abundance every time we come to Mass. That bread of Jesus was an image of God’s abundance, but also an image of Jesus’ own Eucharist. “Here I am, always with you and for you. I will never leave you. Come, be one with me. Eat the endless love that I am. Drink the endless life that I give you. Hear the endless Word of God spoken directly to our hearts.”

Prosecutors are looking to sue some makers of energy drinks. They can be dangerous. One problem is the concentration of caffeine which can scramble growing brains. The other is that after the high, people crash. Jesus is pushing his apostles and his followers—he’s pushing us—to see that when we are spiritually locked into him, we cannot crash. More than tired blood, Jesus energizes our tired souls.

17 A

Only three have done it—won three major golf championships by the age of 25. Last week Rory McElroy, who won the US Open right here in Bethesda two years ago, joined Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods as the third golfer to achieve this benchmark. They interviewed him after this victory. “You are going to be disappointed,” he said to the news people. “It was all very simple: process and spots. I tried to pay attention to the process of my swinging, and then roll my put over a specific spot. Process and puts, that’s all it was.” As the interview was ending, Rory indicated where golf was in his life: “When I wake in the morning, I’m thinking golf; when I sleep at night, I’m thinking golf. Golf is everything.”

Maybe this is why Rory’s wedding to his tennis girlfriend got put off: golf is everything. He doesn’t want to be distracted. And it raises a question for all of us: what is “everything”—the all absorbing interest of our lives? I bet most of us would say our families. Some would say their jobs. Very few of us would claim our favorite sport. Yet Jesus puts another idea before us, something else to absorb us: the Kingdom of God.

We hear these parables which Jesus cloaks in what we would call economic language: the way you buy a field, the way you bet on the price of an item—that’s the kind of intensity you need to be part of the Kingdom of God. It might puzzle us, though. Here we are, Catholics and Christians for many years: have we ever thought of ourselves as living for the Kingdom of God? Is the Kingdom our buried treasure, or our priceless pearl?

Why do you believe? Why are you a Catholic? Would we ever say: because I’m living for the Kingdom of God? More likely because we’d say: I want to go to heaven. Or, if we are a bit more jaundiced: I don’t want to go to hell. But behind the images of heaven and hell, which have been so colored and distorted over 2000 years of Christian history, behind them is the singular image of the Kingdom of God.

What is the Kingdom? It’s God’s transformative action in the present moment, and extending into eternity, whereby the hopes and dreams of humankind come about. Not like a Disney Kingdom, not like some medieval realm, the Kingdom of God can extend to every person in any situation. It is the radical renewal of our relationship with God, accepting God as the Father of endless love, so that it transforms our relationships with everyone else. It is a state where kindness, generosity, mercy, peace, and the pursuit of justice reorient the way we live with each other. It is the era in which God’s qualities of love, healing, and grace characterize our everyday world. “Thy Kingdom come; they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

To be part of this Kingdom involves conversion and discipleship. Conversion means we place Jesus, and his Kingdom, at the center of our lives. Discipleship is the process of aligning ourselves with the life of Jesus. Everyone in this church today has, to one or another extent, experienced conversion and discipleship—otherwise we would not be here, otherwise we could not receive Communion, otherwise we’d not be hearing the Gospel. But every one of us needs to grow as disciples, needs to grow in conversion, because we’ve only begun to see the world as Jesus sees it, we’ve only begun to experience the Kingdom. We’ve not yet invested everything in the Kingdom.

Jesus gives a final parable, one more about judgment—the dragnet that brings everything in from the sea. Like the weeds we heard about last week, the fish will be sorted out. But the basis of this sorting has already begun. What makes us useful for the Kingdom is our discipleship, how we have responded to Jesus and let him transform our lives and our world. This sorting, this judgment, is happening every day, at every moment of our lives as Christians.

It’s haunting to be living through the 50^th anniversary of so many civil rights events—all those traumatic events in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi five decades ago. Cheney, Goodman Schwerner; Medgar Evers and Rosa Parks; King and Malcolm X. Their names come back because of their willingness to live completely for a cause. People die for civil rights because it is a dimension of the Kingdom, treating every human with their God-given dignity. Jesus offers us yet a fuller invitation: to live for the vastness of the Kingdom, to live for what Jesus lived for, to live for the vision of God.

It’s time we unburied this treasure and let it shine in our Catholic lives.

16 A

“Growing pains,” my mother would say whenever I brought up some unexplained cramp or strain. “Part of growing up.” My pre-adolescent mind would imagine bones expanding like tectonic plates under the earth, stretching muscles and nerves in the process. Although the pains continued, I had some kind of explanation for them. I was growing and this was the price.

We normally don’t think of growing a something painful. We plant things all the time and expect they will spring up out of the soil, and put out leaves and flowers when it’s time. Our modern evolutionary assumptions give us a sense of a creation ceaselessly moving forward, from little amoeba in the water to creatures like ourselves. That’s what we do, we grow; growth seems almost inevitable to us.

So it’s a bit stunning to read St. Paul’s language from the Eighth Chapter of Romans. He sees creation moving forward too—toward completion, toward liberation. But he sees this as a groaning, as if life was in endless struggle to make advances, to conquer the forces that beset it, to find full life completely liberated. Not only does he see the cosmos groaning; he sees us at the head of this cosmos, groaning for freedom in our prayer, and us bringing the cosmos along with us until God fully reveals the glory of the liberated brothers and sisters of Christ.

Jesus, too, hardly sees growth as something simple. He gives us the image of seed thrown all around by a particularly extravagant, and perhaps wasteful, sower. We hear all the places the seed falls and we instinctually put them into different categories. Yes, some seed faced temptation from riches. Some seed faced temptation from fear. Some seed simply did not grow. But some of it did. I wonder, though, if it is also not possible to see all the different situations the seed face as different phases we face in our lives. Because when are we free from temptation, from fear, from laziness, from shallowness? When have se produced even at 30%, let alone 60 or 90%. Following Jesus is a constant struggle to make sure the Word of God grows within us. Following Jesus means we disciples can never rest.

Yet, as we hear from Isaiah, as much as the struggle involves us, the glory involves what God is doing among us. “Like rain falling on the earth,” Isaiah, “bringing forth fruit and food, so my Word goes out—and it will not return to me empty.” God works alongside us, within us, and even through our struggles and fears, to bring about God’s fruit—the fullness of life in the Kingdom. God works in and through us to move creation forward toward its fulfillment. No pain we suffer, says Paul, can begin to compare to the Kingdom God is bringing about.

Isn’t it true in our own lives as we think back? The times when we had to work the hardest, when we felt least understood, when we faced the greatest tests—when we look back, weren’t these the times of greatest growth for us? The struggle of the caterpillar to get out of the cocoon becomes the way it grows wings, the way it grows to its destiny of being some far more than a caterpillar—a gloriously-colored butterfly. God is showing us a way to understand life: growing pains which are part of the emergence of God’s glory in our lives.

Last week, in Maui, I saw the famous banyan tree which has taken over the whole central square, spilling life everywhere and covering everything under it with shade and rest. I imagined the genetic material of this tree—it’s utter urge to succeed, to thrive, to fill the world with itself. God’s Word is far more than the banyan tree: coming in and through us, God gives us, Christ’s disciples, the ability to succeed, to thrive, to fill the world with the love of God.

14 A

I have the feeling I would never have survived at a Montessori school. I understand that one of the principles in that system of education is that a child is involved with only one project or item at a time. When finished, the child puts the object away before taking up something new. This would drive me crazy. I am an incurable mult-itasker—having lots of things going on all the time. I love shifting from one thing to another, one project after another, as if I had a mania. Who knows what’s behind this—at least a kind of restlessness, no?

And perhaps also a bit of vanity, as if busyness were my way of saving the world, pushing here and there, making changes, starting something new. I wonder what Jesus would have made of me? Or what I would have made of him—“come to me all you who labor and find life burdensome. I will give you rest.” Rest? Rest!

There is a way in which Jesus is challenging the need we have to fill our lives with tons of activities and tons of things. It’s not by complicating things, Jesus says, that the world changes. It is by meekness, by humility, by opening oneself to the world rather than by trying to control it, that real life is found. We hear the first reading from Zechariah: the king comes riding on a mule, not on a stallion or a chariot. This was written after the Jewish palace had been destroyed by Babylon, and kings had vanished from Israel. They longed for a king—Zechariah tells them that how their king comes will utterly surprise them.

Paul urges us to be open to the Spirit, not the flesh. A modern translation of this might well be this: we have to be open to the depths of God’s presence and grace, rather than distracting ourselves by a million novelties. Is it possible for people to find peace today? To find rest? In our modern world, even the quest for peace becomes a dozen new techniques, indeed, a multiplicity of fads. I am here, says Jesus, to be your peace. You should try me some day. Just sit with me and let me share your life, and let you share mine. We call it contemplation. We call it prayer.

But we should not be fooled by the invitation of Jesus. Along with the content of Jesus’ invitation—peace, humility, meekness, trust, openness to the deeper things in life—there is also the context of Jesus’ words. He has sent his disciples out to proclaim Good News—to announce peace, to tell people the Kingdom of God was near, and to bring healing and hope. The disciples just have returned, filled with stories of what they did in the name of Jesus. This is why Jesus is so filled with thanksgiving: Father I thank you. What you have hidden from the clever and conceited you have revealed to these simple people: that when we busy ourselves with the joy of the Kingdom, with deeds of love in the name of God, then heaven shakes with joy.

So Jesus is not inviting us to a life of utter stillness. Rather, we are invited to a life whereby the activities we do, when done with a view to the Kingdom, will bring us profound joy and deep peace. This is very different than the running around so many of us have to do today. This is not us saving the world, but us being channels by which God brings salvation to the world. This is not us being messiahs, but us showing Jesus as the only Messiah to the world. This is not our agenda list, but our cloaking everything we do with the blessedness of God’s love. “Take my yoke upon yourselves.” Jesus says his burden is light because the real burden, the true work, is the joy of helping to uncover God’s grace, the Spirit’s life, in the multiple tasks that come our way.

As we run from highway to highway, job to job, task to task, click to click, chore to chore, we show we are debtors to the restless world of modern life. We may have to live that way, but if we more deeply become debtors to the Spirit, to the sweep of God’s love underneath every moment, if we realize Jesus is sending out every one of us every day, then we may well find that the burdens of life become lighter, and the work we do is filled with the glory of God.

Sts. Peter and Paul

Although the sports world is now fixated on the World Cup, it was only a few weeks ago that we Americans were cheering the San Antonio Spurs who beat the Miami Heat, long considered unbeatable, in a 4 to 1 series. Much of the applause was for the way the Spurs, led by Duncan, Parker, Ginobili who have long played together developing a sense of team, could defeat Miami for whom Lebron James has become the poster boy. The star, the go-to-man, the one who might win even without a team. When Lebron developed leg cramps, my NY Knick friends were ecstatic. We like stars, but deep down they make us feel inadequate and just ordinary.

Of the two saints we celebrate today, Peter and Paul, both have their claim to stardom. But Paul seems the bigger star. Almost everyone knows the story of him falling off a horse on the way to Damascus—except the Bible never mentions a horse. From that time on he seems restless, fierce, unrelenting, moving from city to city, anxious to spread God’s Word. Paul is a little like Lebron James—he makes us feel inadequate and just ordinary. How could we ever have a conversion and life like his?

Peter, of course, was no slouch, but the Gospel today helps us look at conversion in very direct, and accessible, terms. Jesus comes to Peter and asks him a direct question: “Simon, Son of John, do you love me?’’ We cannot hear this question without putting our own name in the sentence. Frank, Eleanor, Lucy, Robert, José . . . you, each of you, do you love me?

And how would we answer that question? In a way, we’d feel sheepish about it because it never seems that we love God as we should. We always see the failures and inadequacies. Jesus, of course, knows every frailty and inadequacy of Peter—but he still asks him the question. Peter says, “You know that I do.” In spite of the slips and stutters, in spite of the doubts and near-defeats, Peter knows his love, and knows that Jesus knows his love. Remember, in our relationship with God, God’s love is first.

Peter is giving us an image of conversion, of being a disciple, that might be easier to swallow than the majestic image of Paul. Because we can look into our intentions, we can probe our hearts, and ask ourselves very simply: Do I love Jesus? Do I prefer Jesus, in some way, to everything and everyone? Do I love Jesus despite my failings? Do I love Jesus enough to come to him after I have flopped? Do I love Jesus Christ?

If we can say “yes” to this, then we know exactly what conversion is. If we mostly want to say “yes” to this, then we know exactly how close we are to conversion. And all of us should be measuring ourselves in terms of conversion, as lovers of Jesus, as people who want to follow him in the deepest part of our soul, because that’s what it means to be a Catholic Christian—and that’s what it means to come to the Eucharist and eat at his table on Sunday.

When Benedict was Pope we heard a lot about the famous shoes he wore, hand-made red leather. He wore those because popes long have worn red shoes—symbolizing that they walk on ground spattered by the blood of Peter, Paul, and all the other martyrs of Rome. I think Pope Francis would say: you don’t need the shoes, but you need the feet—the kind of feet that walk in the steps of the Apostles because we have found the same kind of love they had inside our hearts as well.

And if we find their love in our hearts, then, for sure, we are members of their team, called by Jesus and sent, like them, into the world.

Corpus Christi A

There is so much conversation about the newly released infantryman, Bowe Bergdahl, because there are so many mixed feelings about him. He’s become a media football. But what intrigued me was the story of how hard it was for him to even make a decision—he was told for five year everything to do, what to eat, when to eat, how to eat. I started wondering what it would be like to eat among capturers. Then I thought of the 5 prisoners from Guantanamo who were released in exchange for Bergdahl. So many of those prisoners, caught in a legal and war-time limbo, have even refused to eat. Judges have allowed us to force feed them.

After all, do we not eat best when we feel part of the company and the environment? Think of Thanksgiving or Christmas. And do we not have the most difficult time eating when we feel the environment is hostile or unsure? To take a consumer angle on this, what if friends invite you to a restaurant and, as you go in, you see their kitchen’s sanitation rating is “C”—kind of makes you not hungry, doesn’t it? You feel out of sort with the environment.

Being part of the environment of Jesus—which we call the Kingdom of God—is the heart of the Eucharist which we are celebrating on this feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. The promises made to ancient Israel, this God who always feeds his people and who have brought food to God as a sign of belonging to God, have now been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” says Jesus. I am the Bread of the Kingdom, of new life, of the new community that God is forming among humankind.

But it is St. Paul who catches something of the nature of this community. Is not the bread we eat, he asks, a participation in the Lord? Is not the chalice we drink a participation in his blood? The Eucharist is all about how we belong to Jesus in the most graphic and powerful way—the sacramental symbol is the act of eating!—and therefore how we are part of everything he is, and part of his Kingdom, and part of his community as well. There is no casual eating of this bread. Jesus says that just as he has life because of his Father, so we have life because of him—a direct dependence, in our very being, on unity with Jesus Christ. He is our life, the Eucharist says; anything else cannot really feed us.

We are, after all, not captives. We have been freed by the liberating death and resurrection of Jesus. That is what we share in when we eat his sacred Bread and drink his sacred Wine. And as we participate in him, so we participate in each other—as brothers and sisters, joined together in Christ. Just as we cannot casually eat this food without being part of Christ, neither can we casually eat this food without being part of each other—sharing each other’s joys and burdens, pledging ourselves to the same kind of love that Jesus has. It’s way too easy for us to come together and sit in the same space—but not realize the community we are. It’s way too easy for us to come, eat, and leave, but not realize the obligation we have to each other. And we Catholics have to understand this in a new and powerful way. We never eat along in the Kingdom. We eat together in Jesus. We are one in him.

I love it when parents bring their children up for communion, and the children are just staring at the host, wanting to grab it. That’s how strong the need to participate is. It’s instinctual. That’s the joy we see when children celebrate first Holy Communion. And that’s the life of participation we have been given in the Eucharist by our liberating savior, Jesus.

Trinity Sunday A

There was a lot of controversy about the Michael Jackson Hologram performance—how technology would allow a 3-d projection of him. I was on the side of those who thought it was not a good idea. We have enough trouble, I thought, distinguishing between reality and fantasy, and this blurs the line as much as possible. “It’s AS IF Michael Jackson were here.” And that’s my point. “As if” is not the same as “is.” I think, for example, if someone could hologram my mother or father it would drive me nuts. I don’t want their image; I want them.

For most of human history, humankind’s image of God has been something like a hologram—a representation more or less vague of Someone transcendent. People thought of God in the plural, as an extended dysfunctional family, as a master mechanic, as the all-seeing judge you could not escape, as the arbitrary toss of the dice, or as fate. Even the Jewish people, privileged as they were with revelation, continued to evolve their sense of God.

We Christians believe that God needed no hologram; God, rather, came to us in the human being of Jesus. This is an earth-shattering revelation because we are saying what seems impossible: that the infinite comes in the finite, the almighty in the human, the totally spiritual in the flesh. But we Christians look at this paradox not as something to be ashamed of. No, just the opposite. God can only be known through symbols; God chose our own humanity as the perfect symbol to relate to us.

And this Jesus gave us the deepest, most penetrating, fullest view of God: not as an abstract force, or some frustrated warrior. God is Father, the font of all love, revealed in his Son, now made flesh in Jesus, and experienced through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We Catholics need to appreciate again how we think of God—beyond us, beside us, but also within us, totally surrounded by God, and totally enveloped in God’s infinite love.

In Dante’s poem, Paradise, in the last chapter, Dante gets to see God. Of course he cannot describe God. He can only see three glowing rings of love, endlessly generating life and grace, endlessly filling and fulfilling everything.

Each day the papers carry stories that seem like extended despair—drugs, violence, suicide, people using other cruelly and despicably. The Las Vegas killings fit this to a T. I hear these stories and say to myself: People don’t know why they are alive today! They don’t know why and for whom they are made! And this despair, to me, seems to come down to this: they don’t know God, the God of Jesus, the God of the Trinity, revealed not in an insubstantial hologram, but in the self-giving person of Jesus Christ.

To know the Trinity is nothing less than to know how Jesus experienced God, and how Jesus would have us experience God as well. Not from afar, but within the divine life and love itself.

PENTECOST A

I’m always amazed when authorities can take a childhood photo—particularly when someone is missing or abducted—and project it ahead. “This is what Shirley would look like at 15,” they say. And they morph the child’s picture before our eyes, broadening the face, lengthening the chin, darkening the hair, as if the continuity between our earlier years and later ones was all that clear. I know I’ve been surprised to see an old photo of a group and someone says, “There you are, in the corner,” and I have to look for two minutes to recognize myself. Or others are looking at me when I was 19 or 20; “That can’t be you,” they say. Sure enough it was.

How about the continuity of the Church, Christ’s community of believers. Can we imagine ourselves in the 1800s in Ireland, or the 1700s in France? What did Medieval Christianity really look like? Or Christians in the first millennium? Would we have felt comfortable in St. Ambrose’s Milan? Or St. Hillary’s Poitiers? For that matter, do we see ourselves in the first reading the 2^nd Chapter of Acts?

On first sight, it all looks strange. Blowing winds. Flames of fire. People speaking and being heard in a dozen languages. It certainly doesn’t look like us. But if we pull back, we can see some distinct features that really show our Catholic Church. We notice two things right off the bat. First, people are in Jerusalem from seemingly every known nation. We just have to look around our congregation to see how we more than maintain that trait. We are from everywhere.

Next is the communication of languages. Here the Apostles are not speaking in tongues which is when someone utters a totally peculiar language. Rather, they are speaking their regular language with their Galilean accents. What happens is that people from all these regions are able to hear them. People from other cultures are able to hear and accept the message of salvation. That, of course, is the history of the Church: from one land to another, from one culture to another, from one language to another, the proclamation of Good News.

What are those tongues of fire, you ask? Images to show people whose tongues were loosened so they could share their faith. What is that blowing wind? The same wind that has energized the Church from the beginning—wind meaning Spirit, meaning divine presence. Pentecost is the transfer of Jesus’ Risen life and power to those who accept him. Pentecost is our biography. Jesus breathes on them, breathes through history, and breathes upon us—breathing out the wind of divine love and salvation.

Still, there are then two aspects we can reflect on as followers of Jesus. First, to recognize the signs of the Spirit in our own lives and worship. Do you pray? Do you read the scriptures? Do you open your heart to Jesus? Do you serve others? Do you strive to reflect God’s teaching in your life? All of this is the work of the Spirit, from loving your family, to feeling compassion, to sacrificing for another.

But more than this, the Spirit of Jesus calls us to stretch. To be more sensitive to the divine gifts and power in our lives. Healing is all around us—how do we bring healing about? Insight abounds—how do we see and point to the signs of God in our lives? Forces of despair and death hold society in their grip. How do we overcome them by the greater force of our faith? God’s gifts are everywhere; we all have them. How many have we lived? And how many have we let go sterile? Perhaps we’ve not yet begun to live in the Spirit Christ pours upon us.

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” These words should blow us away—blow us away in Christ’s breath, bow us away in the Holy Spirit, blow us away in our recognition of the mission Christ has sent us on. If we cannot reproduce the setting of the early Church, so what? God knows we live in a different era, with different dynamics, and different problems. But still God sends us forth, Pentecost people, to set the world on fire with God’s love, and soothe it with the refreshing breath of the Spirit.

Ascension A

So why couldn’t they see? Why couldn’t the friends and neighbors of Elliot Rodgers in Isla Vista see what was going on inside his head? Why couldn’t his parents see beyond their own frustration? Why couldn’t he see beyond his own needs and insecurities? Why could he not see the lives of those he would kill? The father of one victim asks “why can’t our nation see what guns are doing to us?” Professionals ask why we can’t help those who so obviously need it.

There is, I think, one kind of seeing that happens instinctually. It’s mostly passive. Our eyes take things in, we may note one or another thing, and then we move on to something else. Almost all the seeing we do this way. When something happens later, or someone points something out, we knock ourselves in the head wondering why we didn’t notice it at first.

But another kind of see is not passive; it’s active, engaged, searching, and deep. We have this striking phrase in the second reading today, from Ephesians: “the eyes of our hearts.” This is the scriptures’ way of talking about the deeper seeing we need when dealing with God. Look at so many more people who think they are atheists today. We want to ask them: are you even looking? Looking in the right place? Looking with open eyes?

But we ourselves can be like the disciples of Jesus who, with passive eyes, are staring at Jesus ascending into heaven. We can imagine this is all about outer space, and strange worlds, and the bottom of Jesus’ feet. “Men of Galilee,” the angel has to say, “Why are you looking into the sky?” We cannot see the Ascension by staring. We’ve got to use the eyes of our hearts.

What do the eyes of our hearts see? Deeper, more clearly, more peacefully, with contemplation, in prayer: all that for sure. But also our more expansive hopes, not only for ourselves but for humankind. Also the deepest meanings and implications of our loves and our loving. And, most of all, how we cannot see without seeing things in God. “In your light, we see light,” says one of the Psalms; St. Augustine meditated on this phrase for most of his life—to see everything in God’s truth and love. What does God’s light show me?

Part of seeing in God involves not only living in God, but also acting in God. The angel tells the “men of Galilee” that Jesus will return—so they are to live in hope, acting from hope, not with small and crippled visions. But Jesus himself tells the disciples in Galilee, in this very famous passage from the end of Matthew’s Gospel, that they are live with the kind of hope that drives them forth, helping others see in God’s light, helping others find Jesus with the eyes of their heart, helping the world become his disciples.

The eyes of our hearts, when they look on Christ, bring us hope and bring us mission. The Word has gone out—not only to all the nations, but through twenty centuries, until we ourselves hear it. We are no different than the “men of Galilee”—we too are told to make the world disciples. But we can do that only by consciously accepting our discipleship, consciously looking with the eyes of our hearts, and consciously seeking to help the world see God, see God in Jesus, see God with his Spirit.

This doesn’t mean we go to Nigeria or Thailand. It means right in our own homes, our families, among our friends, in our own living environment. If our families, our children, our friends and associates, only see us looking passively, how does this help them to see with the eyes of the heart? If our faith is mostly a cultural form, and not an active way of life, how do others come to see in the light God asks us to shed and spread?

Jesus’ Ascension is not an absence; it’s a deeper presence, in the world and also in our hearts. He continues to return in our prayer, our worship, our daily deeds done in love, in our love for others, in the hopes that allow us to live with conviction and energy. Enough angry people with eyes filled with violence, enough of that. It’s time for clearer eyes, light-filled eyes, and love-filled hearts.

Easter 6 A

Commemorating the Ordination of Fr. Yao Hsu, CSP

New York City, May 24, 2014

Imprinted indelibly in my memory are walks I would take with my father and brother. My father was fascinated by construction, the process of blasting out a foundation from the solid rock of Manhattan. We would peek through crevices in the fencing surrounding what are now the skyscrapers along Sixth Avenue. “Look how far down they are going,” he would say, as we peered down fifty or sixty feet, watching huge machines gouge out the bedrock. “That building will never fall,” he said, fully confident in the might of New York City construction, and in the bedrock that makes it possible.

Bedrock. Foundation. Solid Ground. I would notice when I lived in Chicago how different construction was, how trucks would bring in steel beams—dozens of them—which were pounded into the softer land near Lake Michigan. These beams, 50 and 60 feet long, had to penetrate to the bedrock far below. As we need bedrock for our cities and our skyscrapers, so every one of us needs bedrock in her or his life.

“I will send you the Spirit of truth,” says Jesus. The Spirit to be the bedrock of our lives. You know what happens when trauma comes in our lives, how our minds search for something solid, how our emotions tunnel back to deep experiences we had with our parents growing up, or with friends who stood by us in our pain. Our hearts search for whatever seems solid when our world is threatened. Jesus is saying to us: I and my Spirit will be bedrock for you. You will always be secure in us, and in the Father that we show you.

“I will send upon you another Advocate,” Jesus says. Obviously Jesus is the first Advocate. Now he sends his Spirit to be Advocate with and in him. It’s a strange word, “Advocate.” An older form of it was “paraclete,” which simply transliterates the Greek; as kids we would joke about Jesus sending us a parakeet! But “paraclete” contains a striking image of Jesus and his Spirit. The word means: someone who calls out—the paraclete, the Advocate, calls out on behalf of us, and the Advocate calls to the depths of our heart within us, assuring us of protection, guidance, support, and love. Jesus is our Advocate, sent to us in our brokenness, protecting us from all that would destroy us, strengthening us with divine presence. And what Jesus was, his Spirit continues in our lives.

On this Sunday when we reflect on the priesthood, on that special ministry of our Catholic lives, we can understand this ministry as a way to be an Advocate. Because the priest calls out on behalf of God’s people, speaking the prayers that come from the depths of our hearts and needs, calling out for healing, for mercy, for forgiveness, for human love, for unity, for life. Every sacrament that a priest celebrates connects us with Christ’s specific saving action at fundamental moments in their lives. As a presider, the priest gathers us together and embodies our voices in sacramental, in Eucharistic prayer.

But a priest does this not only as a sacred icon in a sanctuary doing a sacrament. A priest does this also in his life, attending to people by his presence and care, in moments of grief, of fear, of illness, of hope, of commitment, of birth and of death. No one dares to ascend an altar or wear a stole who will not also long to be with people, one with their lives and hopes, one with their needs and dreams. An Advocate is fundamentally present, helping to reveal God’s presence through love shown in the name of God.

“I give you a new commandment—Jesus says—the commandment of love.” This is the bedrock of our Catholic and Christian life: the unbreakable love God shows us, and gives us, in Jesus Christ. This is the hope Peter asks us to be ready to talk about, to share, to give to others. Love connecting us intimately to God, and love sending us forth as missionaries, as ambassadors, as advocates for humankind. Christ can give us this commandment because Christ fulfills it by sending his Spirit, that Spirit of love and life, into our hearts.

As we approach Pentecost when we celebrate Christ’s greatest Easter gift—the Holy Spirit—we have in these Easter days been celebrating all the gifts he gives us through the Spirit—the Word, the Eucharist, Baptism, Confirmation, Forgiveness, and Healing. Along with these, we celebrate the ministry the Spirit brings forth in the Church, in every life, and in the lives of her priests, so we may know the love in which our lives are grounded, and the fullness to which our lives are destined.

Easter 5 A

So if you could be an animal, which one would it be? Or if you could use a color to describe how you are feeling, that color would be….? Questions like these sometimes open retreat or planning sessions, and participants have various feelings about them. Some are intrigued: am I a lion or a squirrel? What will others think of me when I suggest an animal, or a color? Is red too aggressive, blue too aloof, yellow. . . just to yellow? Other just think it’s all silly.

I was thinking of this when I read a long article by a noted editor who was trying to describe his twenty-year involvement with Parkinsons Disease. It affects muscles, of course; but it also affects the mind, he was saying. But how can a mind know when it’s being affected? Do those tests really reveal what is going on inside our heads? Can we really describe ourselves, our inner states, or our inner changes?

If it’s so hard to show the inner state of our mind through external words or tests, how does one show the ultimate mystery behind all being? How does one show God? This is Philip’s issue in the Gospel. “Show us the Father,” Philip says—perhaps the boldest thing a Jewish person could say since it was commonplace for the Scriptures to say that if someone sees God he or she will die. Jesus says to Phillip one of the key insights behind Christian faith: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

We need not think primarily of the physical body of Jesus. To look at his hair, or eye-color, or how much he weighed. Jesus is talking about the signs that he has done, each of which was to accomplish two purposes: to show how God is, and to lead followers to faith. You want to see the Father? Let’s see what God is like: let me bring joy to a wedding party, read the heart of a Samaritan woman, give sight to blind people, call Lazarus from the dead. . . let me wash your smelly feet, let me give my life on the cross as a sign of unconquerable love. You can see the Father in what I do.

“Greater works than these you will do,” says Jesus. He ascends to the Father—that is, he comes to share in the glory and power of God, precisely to allow others to share in his works. The Spirit that he sends will bring about deeds of love and grace in us. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” says Jesus. These are not just descriptions of him and his role; these words are a method for Christian life. For when we live Christ’s risen life, through the Holy Spirit, we discover the truth that Jesus is—that self-giving love is the ultimate meaning of everything. And this, in turn, allows us to follow Jesus’ way—to make his way our way of life, to become his disciples.

When we do this, we reveal something of God even in our own lives. We see this in the readings from the Acts of the Apostles, how their devotion to the Word of God, and to service, led others to experience God as well. Become the living stones of God’s new temple, says St. Peter, by the deeds that we do and the way we live. We have seen so many horrible deeds, from civil war in Syria, to mass kidnappings of girls in Nigeria, to immigrants drowning in the Mediterranean. These deeds of anger, violence and neglect hide the face of God. Our deeds should show his face.

So would this not be a great examination each night, before we go to sleep: how have my deeds revealed the Father to the world? How have my actions made God either more visible or, God forbid, more obscure? For Jesus tells us again and again: he has been raised to send the Spirit upon us, and this Spirit works in us as it worked in Jesus, revealing God’s love and life in our midst.

So, in a little shift here, if you could be a saint, which one would it be? How about being and becoming the saint that Jesus is making you through your deeds and through his Spirit?

Easter 4 A

The owner of the Clippers. The CEO of Target. Banks fined over a billion dollars. NBA coaches let go. Senators battling the CIA over secret files. Low popularity ratings for George W. Bush in his second term; and low popularity ratings for Barak Obama in his second term. The city of Sacramento in default, the city of Detroit bankrupt. These are not good days for leadership.

Jesus, giving us the image of the Good Shepherd, is doing more than alluding to a popular Psalm. He’s also talking to us about leadership. Both points that he makes challenge our modern ideas of leadership which tend to aggrandize the leader. They say in 1920s, a chief office made six times what executives made; now that number is twenty. “They earned it,” people say, because the stock price went up. They earn the ability to make millions while governments squabble over the minimum wage.

Jesus tells us that he is the sheep gate, that there is no other way to enter the pasture. The image echoes his words to Philip, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Jesus is giving us a definitive path to follow—the path of his sacrificial, saving love. In the Gospel of John, Jesus gives us definitive signs of God’s presence and love, and none more definitive than his death on the cross. As he breathes out his last breath, it mingles with the breath he blows upon the Apostles after he rises: take my Spirit, my breath, my life—and make it your own! See how I give myself, in humble love. Give yourself in the same way.

To underscore this, Jesus brings up a second point, the contrast between the Shepherd who belongs to his sheep, and the hired mercenaries who are only doing their jobs. The Shepherd serves out of love and personal connection; the mercenary serves only because of the coins he will get at the end of the day. Leadership is not only loving; it also is generous. The leader looks to nothing but the chance to serve others; the Shepherd gives his life for the sheep because he stays with them, faithful and enduring.

In a world where most of us work for salaries, we surely can point to many who do their jobs not because of what they get paid, but because of the noble purpose they serve. Police and firemen, soldiers and many in the medical profession; teachers and those who give themselves to serving others in the name of God—clergy and religious. Parents instinctually will do anything for their children. But even among the most generous of us, there can sneak in the tiniest “What do I get out of it?” feeling.

So Jesus says: enter the pasture, find out what my kingdom is about, and continue searching the ways in which your life can echo mine. Peter even urges his readers not to worry about their sufferings; we have a God greater than all of those. And that God is revealed in the gracious self-gift of Jesus who has only one thing to gain—humankind redeemed, renewed, and saved. As we reflect on our own attitudes toward work and serving others, Jesus invites us to renew the Easter vision—humankind risen in his resurrection, the Kingdom coming about in our lives.

Few of us, I think, would have made it as shepherds—cold nights, hot days, hours of boredom, sleeping in fields and on rocks. But those inconveniences are little compared to the invitation Jesus gives us—go live for others, to live selflessly, and to find that in putting ourselves aside, we discover what God’s love is about.

Easter 3 A

There are hunches. And there are hunches. Some hunches turn out right, and some prove misdirected. Some hunches come to us in an instant, while other simmer for a while. But I think hunches we have about things are very different than hunches we have about people. Having a hunch about a stock is one thing. Having a hunch about a person is something altogether dissimilar.

Why? Because when we have hunches about people that we’ve met, it’s because they already made an impression on us. They already have begun to affect us. The hunch we have expresses a relationship already begun. We have hunches about new bosses, and hunches about teachers—we find out pretty quickly if they are on target or not. “I thought she was going to be nice.” And we have hunches about friends, and particularly initial hunches about people we end up loving. We find ourselves in love almost without realizing it—because a relationship already began and eventually grew into something that changed our lives.

Cleopas and his companion say something very strange, something we need to think about. “Were not our hearts burning as we walked along?” But they only realize this later, after Jesus has broken the bread for them. As they walked along, as Jesus explored their feelings and explained the Scriptures, Jesus was forming a relationship with them. But, like someone who discovers she or he is already in love, it only comes together after a while. They had a hunch, but they couldn’t put it together.

So when do our hearts burn? When does it dawn on us that Jesus has come to be the center, the meaning of our lives? Some people say they hearts never burned. They go to other churches, or, unfortunately more often they stop going to church. “It’s so boring. I get nothing out of it?” They walked so far along with road with Jesus without recognizing him, his love, and the relationship that he has begun with us.

I mean, what if Cleopas and his companion just kept on eating after Jesus disappeared? What if they just shrugged their shoulders? What if they said, “Well that was strange,” and let it go at that? Is it possible to be loved but not know it, realize it, accept it, be changed by it? It seems that way.

So Jesus has taken the first step. He has begun a walk alongside every one of us. He has opened the scriptures with the greatest news we can hear—that we are not senseless blobs produced by mindless atoms, but embodied spirits called to an eternal destiny. As the Scriptures underline: it was necessary for him to die so that we could come to know the extent of divine love for each of us, for all of us. And, even more, he has sat us at his table, taken up bread and wine, told us to be one with him, because he has become our food, our life. And he has sent his Holy Spirit upon us, that we may be filled with the same life that filled him—the Spirit of love and grace.

How sweet it would be if, after every Sunday Mass, it dawned on us later on that day, and later on during the week, just how privileged we are to meet the Risen Jesus every Sunday, and just how much are hearts have been set on fire because of this meeting.

Easter 2 A

The Devil’s Advocate. We used to hear this phrase quite a bit a few decades ago, but not so much anymore. This was the canon lawyer who would try to prove that someone was not eligible for sainthood. Today, when we canonize two popes –John and John Paul—whose lives many of us directly experienced, we focus not on any limitations they had, but on the way they showed holiness in the world today. Pope Francis is even permitting the canonization of Saint John XXIII with only one miracle. So we don’t obsess on the Devil’s Advocate as we used to.

But let’s take the case of Saint Thomas. Although there was no canonization process for the apostles, we can imagine a Devil’s Advocate having a field day with Thomas. All the other apostles are saying the same thing—“We have seen the Lord.” But Thomas not only doubts them. He raises the bar for his own belief. “I want to touch him. Touch his nail marks. Touch his wounded side.” Surely someone as hard-nosed as Thomas would have a hard time making it through the process of canonization today.

But Thomas helps us explore a central insight which we find in two of the scripture readings today. “Blessed are those who have not seen but still believe,” comes from the Gospel. And the letter of Peter, written to people suffering because of their faith, says that although they haven’t seen Christ, they love him and believe in him. The celebration today is trying to tell us about the kind of eyes we need to see Easter.

Does Thomas know what he’s asking for when he says he wants to touch the wounded side of Christ? We heard these words on Good Friday—how, when the soldier jabbed Jesus with his lance, blood and water flowed out of Jesus. This blood and water represents two things: first, the complete and total gift of Jesus to us; but, secondly, the sacraments of the Church. Water represents baptism, and blood represents the Eucharist. Thomas is indirectly asking for the sacraments, and pointing out how believers see Jesus in this way today.

We might imagine Jesus hanging around in his risen Body after the resurrection. But think of how absurd that would be. Jesus would be like a specimen, like a character in a side show. We would be gawking over the wounds of Jesus rather than living his life. If we think back over all the stories we heard from John’s Gospel this Lent, we can see them as explorations of who Jesus is: for the Samaritan woman, he’s a prophet and Messiah; for the man born blind Jesus is the Son of Man; for the sisters of Lazarus, he is Resurrection and Life. At every point, John tells us that people were coming to believe in Jesus.

Today we have the climax, the ultimate discovery of who Jesus is: Thomas falls on his knees, without gawking or fingering, and declares “My Lord and my God.” With his rising from the dead, we now know Jesus as God come among us. When we say Jesus sits at the right hand of God, we are saying that Jesus now relates to us as God does, because he is Lord and God, beyond the restrictions of a single body. We don’t need to see the body to believe; we need to be part of his Risen Body, his community of faith, to experience the life of Jesus.

This is what we see in the first reading, the earliest follower of Jesus, having been baptized, now living as disciples, sharing life, breaking bread—the earliest form of the Mass—and discovering the power of the Spirit of Jesus in their lives of service. Thomas shows us all of this. Doubt is about what we see or don’t see; but Easter is about seeing the Risen Jesus in our own lives of faith, provided we truly live those lives. Thomas is saying that The Risen Jesus can touch us in our lives as disciples if we truly walk with him, and with our brothers and sisters, in faith.

We may not make it to canonization, and the devil’s advocate may be able to do a job on any one of us. But the way of life shown by our new saints, and offered to all who believe, is our surest path to holiness, to knowing Jesus, and to life in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Easter A

A priest friend of mine tells me this joke: A pastor loves golf. He wakes up on Easter and sees it’s a beautiful day. He gives into the temptation and calls his associate pastor, saying, “I’m really not feeling well even though it’s Easter. Can you take the main service for me?” Then the pastor drives way out of his area and finds a golf course where he can play. Meanwhile St. Peter and Jesus are watching this. St. Peter says, “Jesus, what are you going to do about this.” “Watch,” says Jesus. On the first hole, the pastor makes a par. On the second hole, he makes a birdie. On the third hole, the pastor makes a hole-in-one. St. Peter turns to Jesus and says, “That’s a punishment. You let him get a hole-in-one on Easter. What’s up with that?” And Jesus smiles and says, “Yes, he got a hole-in-one, but whom can he ever tell?”

What’s it like to have good news but not be able to tell anyone? You won the lotto, but have to keep your mouth shut. You bought your favorite car, but can’t show it off to anyone? You got engaged, but cannot wear your ring. Torture all of it. Good News is meant to be spread.

Today we have the greatest news humans can ever hear—that the absurdity of our death—the limitation of our lives, dreams and loves—has been defeated by Jesus Christ. Jesus who took on our sin and death on behalf of us, brought them to the edge of despair, but now comes in triumph proclaiming to all the world: Death is overcome! I have risen! And I will raise you with me to a life of unlimited love, to a fullness which every moment of your life cries out for.

So we are like Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of Matthew—half overjoyed, half puzzled, hearing life-changing news. . . . And what are we supposed to do with it? What comes next? “Go tell you brothers and sisters. He is not dead. He has been raised.” Easter is the Good News we are not to keep to ourselves, but we are to proclaim to the world.

How do we do that? we wonder. Do I go running around with signs? So we take out ads in newspapers? Start a website? What are we to do?

Let’s begin, in the first place, by being an Easter People. By living in accord with our deepest faith, which we proclaim together this day—Jesus is raised, so we are not people of doom and death. Our Holy Father has been insisting that our faith is not for sour pusses. It’s not about drudgery and depression. How often have we made our Christian faith into an excuse for our dyspepsia? No, we are people of hope, people who live in profound joy, and people who radiate that hope, joy, and love into the lives of others.

Easter is asking us if we are living in accord with the salvation Jesus has given us. Are we people assured of life, confident even in our difficulties, hopeful even in our challenges? Because if Jesus has given us his Spirit, if we share his Life in the Communion we receive this day, then this should show in how we live, how we treat others, how we approach decisions, how we lift others up, how we face every moment of our lives.

One of the great bumper stickers of the 80s said: if you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be any evidence against you? How about it . . . let’s make our joy, our sheer happiness at this life of God given to us forever, our Spirit-filled smiles—let’s make this the first and strongest evidence that we have accepted Jesus, and his Easter life.

Palm Sunday A

What do we think about destiny? Often it is claimed, but really, do things have to happen? Was our nation destined to be as it is—could not the civil war have gone another way—and made things different? Were we destined to live in the times we live, or is that the way we choose to see it?

Matthew’s Passion goes out of its way to show Jesus destined—from the preparation of the Passover meal, to the fleeing of the disciples, to the treachery of Judas. St. Matthew and the other early Christians combed the Jewish scriptures, seeing pieces fit together like a jig saw puzzle. But it wasn’t only the scriptures, it was the history of our human hearts that accounted for the destiny Jesus.

For the sin we have chosen, and still choose again and again, had to be shown before heaven and earth; surely, the way Jesus was humiliated and murdered reveals the meaning of just these choices. And the way death robs us of promise and hope had to be directly faced. How could our death be conquered without going through it, without tasting it, without transforming it into loving gift?

The destiny of Jesus is the destiny of the Kingdom of God, the slow but steady working out of God’s vision for humankind renewed and transformed. We begin this week in blood; but we will end this week with brilliant light shining from within a tomb. We may not know exactly how our different personal stories work out, but Jesus continues his invitation: be one with me, make your destiny mine, let me bring you through your fears, your pain, so you can forever drink wine anew with me in the sweetness of my Kingdom.

Lent 5 A

Part of the additional heartbreak in the tragedies we have seen in the lost jet from Malaysia and the town swept away by mud in Washington State comes from the ambiguity, the lack of resolution. As much as our imaginations can conclude that people are gone, never to return, another part of our imagination works to conjure their re-appearance. CNN and other news agencies endlessly interviewed one woman whose fiancé was on the Malaysian flight; for weeks she imagined him and the other passengers as captives held by terrorists. She was sure, then, that he would return.

Our Gospel today allows us no ambiguity. Jesus waits to visit Lazarus because Jesus wants us to confront the definitiveness of death. A part of us thinks that Jesus is using poor Lazarus to make another point, but the death of Lazarus is like the deaths we all face. Jesus makes no exception for Lazarus because Jesus knows exceptions are rare and death universal.

So Jesus wants to bring us to a special place. He wants us to face grief. The Lazarus’ sisters are bawling their heads off; in the end, Jesus bawls his eyes out, not once but twice. “See how he loved him,” the crowd says. Because love is at the heart of grief. And the meaning of our love for each other raises the very question that Jesus wants to answer over poor Lazarus’ dead body.

What does grief feel like? I think it has two components. One is sheer absence. We cannot believe that one who has been part of our lives will be there no more. I hear the Irish have a saying that the dead visit us three times in our dreams. This reflects the incredulity we have: how can my husband, my wife, my child, my parent, simply not be there anymore. They made up my world; they made up the world.

The second part of grief is a consequence of the feeling of absence. We feel as if part of our selves are being torn away. Death unmasks the illusion we have that we are totally contained individuals. When someone I love dies, part of me dies, because I am not myself without them. My self flows beyond me to the deepest connection that I have. It flows backwards to my parents and siblings, and it flows forward to my children and friends. Death shows just how radically incomplete we are.

When Jesus tells Martha and Mary that he is the Resurrection, Jesus wants to deal with these two components of grief. If you relate to me, I am eternally present to you, and you are eternally present to me—I am Resurrection and Life. . There are no boundaries to this relationship, not even the boundary of death. In our relating to God through Jesus, time becomes relative and irrelevant. God holds us in the eternal relationship that God is. And because, in Jesus, we are related to God and to everyone else in relationship with God, Jesus completes our lives beyond anything we can fully imagine. If death can feel like severing, Jesus’ presence feels like entrance into unlimited fullness, unending connectedness. His life makes us whole, and brings us into the wholeness of life.

The great prophets imagined the Exile like a valley of dry bones; God can bring the dead back to life by the blowing spirit that made creation to begin with. When we have the Spirit of God, the Spirit that Jesus breathes out upon rising from the dead, then the issues of flesh, of limitation, of brokenness become irrelevant. “We are not in the flesh, but we live in the Spirit of Christ.” Jesus is getting us ready by raising Lazarus from the dead. “Come out, Lazarus. You are just a shadow of what I am going to do.”

Jesus calls for them to untie, unbind, Lazarus. His bonds were burial cloths. Our bonds are mental, emotional, cultural—we’ve just resigned ourselves all too often to the materialist, Stoic view of death: it’s part of nature, we have our years and then it’s bye-bye. Jesus is saying to us: look at the faces of Mary and Martha as they see Lazarus return to them. Look at how they are connected to each other. Can’t you see their love, their need, their hope? God can see these too—they are in all of us—and, in Jesus, God wraps them with the unending life that they deserve.

Lent 4 A

“It’s not like looking for a needle in the haystack; it’s trying to find the haystack in the first place.” An Australian official used these words to describe what it was like to fine Malaysia 370, the plane whose mysterious disappearance has shaken the world for the past three weeks. Sometimes it’s just hard to see what’s there—the object is elusive. We squint; we use all kinds of technology; but we barely make the image out.

Sometimes, however, it’s pretty easy to see what’s in front of us, but we just don’t recognize it. Millions of eyes watch television, without any awareness of how implicit values in television come to take our own value systems. Or couples get into patterns of arguing about the same things, but don’t see a way to change this. They keep seeing and saying the same things.

Our Gospel, however, points out one more difficulty in seeing. That we become responsible for what we have come to see, for what we have come to know. We are witnesses to it. Contrast, for example, the attitude of the parents of the man born blind with those of the man himself. When the authorities approach the parents, they kick the football away—“Ask him, why bother us?” They could not even affirm the life-changing event that came to their son. But when the authorities come to the son, he dishes it right back to them—“Do you want to become his disciples too?”—because he is more than willing to bear witness to what has happened in his life. “What I know is this, I was blind, but now I see.”

This might make a lot of us uncomfortable because so often we are like the parents. Our faith is a cultural thing, we don’t want to take risks because of it, and we certainly don’t want to pay the price. I believe as long as it doesn’t cost me too much. The blind man might be evicted from the synagogue, but the parents don’t want that to happen to them. So the Gospel today is asking us if we are willing to accept our faith so deeply that we becomes witnesses for it, that we accept its consequences in our lives, that we live by what we see.

Because every time a Scripture is read, every time a sacrament is celebrated, every time we approach the altar, we are seeing, hearing, and accepting a reality. God is touching us as much as Jesus touched that blind man. What, after all, was the particular force of giving sight to a man born blind? It was this—that Jesus made happen something that was not there before. Something new came into a life.

And are not new things coming into our lives all the time? The fact of our faith, the way we have come to know love, the children that have been born, the way our vision of life is refreshed again and again, the hope that will not die in our hearts? Every day we are stepping into a world of wondrous new reality, of marvelous new life. Every day our eyes are being opened.

So like our blind friend, the invitation is clear: live in accord with the wonder that God shows us all the time, to act out of the grace that comes to us every single day. To let the vision of faith become our primary viewpoint in life. To bear witness to the life and love that have come to us.

Who knows? Maybe living this way will not only transform our lives, but also transform the lives of others who are waiting for someone to come and open their eyes.

Lent 3 A

Boy, dating has sure gotten complicated. We have e-harmony dot com, and now Christian Mingle dot com—their ads are on TV all the time. “He’s my second chance,” the woman literally cries into the TV camera. And Match dot com. And, as I see at so many of the Catholic conventions I attend, we also have Catholic Match dot com. All these options, and it used to be so simple. Young men and women would run into each other at work, or at church, or at a party, or at the bowling alleys, as I learned when I was first ordained in 1972. So what’s with all this dot com dating thing?

Perhaps young folks are working so hard these days that, by the time they are ready to get serious, they feel time has run out. Or, and this is frightening, perhaps people think the computer can do better at picking a mate that good old human instinct. They can find the logarithms and equations to scientifically find us a match, rather than rely on the basic process of meeting and liking someone. Of course, folks put out false pictures and blown-up resumes on these sites, so maybe the computer can be dumb too. Who knew how hard to find a date?

The Samaritan Woman wasn’t looking for a date. She was out, getting water at mid-day, instead of the early morning as most other women did, that’s how much of an outcast she was. And you can see from her dialogue with Jesus why she was an outcast. Her problem wasn’t getting a date; it was getting too many dates. In a world where men put women out, she’d been put out five times already. “Get me your husband,” Jesus says. “I have no husband.” Yes, Jesus says, you surely don’t. You’ve never found the endless well of love that sustains life. I will give that to you.

And what’s the price for this? One thing. Not money. Not influence. Not looks. Not charm. She only has to give of herself, to trust enough, to show her broken crazy life to Jesus. Get rid of the fake resume, and the deceptive picture. Show God yourself. Once she does this, she lets his flood of true love, of divine acceptance, flow into her without limit. “Give me something to drink,” Jesus asked at the beginning of their date; she finally gives Jesus the water of her life, in exchange for which Jesus will give the water of divine love, of the Holy Spirit, of union with God. How does Paul put it in his letter to the Romans: “The love of God has been poured into our hearts.” We only have to open them.

Are we envious of this Woman? We should not be. Nothing has happened to her that has not, or cannot, happen to us as well. So many things can block our relationship with God—and, maybe most of all, our pretentions. The way we think we don’t need God that much. Or can keep from God the scars of our souls. Or do not trust God enough to reveal all that needs to be loved, healed, and graced in our lives.

Lent is an opportunity to drop the pretentions, to stand vulnerable and open before the Lord, to acknowledge sins so that God can overcome them, to experience a deeper level of discipleship. Of all the people I have to hide from, God is the last one of all. Come, let’s go on a date, says God. Let me show you the truth of my love. At this time of conversion, hundreds of thousands of people across the world are preparing for the sacraments of conversion—modeling for us the earnestness of fresh love that can be part of our lives when we let the Spirit touch us.

We’ve bought the illusion that whatever we can do in life, we can do better over a computer. Our dot coms will save us. We just need to find the right app. But God needs no app. God is ready to flood us with love. We just have to take off the umbrella of self-pretention, and the raincoat of false security, to discovery the One who tells us everything we ever did, and who loves us nonetheless.

Lent 2 A

She was waiting for the plane to board. Like the rest of us, she was killing time. She took out her cosmetics, worked on her eyebrows, some red for her cheeks, and lipstick to finish it off. I watched her—not a particularly pretty woman, but certainly not uncomely. In between the way most of us are. Who is she preparing herself for? Who is waiting on the other end of the flight? Is it a husband, a boyfriend, who?

We are more and more occupied with our images these days. Billions are spent in plastic surgery. But no matter how we try, our faces grow old, wrinkles appear, and we cannot keep father time at bay. Perhaps there are other images we should worry about—how our characters appear to others, and how our souls appear to God.

Jesus is giving us an image this day, as we start moving into the heart of Lent. This image stunned his disciples, leaving them speechless. It’s the image of his glory—but not an image only of his glory. It’s an image of the glory that God would give to everyone. The scene on the mountain of the Lord’s Transfiguration stands for the image that God would give each of us—it’s a glimpse of Easter, of the risen life, that Jesus will receive and wants to give to all those who follow in his steps.

We are puzzled by Peter. Why does he want to build tents? Why does he want to stay there with Jesus? Of course, the scene is glorious and consoling, so Peter’s desire was natural. But as soon as he suggests this, we see the cloud come and the voice from heaven say: This is my beloved, Listen to him. Peter wants to build a tent, but he’s not ready to listen to Jesus. Jesus is ready to move on to his destiny, to die and rise, but Peter wants only the comfort he can received.

Abraham, of course, was comfortable, but God called to him, to leave, to trust, to go forth in faith. Abraham could not see the final goal, but he was asked to begin moving, to go with God step by step, until great blessings would come upon him, and upon all humankind. Isn’t it true in our lives, that sometimes we could not see the whole path, but we just walked faithfully, step by step. That’s Peter’s invitation: not to build the tent for his comfort, but to walk with Jesus as he leaves this mountain, and prepares for the next mountain, Mount Calvary.

Our faith lives are journeys, sometimes clear, sometimes not. But the biggest temptation is to give up. Sometimes we just move our feet, going through the motions, but really make no progress. Many of us Catholics and other Christians have simply stepped off the road, giving up praise and worship, giving up the following of Jesus. And most of us have no energy in our step because we have stopped dreaming of the end, the goal, the destination—to share with all creation in the glory of Jesus.

Paul is telling his followers to remember the big picture, how God has sent Jesus to bring us to a fulfillment we could not imagine or hope for. But we live in a world that tells us to worry about the next few minutes, or the next meal, or the next paycheck—to worry just about our immediate needs. When we only do that, do we not lose the very image of ourselves that God has planted in our hearts, and also the image that Jesus puts forth for us today?

So let’s do our exercises, put on our cosmetics, color our hair, take our vitamins and pills so we can look better for each other. But let’s not let any of these actions fool us. Ours is has to be a deeper image, the image of our hearts before God, because ours is a much greater goal. Not looking good for each other, but looking like the image of Jesus.

Lent 1 A

We all dream of starting over. If we could go back to grade or high school; if we could study on the college level. If our marriages could be non-stop honeymoons. If my hair could be black and curly as it was in 1970. From facelifts to testosterone treatment, we would love to reverse the clock.

So we are tempted, upon hearing the first reading, to play with a strange picture. What if I was in the Garden of Eden? What if the serpent was talking to me? (A taking serpent would certainly be worth a lot of money on the TV circuit, to say the least!) What if God whispered his command to me? What would I do? And we might well fantasize how we would do things differently, plucking oranges and grapes as we wished but leaving God’s fruit alone, staying in paradise forever.

Of course, most of this would be our delusion because what happened in Eden happens every day in all of our lives. Adam’s sin is not eating an apple. Adam’s sin is his resentment about any limitations on his life at all. “What do you mean I can’t eat the fruit of this bush? I want it all.” Adam cannot say “enough.” Adam feels cheated by life and by God because he wants everything he sees; he cannot stop. Now the word “Adam” in Hebrew means “the human”—Adam represents every single one of us. We are never satisfied.

So if we all would actually repeat what Adam and Eve did, how can anything ever be different? It would never be different—unless God found a way for us to really begin anew. He sends his Son, Jesus, to be in our place; from our place Jesus reverses the attitudes that Adam generated in his first responses to God. Jesus doesn’t need to have it all. He knows he has it all in God his Father. The tempter comes: don’t you want more to eat, Jesus? Or, don’t you want to be famous? Or, the most insidious one, don’t you want to have unlimited political power? In the face of every temptation, Jesus answers the Tempter back: God is enough, God’s Word is enough, loving God and putting God at the center is enough.

The desert was a special place for the Jewish people. There they wandered forty years, symbolically, under Moses. For all their griping in the desert, they felt intensely close to God through Moses. God was a pillar of cloud by day, and a column of fire by night—a way of saying that God was always with them. Later prophets often urged Israel to return spiritually to the desert, to discover their God afresh. This is why Jesus goes into the desert. He’s taking our place, helping us re-experience intimacy with God, and providing the grace for us to identify with God—instead of becoming rivals to God.

Lent is a kind of journey into the desert. Part of our discipline is to simplify our lives so that, with less distractions, we become more alone with God in prayer, as if we were away, on retreat . . . in the desert. In the desert we can see more clearly who God is, and how we relate to God. We can see the compromises we frequently make, the excuses we give, and the lack of growth that often represents our spiritual lives. In the desert we can also see our sin more clearly—the depth of the way we still do not trust God completely, and still want to be our own gods despite the disaster we make of our lives by our blindness and arrogance.

So we go into the desert, not to be tempted by Satan, or to be tempted by the talking snake. We go to be tempted . . . by Jesus. Temptation is creating an attractive alternate image of our lives, usually for the worst. Why be faithful to our vows, our commitments, our moral ideals? Wouldn’t messing around be more fun? Jesus wants to give us an alternative image: instead of the resentful greediness of the Adam that lurks inside us, how about the grateful joy of Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom, abounding in gifts both numerous and grace-filled?

8 A

One of my long-time habits is reading the comics. I think I’m the only one in our house of priests and seminarians who does this, one out of 25. Yet I find their predictable humor consoling—the way the sagas of the characters continues on. I try to never miss Blondie. There’s Mr. Dithers, Dagwood’s boss, yelling at him for his laziness and incompetence, never giving him a raise. There’s Dagwood, still figuring out how to escape the extra assignment at work, hanging out by the water cooler, sneaking his naps. Mr. Dithers is Type A, production ordered, driven, tough. Dagwood Bumstead is type B, laid back, corner-cutting, taking things as they come.

If we use the Dagwood categories, Jesus is certainly telling his disciples to not be Type A—the kind of worrying, driven, severe people who eventually shorten their lives—and everyone else’s. Yet we have to be careful because we might think Jesus is saying not to be concerned at all about the things we wear and the things we eat. Hardly. He fed the poor in the desert and told the rich to give money to the poor. He praised hard-working servants in his parables. Jesus was the son of a handyman who undoubtedly worked hard.

It’s precisely the worry that Jesus wants to eliminate, because behind the worry is a lot of unbelief. Our obsession about possessions, wealth, status, and power often obscures what lies beneath that—that we want to be totally in control of our lives, take charge of everything, and that we do not trust life to take care of us. Jesus, who keeps pointing to God as a loving Father who freely bestows gifts upon humankind, as the compassionate and merciful One who loves each of us despite our status, wants us to see, and live in, God.

And our worrying keeps us from doing that. Our first reading, short as it is, presents the exact image of God that Jesus shows us, and Jesus relies on. A mother cannot forget her child. God the Father is also God the Mother who can never forget us. Existence is that tender. Paul, in the second reading, says that he relies on God for the meaning and judgment of his life, that having become a servant of God, he is freed from the gossip and carping of those around him. Finding God as a God of generous love frees us from a lot of neuralgia and grief.

We live in a Type A world, a world that makes worry, anxiety, and extra work a way of life. In a world like this, faith can become almost obscure. The words of Jesus come across as naïve instead of the penetrating analysis of our wasted energy and useless fretting, of our premature graying hair. With Lent coming this week, maybe we can turn our attention not to the giving up of chocolate, but to the inner work of discovering the God of Jesus, the God of surpassing love, the God of unlimited care. If we can make Jesus’ God our God, then we can rejoice more fully in the lives we have, rather than regret the lives we don’t. And be all the more generous, to boot.

Stop and smell the roses, says Dagwood. Mr. Dithers jumps up and down saying more work has to be done. Jesus says keep your hair color and discover the God who really is. What is it you say?

7 A

We can easily play “fill in the blank.” What’s it like to be, for example, some famous person? Fill in the blank. George Clooney, Matt Damon, Gweneth Paltrow, Michelle Obama, Dick Cheney. Certainly the exploits of Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus help us realize that, no matter how much we imagine, it’s almost impossible to imagine really being another person. But we can vary the game and ask what it’s like to be one profession or another. In some ways, going to school is a way to test this out: what’s like to be an economist, a nurse, a lawyer, an engineer, a rancher?

Our scriptures push this game to a deep and important level. What’s it like, they are asking us, to be God? When we hear the word “God” we mostly think in terms of definition—omniscient, omnipotent, eternal, and so forth. But Jesus is saying that we can learn more about God through behavior than we can through our minds.

For example, compassion. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Jesus is obviously playing on the words of his Jewish tradition which our first reading gave us. They enjoined that we be “holy” as God is holy. But when we seek to find what these words mean, holy and perfect, we have to do so with the image that Jesus presents. Does not God let his rain fall on the just and the unjust? Is not God kind to everyone? Is not God’s compassion offered to all?

From this we have the whole logic of the Sermon on the Mount which we’ve been reading in Matthew’s Gospel these Sundays: if this is the way God, your Father, is, then do you not have to be like this if you want to be God’s children? Do you not need to imitate his goodness, patience, generosity, mercy, and unlimited love? That’s how we prove we are children of the heavenly Father.

But, to go just a little further, this is also how we come to know God. It is by our own actions toward others that we begin to understand God’s relationship to us and the world. Only by caring for others do I begin to see what care means, and, then, how God cares for me, for us, for the world. Only by acts of free and open generosity do I begin to see how generous God is. I often think, when it comes to weddings, that the love the couple has found for each other—excessive, unconditional, totally absorbing—is only a pale imitation of the love God has for every single one of us.

This was Paul’s problem in Corinth. The arrogance and smugness of the believers, their self-satisfied pride and boasting, kept them from the possibility of seeing God, of understanding Christ. For them it was all about cliques, putting others down, and being superior. You’ve got to give that up, says Paul, because only by coming to God in simplicity and trust, only by renouncing our arrogance, can we truly relate to Jesus Christ. Everything belongs to you, Paul says, if you only truly give yourself to Jesus Christ.

Of course, we are here today because we give ourselves to Jesus Christ. But we are here because we also realize that we’ve not given ourselves completely to Jesus. We are disciples, but incomplete disciples, often staying on level 101 as long as we can. Paul will tell the Corinthians that they are babies, drinking milk, but not grown disciples able to eat the solid food of faith. Babies have a great life, but don’t really appreciate it, do they? We have to grow if we are going to begin to see real life.

That’s the invitation—to become disciples, and then to grow as disciples, to take the standard of God’s holiness, God’s love, as the norm of our lives. Of course, we can never completely get there but it’s really, when you think about it, not totally up to us. Discipleship is letting God shape us, being a temple for God’s Spirit, who accomplishes in us what we could never do, so long as we surrender.

So let’s close our mental game. What’s it like to be . . . Jesus Christ? Because that’s the dare, the challenge, the invitation, the grace. And that’s what we are saying every time we come to Mass, every time we receive the Eucharist. We are one with Jesus, not only in our hearts, but also and importantly in our actions.

5 A

No movie has gotten the attention that “American Hustle” has received: its many awards, its gorgeous women, its complicated plot. I think the reason for this acclaim might actually be embarrassing—maybe this movie shows all too accurately what’s in our American mind. “People want to be conned,” is the movie’s theme. “They keep conning themselves.” Why? Because we all think we can get what we want; and, if we do, then we’ll be very happy. Our greed keeps the Bernie Madoff’s in business.

But what if the secret of life is exactly the opposite—not worrying about what we don’t have, but praising God for what we do have, and being willing to give away some of what we have as a sign of trust in God? This sounds almost nuts, I know, but the “good works” that Jesus is talking about, what makes us salt for the earth and light for the world, is exactly a kind of generous love that liberates us, rather than an ungenerous greed that traps us.

Isaiah is very clear about what God asks—the sign of our being liberated from exile, he says, is the care we have for the poor. Isaiah is singing this poem to a Jewish people long in exile, a people, therefore, tempted to be filled with self and self-pity. If you care for those at the bottom, Isaiah says, then you will be praising God and doing God’s work. Because the way I care for another helps me see how God cares for me. Every one of us, no matter how rich and secure we are, ultimately needs God, ultimately depends on every gift God gives us. Paul says he comes not in strength, but weakness, because he knows who he needs. He relies on his helpers, the prayers of his communities, and the strength that God give him at every moment of his life.

So instead of “American hustle,” maybe we should try “Christian muscle,” the strength we have from God to love as God loves, to love with the generosity of Jesus Christ. There can be no laws here, no rules, because it’s up to each heart touched by God. But maybe we can do this: if each one of us thinks of someone we know in need—whatever the need—and goes out of his or her way to show a generous kindness—if each one of us did this, maybe we’d begin go see the tang of our salt, and the glow of our lamp, have impact on our world.

Instead of being conned by others because of our greed, maybe we can be coaxed by God to reach out to others because of their need, and because of God’s freely given, always generous, grace.

Presentation of the Lord

After we get to know people fairly well, they start showing us pictures. “Here’s what I looked like when I got married. Or when I was in college. Or when I was an adolescent. Look, here are my baby pictures.” And, looking back, we can see traits that seem constant in a person—how they smile, the way their eyes stare, the shape of their ears. Looking back, we can trace in our minds lines that seem to connect the present with the past.

St. Luke is doing something like this in the Gospel. He’s showing us the baby pictures of Jesus, and showing us the traits that were there from the beginning which would grow into the ministry of Jesus. In showing us this picture, he uses both a wide angle lens and a close-up lens to make his point.

The big picture brings together the whole Jewish tradition and Jesus. Simeon and Anna, who represent the little people, the faithful people, from the Jewish tradition appear before us to proclaim that everything that was hoped for and promised by the law and the prophets has come together in the person of Jesus. Simeon says that he can now conclude his life because his eyes have seen the salvation of God. Note how he says it: a light for the revelation of the Gentiles, and the glory of Israel. In Jesus, Israel touches the dreams of all humankind.

But when we look at the details, we see even more. In particular, the image of Jesus and the words spoken to Mary. Jesus receives his name and undergoes the Jewish ritual of circumcision, which was a sign of consecration—dedication—to God. In this first sign of blood we anticipate the fuller sign that would be given later, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Jesus will bring the Jewish right of dedication to God and make it into the sacrifice of himself, the gift of himself.

Next, we are amazed at the words spoken to Mary. Jesus will be a sign of contradiction, a sign of opposition, which will lead to the rise and fall of many. And a sword will pierce Mary’s heart. Here St. Luke is saying that Jesus will call people to make a decision, and that decision will reveal their heart to God. Knowing and accepting Jesus will not be something easy. Many will ignore him, many will oppose him, but those who accept him will find salvation.

After two thousand years, perhaps this radical choice is a bit hidden from us Catholics. It’s easy for Christians to coast along on their cultural heritage, to say the words, or fulfill the externals, without thinking about what it means. How is Jesus a sign of contradiction in our lives—how do we contradict who he is, what he taught, and where he would lead us? Is Jesus real for us, or just a non-threatening image from the past? Have I let the sword of decision cut through to my heart?

The Church today is saying that the point of our faith is an encounter with Christ. Have I met Jesus? Or, have I let Jesus meet me? Not the Jesus I have made into a tame image, but the Jesus that calls me to live as he lived, to give myself in service, to become a gift for the Kingdom of God? For we are consecrated—are we not?—in our baptisms, and we are called to bring the light of Jesus to the nations, to our own nation, to our own daily lives, to our homes, to our hearts? Every Sunday when we gather for Mass, we are presenting ourselves in the living temple of God—at least we say that. Do we really do that?

This Sunday all the world will be bananas about the Super Bowl, the decision about which team is the best this season. But then the game is over and we await a new season. It’s a big decision, but not an important one. The important decisions revolve around this: what is in our hearts when we open them to God? What is in our souls when the light of Jesus shines upon us?

3 A

Whoever wins the Super Bowl next week, it won’t be much of a surprise. Many of my New York friends have taken to the Forty-niners; they were saying that their loss to Seattle was not shameful. Both teams played good games. And while Denver handily beat Boston, no one would have been surprised if it worked out the opposite. So whoever wins the Super Bowl, it won’t be out of the blue.

Most of the time we don’t like things coming out of the blue. We prefer our lives predictable, in a range, relatively safe. Out of the blue come accidents, lawsuits, medical emergencies—we want few of those. But out of the blue also come some amazing things, like long-lost friends who send us unexpected greetings or gifts, or winning numbers in Powerball, or Samaritans who appear out of nowhere to help us when we are hurt or stuck.

For all of the preamble Matthew has given us leading up to today’s Gospel—the long genealogy, the story of the birth of Jesus, his baptism and even the temptations in the desert, Jesus today seems to come out of the blue. Matthew quotes a passage from Isaiah—the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, the Galilee of the pagans—as if to underscore how far Jesus is from the mainstream of Jewish life. It’s more than the boonies; Jesus, from Galilee, comes from a land encircled by Gentiles. At the end of the Gospel reading, it’s the Syrians who are bringing their sick to Jesus for healing.

The quality of coming from out of the blue certainly colors the central part of the Gospel passage. Jesus begins his message saying that God’s Kingdom is at hand, nearby, about to come. Think of what a bold statement this must have seemed to people oppressed, for whom the ultimate government, their particular kingdom, were the invincible and brutal Romans. Not only is Jesus saying that a Kingdom will come someday; no, he says, we are on the very verge of it. That’s his message.

But how does this Kingdom come? The next few sentences show us; again, things that happen out of the blue. He sees two fishermen by the sea: “I will make you fish for people, for the souls of your brothers and sisters.” And immediately they followed. Next he spots James and John. He calls them and immediately they too follow Jesus, leaving nets and daddy behind. It’s not the expected that appealed to them; no, it’s the unexpected, the appearance of a prophet from their own area with a message bold enough to sweep them in.

If the Kingdom is going to grow, then, it needs people to respond. It needs people accepting their vocation, their calling. It needs people willing to follow. Our Catholic minds immediately jump to priests, sisters, and brothers, but we should not jump too soon. Jesus is calling fishermen, the unlettered laborers who made up so much of ancient society. Before they would become the apostles we now name, they would have to stretch their hearts and minds to understand who Jesus was, and what kind of Kingdom he brought.

Surely Jesus calls us today, every one of us. He calls us in our ordinary lives. He calls us with our weaknesses and fears. He calls us with our doubts and hesitations. But he calls us from within the message of faith we have received—making us part of the Kingdom. Every one of us has been made into someone who can fish, can catch, can involve people in the love of Jesus and the scope of his Kingdom. Of course we need priests, sisters, brothers, deacons, catechists—religious professionals. But their ministry needs yours, their vocations need you, Christ needs you.

Out of the blue. So many of our callings come that way—the people we fall in love with, the news that someone is pregnant, opportunities for advancement. So many things seem to come out of the blue. But, among those, nothing ranks higher than the call of Jesus; he sees us, not on the shore of Galilee, but in our offices, cars, classrooms, supermarkets, Starbucks…. Come, follow me. Help me build the Kingdom. It’s coming, out of the blue.

2 A

If you could be an animal, which one would you be? If others said what animal you reminded them of, what would they say? Look at the animal names we call each other, many of them bad, some of them good: a rat, a skunk, a snake, a chicken, a pig—yes, but also a kitten, a puppy, a chick.

I’ve never heard anyone called a lamb. A sheep, perhaps, or a fox in sheep’s clothing, but a lamb? “Behold the Lamb of God,” says John, in our Gospel this morning. This, as we open up the cycle of readings for this year, with passages mostly coming from St. Matthew.

It took John a while for him to come up with this name. John the Baptist, who comes to prepare us for the coming of the Word into the world, had to discover who this Word-made-flesh was. Greater than John, existing before John, now the Word was here in the flesh. How would John recognize the Word? His whole baptismal ministry was to set the stage for Jesus. He says that he knew, when he saw the Spirit come upon Jesus, that this indeed is the Lamb of God, the one who would take away the world’s sin. Behold the Lamb.

What does it mean to be a Lamb? On the one hand, as opposed to many images of salvation and saviors, the Lamb represents meekness, quiet, approachability—the kinds of qualities Pope Francis has been pointing us toward, the kinds represented by some of our most favorite saints—Francis, Teresé the Little Flower, or, most recently, Mother Theresa. Redemption is about drawing near in love, not attacking and destroying.

The other sense of Lamb comes from Ancient Jewish ideas of sacrifice. Lambs were the sign of Passover— escape, freedom—the memory of how the blood of the lamb showed the mercy of God to an enslaved people. For Jesus to be the Lamb is for Jesus to generously offer himself, whatever the consequences, to accomplish God’s purposes of love. Later on in John’s Gospel, it is when the lambs are being slaughtered to prepare for Passover that Jesus, on the cross, pours out the last drop of his blood as a sign of God’s love for us. In Jesus, God is saying, “Here, I give my life to you, and I show the extent of my love.” This is what John is now seeing in Jesus as the Spirit comes upon him.

Later on in the Mass, just before communion, I will hold up the consecrated bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Jesus, and invite you to partake in the “supper of the Lamb.” In doing this, we are accepting our role in taking away the sin of the world by the integrity of our own lives through the work of the Holy Spirit. In coming forth for Communion, we are saying that Jesus’ role as Lamb, as savior, a sign of God’s love, continues in our own lives today.

Our second reading begins St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. As we read this letter, we realize Christians have been anything but lambs. We will see in Corinth a community of conceited, self-absorbed, unloving, and divisive people—more eager to show themselves off than give themselves to each other. We will read this letter not to look down on the Corinthians, but to notice some of these same traits that might be creeping into our own lives. After all, to come to the supper of the Lamb means we have to live differently, as St. Paul will point out, making the qualities of Jesus our own.

We are always trying to find the true nature of celebrities. A-Rod is in the news a lot now, Tiger Woods a decade ago, Charlie Sheen, Justin Bieber, and, of course, Mylie Cyrus. These people did not live up to their first impression. They turned out to be different than we thought. Our Gospel today gives us Jesus’ First Impression: Behold the Lamb of God. As we proceed through this year of scriptures, we’ll see just how perfectly Jesus lives up to it, and just as clearly how he calls us to live up to his image as well.

Baptism of the Lord A

I was giving a talk about changes since the Second Vatican Council; it was to an informal group of mostly young people whom I thought would appreciate the perspective of an older man like me. No sooner had I begun to make my points when a youngish, 30 something, raised his hand. “Vatican II destroyed the Church,” he began. And persisted with his comments at such a regular pace that that after a while I said, giving up: “Look, I’m trying to present my thoughts here. Maybe I should sit down and just let you come up and teach. Then I can ask you questions. You’ve taken over the class already.”

Sometimes teachers glory when their students exceed their gifts; but usually it’s good to know who’s the teacher and who’s the student. Something like this confusion is happening in the Gospel. Jesus comes to John to be baptized. John says, “No, I should be baptized by you.” Because to be baptized means to become someone’s student, someone’s disciples. As far as John could see, Jesus was the Master to John, not his student.

This raises some interesting angles for us, some two thousand years after the baptism of Jesus. Is Jesus our Master, is he our Teacher? Or, like a strange reversal of John, have we become the Master’s, giving Jesus lessons about how to adjust his message this way or that? For to be baptized is far more than going through a ceremony, or getting a name, or being free from sin, or even joining the Church. We are baptized when we follow a way of life that imitates the Master’s life, that walks in his steps.

Certainly general culture admires Jesus, but we have tamed Jesus again and again, making him into a philosopher, a monk, a King, a social worker, a therapist, a superstar. In doing this, we pull a piece of Christ out and modify the rest of him to fit into that image. That is why people cringe, for different reasons, when we identify our country as a Christian culture. On the one hand, what about non-Christians? On the other hand, what evidence would we put forward about our Christianity? Some of those who most conspicuously claim the mantle of Christian often seem the least inclined toward compassion.

But, even more, in our personal lives, we modify Jesus in so many ways, ignoring him most of the time, invoking him when convenient, softening or ignoring the stronger things he says to us, and basically reducing his power, his authority, his Lordship over us. Just the word “Lordship” drives us nuts. But if Jesus is not our model, our teacher, our leader, then how can we claim to be following in his steps?

One of the practices that some Catholics are adopting more and more is to let Jesus speak more clearly in their hearts. They set aside the time and listen to a verse or two of scripture, and let those words sink inside. They first reflect on them, then sit with them in silence, then say prayers on the basis of those words, and then they act on them. This is an ancient form of prayer called “divine reading” of the Scriptures. Other Catholics I know gather together to share over the Scriptures to hear them more deeply. “The voice came from the heavens”; the voice continues to come. The Spirit continues to descend upon us, so long as we allow it.

We all know how infallible our children are in second year high school. They already know how stupid everyone else is. Who’s got anything to teach them? Smarty pants. Know-it-alls. But at least they pretend. When it comes to our listening to Jesus, and letting him be our Teacher, most of the time we don’t even pretend. We just tune the Teacher out . . . and then wonder why we never grow.

Epiphany

Christmas Day was wonderful. After 7:30 AM Mass, an easy drive to New Jersey where I was able to hang out with my sisters and relatives, eating many courses, followed by many-coursed deserts, all of it aided by wonderful sips of wine. I was into New York City by 8:30 PM and decided to walk off those extra calories. On my way to 34^th Street and the Empire State building, I crawled through a jammed Times Square. Could not believe the numbers of people there, surrounded by so many blazing lights on the billboards, all of them taking selfies in the heart of the city. The ultimate selfie? People were watching a huge, blazing sign that had a camera that was taking a selfie of the crowd. Waving hysterically, people were thrilled to see themselves being thrilled.

Selfie has now become one of the newest words in our dictionary. The Pope takes selfies with visitors, and President Obama got some guff for his selfie with other world leaders at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Most of FaceBook are selfies. What is this, so much self-absorption? Or is it something else—a way in which people put themselves into larger situations—near famous sights, with famous people, or into the network that FaceBook and its counterparts represent. The selfie puts is into another scene.

So how does God take a selfie? That’s what God has been doing during this Christmas season, which comes to its climax in today’s feast of the Epiphany. God sends us an image of himself, not as the Eternal Transcendent, because there can be no photo of that, but as one of us, in our flesh, in our own life. God enters into the human situation, to taking on our life so we can take on God’s.

The Magi represent the sweep of this presence in our midst. Because when God enters our situation, God broadens it to include everyone, and deepens it to touch every human heart. God comes into the Jewish world so that God can come into all the world. These Magi represent all of us, from all races and nations, looking for the God who would draw us into one, and bring salvation to the human situation of sin and death that besets us all.

Isaiah captures the sweep of this feast with his majestic language. In the midst of the darkness of their exile, God has shown the light of his favor. Jerusalem will be radiant at what it sees—caravans and camels coming with the wealth of the nations. But God reverses the image, because it’s not the world coming to Jerusalem, but God’s grace going forth to the world. The second reading puts it quite plainly: the mystery revealed in Jesus is God’s embrace of all the world, that the Gentiles—the unclean and unchosen—are now co-heirs and members of the same body of Jesus Christ. God takes a selfie in Jesus, and includes us all in the picture!

There are two spiritual tasks we have. First, we have to experience God’s light coming to each one of us, Christ beaming a message of grace, pardon, and love. For Jesus comes for each of us, as Jesus comes for everyone. Polish away the tarnish we let build up on our spirit, so Christ can shine in us. Secondly, we have to see Christ’s light shining on all the world, every person, especially those who seem distant, strange, or estranged. Each of us has the ability to radiate Christ’s light upon the seekers in our own world, letting them see God’s glory reflected in our own faith.

Of course Times Square would be filled even more for New Years. The ultimate scene for the ultimate moments of one year and the beginning moments of 2014. God wishes us much more than New Year’s Greetings; God wishes us new life, escape from the darkness that encircles us, and entry into unending light.

Holy Family

Learning a language has some hidden difficulties. We presume, for example, that sounds are the same. We also think we can easily make sounds in another language. So going from English to Spanish, my Latino friends had to constantly correct the way I said “con” because it sounded like “can” to them. And I had to practice the double rr sound, and learn the double ll pronunciation. In some languages, sounds in English are entirely missing, and some people can never learn them. Every time I go near Chinese, it seems like a mystery to me.

The same is true in life. Certain basic experiences are like basic sounds we learn. We either learn them or we are crippled in life. Human experience is made up of certain fundamentals—dependency on others, respect, generosity, kindness, love, sacrifice—for example. We either learn these human, emotional fundamentals or else they become a struggle for us. We know people, for example, abandoned at birth and how hard life becomes for them.

Where do we learn this human language of emotion? Basically in the family. Through the rearing of children, parents transmit, in family life, these basics of human personality. And everything else in life is built upon these—even our faith. If we do not learn love as children, how we do grasp God’s love for us? If we do not know sacrifice, how do we understand Jesus’ life and death?

In this feast of the Holy Family, we see the implication of the Incarnation, the Word of God becoming human. To take on our flesh, is to take on our family lives. In our Gospel, we see Jesus the child being cared for by Joseph and Mary—the risks and sacrifices they made to protect the newborn Jesus. So Jesus, the Son of God, becomes part of the human interaction which our family lives express. To be human is to be part of a network of relationships; now God has become part of that network in Jesus.

However difficult family life is today—because of changes in society and expectations—it is an essential instrument of creation and human formation. Family life is something blessed by the infancy and growth of Jesus in the household of Mary and Joseph. Jesus adds to the vocabulary of family because he brings God’s grace and infinite love as a model and guide for how we live, and how we live in families. He pushes our human relationships into our relationship with God.

We are all dependent. We are all incomplete. God brings about new life through the love of two, making us all combinations of our parents. In my personality, I have something of mom and dad. We are all connected to others, and to each other. What grace, then, that God becomes part of this connectedness by sending his Son Jesus to be our brother, to make us part of the Holy Family, and to make us part of his family of the redeemed.

Christmas A

What shall I get so-and-so for Christmas? Or where will we go for our Christmas break? These kinds of decisions take some thought, but they are not earth-shattering. Other decisions loom much larger: where will I go to college? Or, even more, what will be my chosen career? Or, yet more still, whom will I marry?

There are various methods for making decisions—asking advice, writing down lists of pros or cons, or getting out the calculator to figure out costs. But, sometimes, the best way is to let things sit, to pull back, to do nothing, in order to listen to the deeper voices inside of us. Sometimes it takes a lot of inner reflection to see what is really in our hearts, or what is the best thing to do.

Joseph is in a dilemma in the Gospel today. He is obviously a man of integrity and faith; but he finds the woman to whom he is engaged now is with child. What should he do? He figures out one plan that makes sense for him, if not for Mary. Then he goes to sleep and an angel of the Lord helps him know what he should do. He gives it a rest and then makes his decision.

Wow, we say, I’d love to have an angel of the Lord help me figure out what to do. But, when we think about it, maybe we do. Because what Joseph’s angel helped him see was God’s deeper hand in the confusing events of his life. He came to see possibilities for God where he did not see them before. The angel, in other words, helped Joseph get to the better senses that his faith in God would have led him to. The angel helped him see what, deep down, he already sensed.

This is a huge invitation for us in this crazy Christmas season—especially the last days before Christ, with last-minute shopping, a few more parties, food shopping and preparation, packing for a trip or getting a spare room ready for visitors. Slow down. Chill out. Pull back. Let some deeper voices emerge inside our heads. Let’s give ourselves the time to see what God is telling us, what the deepest layers of our faith want to say.

I’m sure the message is a little different for each of us, depending on what we are dealing with in life. God’s wisdom, after all, is shaped toward the particular burdens we have. But the underlying message applies to all: God will not leave us alone, isolated, abandoned, as if we were meaningless creatures in a meaningless universe. God is preparing to come among us; and, in doing that, God changes everything about us—who we are, who we think we can be, and what we think about our ultimate destiny.

So take some time, sit back, turn off the Christmas music, close the eyes, open the heart, and see what God is saying to us. God speaks wonders to Mary, written in her own flesh; God speaks hope and promise to Joseph, even in his anxiety. What will God speak to us? We’ll find out if we give God, and the angels, time.

Advent 3 A

When the explanations started coming for the Metro North train crash two weeks ago in the Bronx, one of the theories was “road hypnosis.” Staring down the rails for long stretches, our eyes begin to not see what is in front of them. We get hypnotized, brought into another world. Of course, almost all of us drivers have felt the same thing on the NY Thruway, or route 81 north of Binghamton. Our eyes lose focus, we don’t see even though they are wide open. Throw in a Bluetooth phone conversation, or beeps from texts, and it’s even harder to focus, to see.

One of Isaiah’s signs of the coming of God’s coming in the first reading is that the blind will come to see. This raises for us a basic question: how well do we see? Are the blind the only blind ones? Are all of us somewhat blind? I have a good friend who, after years of trying to see his golf shot—he hit it far longer than me—finally had his cataract operation. “I can’t believe how much I was missing,” he said. “Colors, shapes, depth.”

We are somewhat shocked at the Gospel opening today. John the Baptist, the one who announces Jesus, is now imprisoned. From prison, he sends messages to Jesus: Are you the one we awaited, or is someone else to come? We ask: wait a minute, John: you are the prophet, the seer, you are the forerunner to Jesus. Why are you asking this question? But a key truth comes from John’s question: we always have to come to know Jesus more. We never have completely seen, acknowledged, or accepted Jesus Christ. There is always more to see, to encounter.

Jesus responds by pointing out his deeds—the very things that Isaiah talked about are the very heart of Jesus ministry. The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, and even the dead are raised. Now we need to be careful here, because we might want to read Jesus as primarily a physician, or a social worker. Jesus surely wants to heal people, and bring them into unity and peace. But he does this as a sign of something much greater—what God is doing one way or another for all the world, as signs of the Kingdom of God breaking out in our midst. And what Jesus did, the Spirit continues in us, in his church, in people who are committed to his mission and vision.

Jesus teases the crowd—What did you go out to the desert to see? What made your curious? What was the need in your heart? “Did you go out to see some reed blowing in the wind?” Of course not. A blowing reed would not spark your curiosity or answer your need. You went out to see a prophet, someone who speaks with God’s power to our daily lives. You went out to see John, the greatest born of woman. “Yet the least born into the Kingdom of God is greater than John.” We are, again, shocked. But Jesus means it: John glimpsed in anticipation. But we possess by participation. We share in God’s life more directly and powerfully than even John the Baptist.

Why, after all, do we come to church? To see what color the vestments are? To watch a candle burn? To see if the altar servers make mistakes? To see our friends? We come to church to encounter Jesus Christ, to be made one with him, to take his life inside of us, and to promise that we will live his life through the week. “The Body of Christ.” And we say, “Amen.” And take his body into our hearts. Greater than John the Baptist, indeed.

Advent gives us an opportunity to pay attention to what we see and what we can see more deeply. As a time of beginnings, it calls us to start again, to renew our spiritual lives, to see more clearly, to get rid of our cataracts, to get out of our Christian hypnosis, and to encounter Jesus through his Spirit once again.

People have been talking about Nelson Mandela and his impact on people. One commentator said a big part of his effectiveness was that he looked your right in the eye. He saw you. And you saw him. Jesus likewise looks at us right in the eye: I see you, and I want to help you see. Let me give you my vision once again. You’ll be astonished at the beauty and the love of my Kingdom.

Advent 2 A

So I was waiting to board a plane, standing next to a mother with her daughter. They started boarding in the usual way—and the girl blurts out, “Mommy, why are these people getting on the plane before us?” Mommy looks at the girl, trying to figure out how to answer this. “They have priority,” she says, kind of stumbling. The girl, of course, has no idea what this means. “They are more important than we are,” the mother finally says—obviously disappointed and disappointing her daughter.

It’s one of the most normal instincts we have: everyone should get treated the same. When people jump in line ahead of us, when someone gets picked before we do for no obvious reason, when we get a rejection letter when our friend gets accepted—we feel disrespected. And if people have some kind of “in” because of a connection—they know the owner, or they have a friend in the business—it really peeves us. “What about me? I’m not important?”

John the Baptizer says some pretty harsh things today, but the line that sticks out as I read the Gospel is the one that says “Do not say to yourselves we are sons of Abraham.” John is saying that in the new order that God is bringing about, there will be no favorites. No one group, no one class, no one approach automatically gets a free pass. Why are there no free passes? Because there is only one essential requirement: to open our hearts to God and live in consequence to that opening. Anyone who does that has a place in the Kingdom which is coming. It’s the only pass that works.

It’s easy, I suppose, to get a little elitist about things. Pope Francis has certainly been taking it to his bishops and clergy, insisting that they do not have some exalted place just because they are ordained. In his last big message, he noted that there were over a billion lay people, and it’s the priest job to serve them, not the other way around. Notice how Paul describes Jesus this way—of service to the patriarchs so that Christ’s service to all the world can become known. I’m afraid all of us Catholics can be tempted to be elitist, thinking that we have a free pass just because we are Catholic. Our free pass is this: because we are Catholic, to be of special service to others, to the world: this is our privilege. It’s not something to feel smug about, but something to challenge us to more authentic Christian life.

Isaiah dreams continue in the second reading. This week he dreams of a world of complete justice. God is going to raise up a new king, from the line of David—the stump of Jesse—who will not play favorites, or judge by appearances, but who will bring God’s justice to the world. What is God’s justice? When the world is the way God dreams of it—“thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”—then God’s justice happens. So that is the standard for our lives: to live as God would have us live, as God has shown us in Jesus. When that happens even instinctual animosities begin to vanish—old hatreds and stereotypes—because wolves lay down with lambs, and children can touch the snake without getting bitten. Nelson Mandela's death this week reminds us of the power of a life completely dedicated to achieving the justice of God, of getting ingrained enemies to embrace in peace.

God’s dream doesn’t happen by magic, overnight. It’s a process of slow transformation. God shows us the process in Jesus. His Son Jesus gave himself in love, in sacrificial death, to move the process forward. He sends the Spirit upon us to advance the process further. In every little act, in every attitude, in every approach, in every gesture, we have a chance to bring God’s justice to further reality, to move the Kingdom forward.

John calls his listeners—the pious religious leaders of his day—a brood of vipers, a bunch of snakes. He tells them change is coming—the axe is laid to the tree. Advent is screaming into our ears: this is a time of change for us, a time for us attend to God’s vision, to live for God’s justice. Because if we can do that a bit more, then we’ll be a little more ready when the King of Justice arrives.

Can I open my heart more deeply to the Holy Spirit and let the Spirit console me, challenge me, empower me today?

Can I give more quiet time to the presence of God inside me, letting God speak to me through his Spirit?

Can I pray more regularly every day, several times, opening myself to God’s Spirit?

Can I let the words of the Gospels I hear every Sunday linger in my mind and puzzle my heart? Can I let them change my life?

Can I be less hidden as a believer, more open in my faith, in my own home, and in my circle of friends?

Can I be an instrument of the Spirit in helping others sort through problems, encouraging people who are wobbly, helping others carry their burdens, being present in their pain?

Can I spark a little fire with the joy I feel knowing I am united to Jesus through his Spirit? Can I bring the Spirit’s joy more clearly into my world?

Can I reach out to people who seem different, knowing that the same God is at work our all human hearts?

Can I be sent as the Father sent Jesus, and as Jesus sends the Spirit on us?

Easter C 4

One of my friends would talk about the first warm day of spring in New York. All of a sudden people would be out of their tenements and apartments, crowding the street, enjoying the end of winter. That was when, my friend said, you could how different things were now—who had moved into the area, who had moved out, whether they were richer or poorer, what the population trend might be going into the future.

We love markers like this, when minorities become majorities, when glass ceilings and color barriers are broken, when an era has arrived. The election of Kennedy, and the terror attacks on 2001 and this week in Boston. But it’s not always easy to see these things, is it? Is this now the age of China, as opposed, say, to America? Has American imperialism started to exhaust itself? Has the internet really changed everything about us?

Luke, in the book of Acts, is painting big strokes for us, giving us pictures of a very complicated history. Paul and Barnabas seem to make it pretty clear that the Gospel is now going Gentile, and not Jewish, as if this was some hard and fast marker. In fact, there was a lot of Jewish experience left in the first century of the Church, and lots of it even in the book of Acts. We can be deceived by the big pictures we paint.

Because whatever big trends there might be, first there are people with hearts and minds—where God works with his Spirit. This is where God calls to us. Jesus presents himself in today’s Gospel as the Good Shepherd, not because we are all part of some generic flock, but because he cares for each one of his sheep. He develops a personal relationship with his sheep, and the sheep know his voice the way we know the voices and movements of our family members. He protects us in our greatest fears and terrors. If Easter is available for all groups of peoples, that is because Easter is available to each single person.

It’s not easy to hear the voice of the Shepherd. It’s not easy to listen to listen when change is in the air because we get so used to the patterns of our lives. How long did it take Christians to understand the contradiction of slavery? How long will it take us to incorporate in our personal lives the changes to which Christ is calling us? Either way, Easter is calling the world, and us, toward change until Christ’s Risen life is more fully manifested in our lives. My sheep hear my voice. Do we?

The book of Revelation gives us this week a very helpful big picture. Written in a time of oppression and persecution, a time of martyrdom, when followers of Jesus had to feel totally under siege, Christians receive an alternative vision, one of God’s victory. Behind all the big trends, the statistics, and the demographics, there is God’s underlying pattern—to bring his sheep, those who hear his voice, to full life in Jesus. This pattern is stronger than our personal ups and downs, and stronger than the world’s political transformations, stronger than acts of terror. This divine pattern is what Easter invite us to see.

Easter C 3

We love suspense, but it cannot go on forever. We built up such a hype throughout all of March, starting with 64 college basketball teams, but it all came down to Michigan and Louisville on Monday night. Gone were all the Jesuit colleges, the smaller colleges that might be the up-setters, and the other large state schools. The suspense was only raised when Kevin Ware, of the ultimately winning team Louisville, suffered a compound fracture to his leg earlier in the month. He hobbled out to get the souvenir basket net at the end, amid all the frenzied cheering.

For all we enjoy suspense, working up to some climax, there has to be some resolution, some way to bring things to conclusion. We need this not only in sports, but also for the major decisions of our lives. We cannot spend decades waiting to get married, or get a job, or know why we are living. It’s so striking to see the clarity of the apostles in the first reading: having been arrested, standing before the leaders, considering themselves blessed to be persecuted for the name of Jesus. How did they get to this clarity?

It was not only the vision of the Risen Jesus, but their interaction with Jesus that brought them such clarity. And it’s to the Gospel we have to go to find out how this works: how the beloved disciple is the first to acknowledge that Jesus is on the shore, how Peter then concludes that it is Jesus, how they all sit around with Jesus as he makes a baked-fish breakfast for them without daring to ask whether it’s him, and how he dialogues with Peter. In these encounters, the disciples have to decide not only on what they think of the Risen Jesus, but whether they will be committed to him. It’s the commitment that brings the clarity, that brings resolution.

Are we jealous of Peter? Being so close to Jesus, being in such intimate conversation with him? There’s something sweet about the exchange—Simon, do you love me?—but there’s also something drastic about it. How would we feel to have Jesus look us in the eye and ask us if we love him? What does this evoke in us? All the compromises we make, all the token actions, all the lip service… all this would rise to the top and we’d be embarrassed. And we’d feel this because it exposes how unresolved our own love of Jesus is. But only when our love gets totally resolved, only then do we have the clarity that we see in the Acts of the Apostles. Only then are our hearts at rest.

Of course, with Peter it’s not just the exchange. If Peter loves Jesus, he has to show this not by ogling his Risen Body, but by serving others in the name of Jesus. Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Let others know that my grace is available for them, for anyone. Our clarity with Jesus involves the clarity of our love, care, and sharing with others. We come to church on Sunday precisely to answer the question Jesus asks—do you love me?—and also to be strengthened so we can be Christ’s ambassadors in the world. Every Mass we attend speaks to our hearts, and asks us to speak to our world.

The selection from the book of Revelation really speaks about the promise of our Catholic faith: people of every race, language, every creature in creation, praising God because of the unity they have with God in Jesus Christ. This is who and what we are supposed to be—all of creation, expressed in the vastness of our Catholic community, praising God for the infinite love God shows us, the infinite love we share.

Easter C 2

Video cameras caught it, and it seemed ominous. Two people walking near Central Park in Manhattan, a van drives up, people get out and throw the two walkers into the vehicle, and the car drives off. A terrible abduction in the middle of New York City? No, the news said, it was a prank, part of a surprise birthday party—what a party that must have been! But we had April 1st, April fools, with even big tech companies getting into the hoax business. How do you know when it’s not a trick?

This is a good question for Thomas in this most famous of Gospels, read every Sunday after Easter, as if to ask us: do we think Easter is real. Thomas seems like our kind of guy, no-nonsense, I’m-from-Missouri-show-me. It’s hard to know what he made of the others who had experienced the Risen Christ—or why he still hung out with them after a week. Why stay with a group of people you think are deluded?

Unless, of course, his doubt was the real hoax, the trick his soul was playing on him to keep him from affirming Christ. We know his problem was spiritual. Playing CSI was not the point because when Jesus comes, we do not see Thomas playing the pathologist, examining the wounds. No, he falls down in faith. He knows the emptiness of his doubts.

“Blessed are those who have not seen but do believe,” the Gospel says. Do we feel blessed, because that description describes us? What would we have made of the physical body of Jesus? What would we do? Ogle, gape, match expectations with what is happening, try to think of something intelligent to say? The point of Easter is never just the physical body of Jesus—it’s the Easter of his risen Spirit.

“As the Father sends me, so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit. Be an agent of forgiveness and hope in the world. Be my Easter throughout history.” That’s the challenge Jesus sets before his disciples, and before us. And we might be wondering how we do this. After all, faith can seem almost like a magical dream, something separated from daily life. This Sunday, we begin reading from the book of Revelation today, a book that many in Christian history have made out as some magical map into the future—instead of a book of consolation for the oppressed, which was its original purpose.

So let’s go to Acts, where we see Peter and the other apostles putting Jesus’ words into practice—doing the deeds of Easter, through compassion, forgiveness —acting as signs of divine love, as instruments of healing. In our own way, we can do each of these every day—we can be Easter in the lives of others.

The hoax is not Jesus’ Resurrection. The hoax might be this: we keep hearing the Easter message year after year, we keep smelling the lilies, but we still cannot quite get all Easter’s meaning.

Easter C

Punxsutawney Phil disappointed us. I realized this when I saw a picture of a groundhog on my FaceBook page, a groundhog holding a sign that said, in big letters, “I lied.” In February, with lots of hoopla, the folks in Punxsutawney, PA, declared to the world that Phil had come out of the ground and had seen his shadow, and therefore the remaining weeks of winter would be light. “Sure,” I told myself as I pushed two inches of wet snow off a car last Monday morning, and as I waited for the plane a Regan Airport to get de-iced on its way to Texas. You cannot believe everything that comes out of the ground, can you?

What about Jesus? What about the emergence of Jesus from the ground of the earth, from the confines of his tomb, from the bonds of death? How do we come to believe this? For cannot Easter, and the preceding story of the death of Jesus, seem like something that happened in a world far away from ours, in a past of great remoteness? What does it mean, what can it mean, that a preacher from rural Palestine was murdered by a regime that murdered thousands? What can the extinction of one life mean?

So as we gather this Easter morning, direct descendants of those who heard the first Easter message, it’s important for us to review the message and get it straight. What serious sin does is tear existence apart, break the harmony between divine love and our existence, leaving us to versions of life filled with pettiness, anger, greed, lust, violence and death. We have more than bible stories to verify this; we have our own experience as individuals and as a soceity. How do we repair that tear, this brokenness that pervades our life?

God repairs the brokenness, God restores the tear, in Jesus Christ. The cross is the sewing God does to weave our existence and his love back together. “Did not Jesus have to die?” Luke will say again and again in his Gospel these Easter weeks? Why? Because only a death like his shows the brokenness of our lives, shows what we do to each other, and what we would do even to God. Only a death like his holds up the wound, the pain, to the full light of day. Jesus’ death is the scar left from the healing, his wounds still terribly visible, but now shining in triumph.

And Easter is the showing of the victory to the world so that the power of his resurrection can begin to reshape human existence here and hereafter. Two messengers in the tomb have to tell the women what their minds cannot reach to grasp. “Why look for the living among the dead?” Something new has happened in human history, but something all humans have desperately looked for. Something new happens when we realize that we are no longer defined by death, but by unlimited hope and life. Easter demands not only belief in the risen Christ; it demands belief in a transcendent vision of human existence. It’s more than grinding out life, avoiding pain and increasing pleasure; it’s more than making money, and living long. It’s the very breadth of human life, its scope and its depth, that also calls for belief.

Perhaps a lot of modern culture just ignores this, content with its smallish account of human life. And maybe some people today can get to where Peter was, having heard the women, running down to the tomb, he stares into it and let’s himself be puzzled. Something else is going on here, he has to be saying. Something I cannot yet grasp or fathom. Maybe some people today can acknowledge the mystery.

But hopefully many of us will get to where the women are in the Gospel; stunned at the message, staring at a tomb now empty and death garments strewn around, they run to the others with the message. He is not dead, he is alive. They stun their companions and the world with their words, words they cannot keep to themselves, because with the rising of Jesus everything now is different. From the ground has come the greatest truth we can ever hear—about God, about ourselves, about the destiny of our existence.

Easter, of course, is not just simply believed; it is lived. It becomes real when the Spirit of the Risen Jesus takes over our lives, fills us with compassion and reconciliation, with generosity and joy, with the commitment to lift the burdens of others and strengthen those filled with fear and doubt. Easter lives when we testify to it by our lives and our words. Easter faith leads to Easter life—a life we have here today, gathered in community around the Lord’s table, where he once again enters our midst and asks if we see it, if we get what God has done, and if we understand what this means to us and to our world.

Palm Sunday C

We call him the good thief, though he was hardly a thief. Terrorist might be the better word, rioting and killing. We even have a traditional name for him, Dismas, although there’s no backing in tradition for this. We’ve meditated long and hard on his words, his final act of faith, whether out of desperation or insight: “Remember me when you come into your Kingdom.”

But I think about the other one, the one crucified on the left, the other terrorist we never think about. What was the difference, I ask myself? Why could one see Jesus’ innocence, and the wrongness of his death, while the other one mutters curses? And, while we reflect hard on Dismas, the one we call good, is it not the case that we are all much more likely to be like the other?

What the other thief, the other terrorist did, was what most of us do all the time: he mouthed the gripes of the crowd, he echoed the popular opinion. Seeing Jesus jeered and abused by Romans and Jewish leaders alike, he would spend his final hours joining in. What they were seeing, and saying, seemed true to him—how could Jesus be God’s son, dying as he did, and leaving him to die as he did? Far easier to ape the crowd than truly stare and see the Christ.

At this point in our history, doesn’t it easiest for us to drift along with those who have the largest voice?. What have we to lose? There’s a comfort in being like everyone else. But there also is a price in doing this. Jesus, of course, forgave both terrorists—but only one could accept that forgiveness, only one could respond.

Maybe that’s the invitation of this Palm Sunday—to get beyond the voices of everyone and see how Jesus, in his dying, uniquely calls to us; to get beyond the popular babble to the truth of Christ’s love and the chance we have to respond to it, to receive it, to live it. Maybe that’s our work this week: to truly see Jesus, the kind of death he is dying, and the kind of life he offers.

Lent 5 C

Our world is fascinated by women in trouble. Our news agencies spent almost an entire year talking about Casey Anthony, the woman who was accused of killing her child. This year it’s Jodi Arias, the woman who shot and stabbed her boyfriend but claims she does not remember doing it. And, of course, fifteen years ago it was Monica Lewinski. And, on a regular basis, the activities of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton get a lot of notice.

All of that reminds us of this incident in the Gospel of John when the religious leaders bring a woman who was caught committing adultery. Of course, she was not committing adultery alone, but we never hear of the man. Culture, ancient and modern, always seems ready to attack and blame women, just as we so often blame victims.

What makes this incident different is that the religious leaders are blaming this woman so that they can blame Jesus; they are using a scandal to create a scandal for Christ. But it does not work? Why? Because Jesus points to the real scandal, the real sin, which the leaders refuse to see. But this sin, which is the cause of all other sins, is absolutely necessary to see.

“Let the one among you who is without sin throw the first stone?” It is their presumption that they are better than this woman, it is their presumption of their own innocence, that is the big lie. It is their pride which allows them to feel superior to others, superior even to Jesus, that really is blinding them, keeping them from seeing what everyone must see. Because pride takes away the truth of our total dependence on God—for everything, and especially for forgiveness. When we think we do not need God, or God’s forgiveness, then we show total ignorance of ourselves, and also ignorance of the God of Jesus.

Our whole Catholic life is founded on forgiveness. Baptism, the first sacrament we receive, is a celebration of forgiveness. Penance and reconciliation, which are part of every Catholic life, are totally necessary for us in our relationship with God. To think that we are better than others is to overlook who we truly are: all of us need the mercy and forgiveness of God. The saints know that most of all.

This Lenten season helps us accept our need for mercy because it underlines the kind of God Jesus shows us. “Behold I am doing something new,” sings Isaiah the prophet. And what is that new thing? In a week that brings a new Pope with many firsts, it's essential for us to see the new thing God does for us—to see that God is not a God of condemnation, but rather a God who pours forgiveness upon all who open their hearts to him. “Does no one condemn you? Neither do I. But go and find my power to overcome your sin.” Paul feels such newness in his life that he considers all of his past as trash compared to what God has given him in Christ. God makes us new in his grace.

The Lenten question then is this: will we open our hearts to accept the mercy of God? And will we show that we have received this mercy by our own attitudes of compassion and understanding for others? Insofar as we want to throw stones at others, to that extent we have not yet come to know God.

Scandals will come and will go; they will sell newspapers and expand our gossip. But the real scandal is this: we have seen God’s love in Jesus but have not really accepted or lived it in our own lives.

Lent 4 C

“Mi casa es su casa,” is the way the Spanish say it, “My house is your house.” And it feels more expansive than the way we say it in English: Make yourself at home as if the guest has to do the work. There’s a feeling of warmth, of openness, of acceptance with the idea that someone’s house has become my house, that I am totally at home with them. Even so, it’s not easy to feel comfortable when in someone else’s home; we don’t know the boundaries, we aren’t sure when we are burdening our host, we don’t want to be an imposition on others.

When are we at home? It’s not that easy to answer. Surely we think of a physical location—a house where we have lived for a long time, or an apartment from your youth. But home, when we think about it, is never just about a place. More than anything, it’s about relationships. It’s not my mother’s kitchen, but her presence in the kitchen; it’s not my father’s workroom, but the way he made it his own. We are at home when we feel connected to people, when our relationships are bound to those we are for, and those who care about us. Think of how a lost child feels, until it sees mommy or daddy. It’s the connection.

Our Gospel is about misconnections, all the way around. The younger son misconnects with his father, not even realizing the bond his father has with him. The older son feels connected but only on one level, that of burden and responsibility. But the father’s connection to both sons, the father’s desire that his generous love be seen and accepted, remains the key drama of the story. The father is offering both children a home, a place of bonding and unity; when will they see it?

Lent is about renewing our sense of connection with God and with each other. In some ways, many Catholics feel disconnected from their faith; in other ways, we can all be far from the God who shows such generous love, even we who worship regularly. God sends Jesus Christ precisely to bond with us; God is in Jesus, reconciling the world to himself, making a place and a space where we can all meet God, and God can meet us. Yet Jesus can appear remote from us—not because he is ever far, but because we grow far from him.

Our first reading gives us a sense of when the Jewish people felt at home. It looks upon their time in the desert as a time of transition, a period of homelessness; now, having come to their own land, they no longer rely on the manna of the desert, but rather on the crops of their harvest. But this view can be illusory. How easy to take God for granted when our crops are coming year after year. How easy to think that the Land is more important than God. The greatest prophets in Israel would turn this image upside down: it was in the desert when we were closest to God, because there we knew we needed God.

In some ways, we are always with the Jewish people in the desert. The whole experience of this life is one of exile, of pilgrimage, of partial life. What we experience in this life, the closeness we have with Jesus and with each other in Jesus, only anticipates what our true home will be like, the Kingdom, when God is all and all, and when we are totally present to each other in God. We accept the Father’s love in Jesus, knowing that we have so much more to learn about his house, and so much to experience in his grace.

“Mi casa es su casa,” God is saying: “I will be your house, your dwelling, your abode. Come as close to me as you can, anticipate what I will offer the world, and bind yourselves to me and to each other in my Church. Give up your waywardness; give up your posture of duty. Give into the vision of love that I show, because in that vision you will finally find your fullest life and your truest home.

Lent 3 C

I was flying all night and making a connection through Miami. Just two hours and I’d be back in my own office. When was this trip going to end? The flight was filling up. Passengers were taking every seat, and filling the overhead bins. A man comes on at the last minute. His tie is in disarray around a crumpled shirt and fancy suit. Where was his overhead space? Who are these stupid people, he was saying, taking all the space? The flight attendants were saying they’d check bags for free, but that was not enough for Mr. Morning Glory, “Who do these people think they are? Where can I put my bag?”

I’m wondering: well, why was he the last on board? What would be the problem with him checking his bag? Why is he grousing at everyone else, when they did what every other passenger had done—put their luggage in the bins as long as there was space. Or do things apply to everyone else, but not to him? Was everyone else the problem, but not him?

We have these attitudes all the time. Other nations are making trouble. Our neighbors do not keep up their lawns so well. Our co-workers are slackers. The other political party is the problem. So Jesus uses some pretty stark language, almost shocking, to get the attention of his listeners. Do you think it was only the Galileans, do you think it was only the folks on whom the tower fell, who were the sinners? Don’t get your hopes up, brothers and sisters. Because you are no better than they were. Before you point a finger, look in the mirror yourself.

It’s easy to think that everyone else needs conversion, but not we ourselves. Jesus is telling us that conversion is everyone’s business. We cannot exempt ourselves because we all stand under the same judgment, however that is coming to us. So don’t blame the unlucky or the misfortunate as if they are the losers. We all stand a good chance of losing, unless we turn our hearts around. Paul argues this exact point to the Corinthians—warnings were given in the past to the Jews, but these were really warnings to us. Wake up! Pay attention!

We see in the first reading what judgment will consist in: standing before God, the God of unending love and true freedom. The Scriptures put us there with Moses. The judgment we face is this: how is that total, unbounded love reflected in our lives? How have we found true freedom, and helped others find it? God is a mystery, for sure; Moses is stunned. But God’s mystery is revealed by God’s interaction with—and in us. My sister, who is a nun, tells the story of the woman on retreat who could not feel forgiven. The woman talks to the retreat master who discovers that this woman has not talked to her sister in over 20 years. What was the issue, asks the retreat master. “I cannot remember,” she responds. “Why don’t you call her up,” suggests the retreat master. “I could not do that because that would mean she was right.” Yes, we are all in need of more love and deeper liberation. We’re all stuck.

Lent give us the opportunity. It’s the time Jesus talks about in the Gospel, the time of patience God gives us while we the time as pilgrims. Lent asks us to stop looking at others and start looking inside, where real change has to happen.

We got all excited about the Oscars last week; and we are all excited about the start of baseball. No harm in any of that. But when do we get excited about God, and God’s offer to us? When do we realize that we are, every Sunday, closer to God that even Moses was in the burning bush? When do we say to ourselves: “I cannot let this pass by. I have to go see what this is. Not a burning bush. But God come to us in total love in Jesus.”

Lent 2 C

Why is it that the most vivid memories I have almost always come from my travels. My dreams seem stranger. And the situations I get into—whether traveling or engaging with foreigners—seem to return again and again, with smiles or groans. I will forever remember a trip in the Basque country of northern Spain—after a tremendous meal of shrimp and lamb with 40 members of the extended family of our host—walking through the mountains. Fog seeped from the ground, sun dazzled in the leaves above, horsemen appeared with their mounts and disappeared into the mist, cows with bells wandered along our side. Where was I? What was this? Had I temporarily left earth?

When we travel, we leave our ordinary course of life. As a result, we can see things that we usually cannot see because we get so used to the everyday, our categories of life. Go on a retreat, go on a trip, meet someone entirely new—the categories break open, the everyday starts to radiate with mystery.

Jesus is on a trip. St Luke shapes his Gospel with Jesus slowly moving toward Jerusalem, where he must die. The visit on the mountain today with his innermost apostles serves to illuminate the meaning of the whole journey. Up on the mountain, things seem magical, enchanted, eerie, and also frightening. Along with the light, we find the clouds. In this dramatic moment, when Jesus shows us the glory that hides within him all the time, the disciples have to confront their own attitude toward him.

“Let us build three tents,” says Peter. Indeed, he forgets that he is on a journey. He wants to stay where he is, bask in the glow of the moment, watching Jesus as he wishes to hold Jesus in his mind—the glorious Jesus of triumph. Can he see what Jesus is doing, talking with Moses and Elijah, dialoguing with the Jewish tradition of law and prophet? And what are they talking about? It’s a striking word in the Gospel, only Luke uses it: they are talking about the exodus he had to accomplish in Jerusalem. What is an exodus but the most decisive journey of life, a journey of testing, a journey of escape, but ultimately a journey of freedom.

“This is my beloved Son, listen to him”—so comes the voice from the cloud, the cloud that obscures the light and puts it into context the glory of Jesus. There is only one way to glory, and that is through the journey that Jesus takes, through the gift of himself, in sacrificial love, for the sake of the Kingdom, for humankind, for the liberation of all humankind. Peter, do you want to take this journey? Do you want to enter into God’s mystical moment? Do you want to be truly enchanted? Even Abram knows that glory comes from sacrifice, from the gift of oneself.

Paul is writing to people who have pretended to walk the walk, but they are in it for themselves. He’s almost shouting, so disappointed is he with those who began the journey but then gave up. There is only one path, the one Jesus shows us. Lent puts signposts up again and again, pulling us out of ourselves so we come to see the Christ who leads us, his glorying shining not in magical escape but in full awareness of the reality of God and humankind.

For years I lived in New York with tourists always wanting to go to places that, as a native, I had never visited. “Why do you want to go to the top of the Empire State Building?” I’d ask. They could see splendor where I could not. What splendor are we missing in our faithlife because we never fully undertook the path of Jesus? “This is my beloved son, Listen to him.” Where would you lead me Jesus? Let me come.

Lent 1 C

After the Budweiser Clydesdales, the next most popular Super Bowl commercial was the kid with the Audi. He seems out of sorts as he dresses for his prom as he’s going alone. Dad comes in and throws him the car keys. “Have a great time,” he says. The kid is emboldened, I presume from the Audi, but who knows. He drives to the prom, parks in the principal’s spot, and the camera follows him through the crowded room filled with kids dressed to their best. He walks up to this beautiful girl and begins kissing her passionately. The girl smiles in secret glee. Her date, obviously King of the Prom and an athlete type, comes over the pummels the kid for taking his girl. Final scene, he’s driving home, smiling outrageously, with a black eye; then we see the four circles of the Audi Logo.

So this kid dared himself. Hyped up so much by driving that Audi, he surprised himself. “I did it,” he smiles. There’s something about a dare, whether we dare ourselves or another, that stiffens our spines. What do you mean? I can do it. Go ahead a dare me!

So Satan, the tempter, is daring Jesus in our Gospel this morning. “If you are the Son of God.”—Prove it. Make bread. Jump off a tower. Rule the world. In doing this, the Tempter does what tempters do—pushes us to the edge to see what is inside of us, what our real commitments are, what we are really going to live for. Satan dares Jesus—do something crazy for me. And Jesus responds by refining what his life and ministry will be all about.

It’s a sober lesson for us Americans. For us, faith so often is about what we get out of it, the consolation, the benefits. You cannot look at much of American religion without finding one or another religious hipster talking about how religion will make you rich, or fix your problems, cure your cancer, or whatever. Jesus clarifies the purpose of faith: to relate us to God, to orient us to the ever-generous God whose grace fills our lives. Having fasted and prayed, he shows us this God more clearly than ever.

You shall not test the Lord your God—why? Because testing God means fundamentally mistrusting God, and fundamentally not seeing the blessings of God that are always present. Moses in the first reading offers the bread of thanksgiving because of what God has done for the Jewish people. And only a particular blindness on our part leads us to resent God, not see the abundance of his love, and pout like over-entitled babies.

Can we go with Jesus into his desert? Can we do Lent with him? Can we clarify our own faith, our own focus on God, our own living for the sake of God and others as Jesus does? Can we give up our approaching God with a calculator in hand, like we are making deals, and come to that trust to which Jesus invites us? Lent is not about giving up candy or beer; it’s about conversion, coming to focus our lives on God as the center, and living our discipleship more deeply. Pope Benedict has called our modern life a “desert” because we’ve banished God from it? Can we un-banish God from our personal lives, can we let Jesus make God the center of our lives again?

Paul tells the Romans that God’s word is not elusive, abstract, a million miles away. God’s Word is as close as our hearts, when we open them in faith. So here’s a good Lenten dare: I dare you to undertake the spiritual renewal God invites you to—this Lent. I dare you to make Lent a time to transform your life.

3C

Even though we are no longer a nation of long-worded statements—we hardly listen to speeches, hardly make them, and take our information in small doses and tweets—we do get mesmerized at times by what seems like an important speech. Sometimes a bishop will give a powerful sermon, or the pope write an important teaching, and a politician give a talk that garners a lot of buzz. President Obama gave his second inaugural—some compared it to Lincoln, others thought Obama continued to ignore the folks he needs to work with. Whatever the commentary, going into a second term is very different than a first term—a president knows the limits, and knows more clearly what he wants to do.

St. Luke gives us Jesus’ inaugural speech. He shows Jesus in a synagogue in his hometown—how often do our political leaders return to their birthplaces to launch a campaign—where he is well known. The tension of the reading seems to build gradually—they hand Jesus the scroll, he unravels it to one of the later chapters of Isaiah, he reads one of the more stirring passages of that great prophet, and when he sits down people cannot take their eyes off him. Luke is underlining just how important this inaugural speech is

“Today this reading is fulfilled in your hearing it.” What Jesus must mean is this: from this day forward, Jesus will implement the words of Isaiah in his own ministry right in front of everyone’s eyes. In fact, Luke’s Gospel will be a succession of deeds of healing, mercy, justice, and outreach to those on the bottom, because Jesus has come as God’s jubilee—God’s anointed instrument of mercy and reprieve—for humankind. The paradox is this: those mighty deeds of love and justice which bring so much hope to the folks on the bottom become the reasons why Jesus himself will suffer and die on behalf of some of the folks on the top.

Yet this does not hinder Jesus from announcing his purpose. He is like Ezra in the first reading—Eara returns with the Jewish people to a devastated Jerusalem after 80 years of exile, Ezra has to encourage a broken people. He stands on a platform; we can feel the tension and excitement here—the books of the law are read—the failure to keep the law accounted in the mind of the Jews for their failure and defeat. Ezra is giving them a fresh start: renew the covenant, put God at the center, and we can rebuild and be greater than before.

Ezra and Jesus each demand the attention of their listeners. Yet we cannot help but notice the contrast. Ezra is calling people around a rebuilding project; Jesus is calling people around a renewal project. Ezra is trying to construct the framework for a new community. Jesus is beginning the reconstruction of humankind itself. Ezra calls a dispirited people to rejoice; Jesus calls a complacent people to conversion.

And what is the conversion? To recognize that God can only be seen in the service that we give each other in the name of God’s infinite love. Jesus reaches for the imprisoned, the broken, the blind, the folks on the bottom—it is in the charity he shows these people that God’s love is revealed. Paul argues the same thing—that we all belong to one body, even with our different gifts, and therefore we all are responsible toward each other, with all of us being equal in the Spirit, and equally empowered in the Spirit. Every role we have in Christ is exalted because each one of us is infinitely valued by Jesus. We are his body, both at Mass and, just as much, in the world, carrying on the inaugural vision of Jesus Christ.

Our nation is getting hyped for the Superbowl, one more way we show that might and power are what we treasure as a nation. Who will be stronger? Who will dominate? Who will win? Our faith says that Jesus has already won, through his destiny of lifting others up, and being raised from the dead to bestow his Spirit of life upon us. The vision is revealed. Will we let Jesus implement it in our lives?

2 C

Being in Seattle this week, I am very happy not to be in Washington, DC. It’s a great stroke of luck to miss the crowds who will be coming for the second inauguration of Barak Obama—subways clogged, highways jammed, people lost, connections missed. They say this inauguration will not be as crowded as the first, four years ago, when the novelty of an African American president promising hope and change seemed so alluring. This goes to prove, I guess, that you only get one chance to make a first impression.

What kind of impression is Jesus making in the Gospel today? Even though we are wearing green vestments and we call it Ordinary Time, it still feels like an extension of Epiphany—another first appearance of Jesus, after his Baptism which we celebrated last Sunday. Here he is, with his companions, all of them guests at a wedding. “They have no wine,” says Mary, words so few that she must have presumed Jesus understood the situation. “Do whatever he tells you.”

What he tells them to do is remarkable, to fill up water jars with almost 140 gallons of water, all of which will become wine. Just imaging that much wine here in your parish—it would more than do for a party! Even if there were 500 people, there’d be plenty to go around. What is Jesus up to?

We have to pull away from the physical facts to get the spiritual impact. Jesus is beginning his mission. “My hour has not yet come.” “Maybe it has,” Mary is saying, in effect. And what is that hour, that mission, that purpose? To bring the fullness of God into our human experience, to help us see what our God is like, and how God is toward us. Jesus ministry will be a follow-up of this feast, one more glass of great wine after another. Because the wine represents the sweetness of God, divine love, given to us in Jesus and poured abundantly into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

What a challenging image for us! Christian life, Catholic life, spiritual life, as a feast of joy. . . as a banquet . . . .as an abundance of God that overwhelms us. It’s so easy for us to think of faith as some set of obligations, or some kind of bargaining system with God (I’ll do this if you’ll do that), and so hard for us to recognize the overwhelming joy that God wants to give us and the world. It’s a joy of healing, of forgiveness, of promise, of new life, of unending love. It’s a joy that flows from God in and through and between us. It’s a joy that God continues to touch and renew us, and will do so now and forever.

I’m always amazed that so often Christians do not see this joy. Isn’t this joy what we are showing in every Mass we celebrate, how we gather and let Christ come among us, come within us, come to the world through us? Isn’t every Mass we celebrate a sign of God’s saving joy? Jesus is making an outrageous gesture, transforming all that water into wine, to call our attention to the excessive love that we experience when his Spirit draws us together, when we feed on his body and blood, when we affirm our discipleship once again—when we become the Eucharist!

Often we do not appreciate the very rituals we do as Catholic Christians. It’s like we were at Cana but missed the main action. That’s why we need to be reminded of the point of our faith—joy, abundant joy, joy poured upon us and the world.

Water becomes wine. Wine becomes blood. Blood becomes life. We become member of Jesus Christ. It’s more than taking on a role, like becoming a lawyer, or a librarian, or even a president. It’s becoming who God wants us to be, becoming our fullest selves, letting the water of our everyday experience become the wine of spiritual life.

BAPTISM OF THE LORD C

Sometimes you cannot stay on the sidelines. Everything inside you is pumped and prepped. The situation looks very clear. You have to step in. You cannot say “no.”

Certainly there was a lot of conversation about Robert Griffin III, and his playing in the playoff game against Seattle. Should coach have put him in? What did the doctor say—or not say? What about his knee? Was he ready? But RGIII himself said it—the game was on, and he was going to be in it. In some ways, he was incapable of staying on the sidelines.

For centuries theologians have asked why Jesus was baptized. He did not have sin, was not in need of baptism, so why did he do it? Of course, John’s baptism was nothing like ours. John’s baptism was a baptism of preparation—a statement that one was going to give one’s life in expectation of what God was going to do. Jesus steps forward because he is saying he is prepared—he’s not staying on the sidelines.

After he is baptized, in the narration we have from Luke, there comes the voice and the sign of the Holy Spirit. Jesus, in his humanity, has stepped forward; the Father confirms, then, the divine mission of his beloved Son: to be the chosen one, to be God’s transformer of history. The Father of love confirms the divinity of the Chosen One. The one who would baptize in the Holy Spirit now has the Spirit descend upon him: God’s life now works overtly in the ministry of Jesus.

We imagine that being chosen by God must be sensational. Think of the Pope, or think of our bishops, in all their regalia. Think of the great figures in history. Yet such thinking on our part only shows that we have fallen for the trappings of power rather than the actual message of the Gospel. We think of Constantine, or of Charlemagne, not of Jesus Christ. Isaiah’s reflections underlie all the baptism passages: Jesus is the chosen, beloved Son, because he is sent not in power, not in threat, but in humble service. He’s not stomping on the broken reed, he’s not pouring water on the smoldering fire. He’s not making a fuss. But his humility will make the coastlands shake because, through it, we will see the power of God’s love.

Jesus is baptized to show his preparedness, his readiness to enact his Father’s will. He also is baptized as an example—how his followers should be, our readiness to be humble servants of the vision of God. For the Lord shows no partiality, no preference; all are called to be instruments of service. From every nation and culture, every continent and demographic, the Spirit of Jesus has come upon the baptized, to empower all of us to be servants of the Kingdom, to show God’s love and compassion, to reach out to those without, those on the bottom.

Many ask if Catholicism has made being a follower of Jesus too easy. Do we Catholics just stand on the sidelines? Do we say the lines without meaning them? Call ourselves disciples without being ones? Hey, the Spirit is always ready to descend, to revive, to renew, to conform us more closely to Jesus. God is always ready to empower his chosen, as soon as we know that it’s not our job to stay on the sidelines and watch.

Epiphany C

What good fortune I had this past week, to visit good friends on the westerns side of Puerto Rico, enjoy the sun, pretend to play golf, and read on the porch in the afternoon. As I went through piled up copies of the New Yorker and some theological articles, I could look down the street where several families lived. Their children were obviously enjoying their Christmas toys, one after another. I'd see them bring out skooters, up and down the street they'd go, for ten minutes, then bring out their new bikes, up and down the street for another ten minutes, then something like batons, swinging them in the air, for another ten minutes. Then back to the skooters, then the bikes, then the batons.

I could not help but wonder if these children were mimicking the rest of us, always with something else to do, something else to try, at least for a bit of time. The exercise equipment piles up, the electronics, the used CDs and DVDs, as we move from one immediate perceived need to another. Advertisers keep us going, telling us needs that we weren't sure we had. . . but now we know we do. When did we start going fanatical about how white our teeth are? Or when as men we suffer from low "T"? Or that we needed to condition our hair or else?

This feast of Epiphany challenges this manic need we have to keep having and trying new things, this restlessness inside of us. There are two contrasts. Herod, the insecure king, who pretends to like the Seekers from the east, and who will do anything to hold onto whatever power he has. Do we need to kill the children? Then do it. What else do we need to do. Herod, the seeker who never finds. And then we have the Magi, the Seekers, who represent all of non-Jewish humankind, who after searching here and there, finally know what they want, finally find, and finally give themselves to what was most important to them. They give themselves to God.

These Seekers stare us in the face today. What are we searching for? Why do we grow tired in our obsessive desire for what we think will make life more comfortable, more secure, more luxurious? If we have not sought and found our God, then no amount of searching will satisfy us, no amount of obsessive spending will gain us peace. That's the lesson of today.

The other side, of course, is that God seeks us. Whatever there is inside of us, we strange creatures who have evolved on this planet, strange creatures whose minds roam all of existence, and whose hearts seek the fullness of love--whatever we seek, the truth is that the Fullness of Love sends countless stars into our lives, guiding us to divine love. The Fullness of Life sends endless signs into our lives, wondering when we, in adoration, will accept true Life.

Our coming to Church today is both a seeking and a finding. For all we have received in faith, there is so much more left to receive. How can I receive that? we ask. As the Magi show us, by falling down with open hearts before our God, made a brother in our midst so we will not miss him. He comes to us, offering us everything, if we can turn to him in total trust.

We've done the Herod thing long enough; isn't it time to be the Magi, to point to the world the Star that is God made visible, and, in contemplative faith, show our world what it means to seek and to finally find?

In Puerto Rico they have a cute custom for Epiphany. Children leave grass or hay on the floor of their relative's houses on January 5th; when they return on January 6th, there is a gift for every pile of grass they put down. Their grass turns into a gift! When we come, however we are, and give ourselves to Christ in commitment, our gift turns into God's Gift, for we are united with Jesus Christ, God's Gift and Light for the world.

Holy Family C

It’s interesting what feels urgent over time. Back in the early 70s, when I was ordained, it was the long-distance phone call. Wow, that had to be important, and expensive, so I better get it now. Then this morphed into the fax. “Frank, there’s a fax for you.” Oh, I better drop everything and read this fax. Then it was e-mail, in the days before spam. Then it was the cellular phone call, vibrating away, demanding that I pick it up. Now it seems to be the text message. Bing Bing, text message here. “Let me see who it is.”

It’s hard to figure this out, particularly the text message. After all, it is far less personal than a call, but it appears even more enticing. One can dangerously drive a car and talk on a phone; but one cannot text and drive no matter who you are. Yet you see people texting away. Thinking of the next cool remark, the next emoticon, the next knowing reference.

Today we have God’s message, not a fax, nor a call, nor a text. But a message in our own flesh and blood. It begins as a child, someone you have to draw near to because infants are vulnerable, fragile: they need us to survive. But the message grows into a prophet who cuts to our hearts by bringing us the Word of God, a healer who reaches our deepest parts where pain is deeper than bodily hurts, a story-teller who involves us so powerfully in his stories they end up interpreting our lives, and a savior who brings the liberation of God to our sin and even our death. The child begins by needing us; but it ends up that we need him.

I hear the baby cry. I see the young man run. I watch the adult come out of the desert. I see the man reaching those at the bottom, those ignored by society, while he is attacked by those on the top. Ring, ring, ring. God’s message is calling. He comes in our flesh so we get the point. I will love you from the inside, and I will bring you inside my life. Ring, ring, ring, God’s message is calling.

We come today to acknowledge that message and the baby looks at us wondering if we will do more than that. It’s a message that can change lives, can even change the world. If we answer it will not be a tweet or a nifty text. It will be a heart, the heart of Jesus, bringing us into the heart of God, asking for our hearts in return. “Lord, can I give you my heart. If I do, what will be left?” The message waits our reading, our hearing, our loving, our living. “If you give your heart, you will lose nothing; instead, in my Son, you will gain it all.”

Blessed Christmas.

ADVENT 4 C

I was out for a walk last Saturday around the Washington Hospital Center. Temperature was a perfect 55, and I got up to a good pace as I went along. Going down Irving St., a large street that goes by the hospitals in North East Washington, I first noticed some Latinos passing coming by me, with big smiles and warm greetings. As I moved further up, I saw something that looked like a demonstration, a row of people walking down Irving on the driving pavement, blocking all traffic. As I got closer, I saw the Mexican Flags, the Papal Flags, a truck with a microphone leading the Rosary, and about 200 people praying, carrying roses, on their way to the National Shrine. Behind them were lots of frustrated drivers wondering what they had run into, now that they could not make their way onto Michigan Avenue.

Later I went to the National Shrine, well over 1000 people, mariachies blaring, and hymns filling the vast space. This might seem like some nationalistic demonstration. It was, however, something else. The roses told the story. Here was the sign of Mary's visit in Tepeyec, to a people being conquered, to people looking for their place in the world now that everything they knew was turned upside down by the arrival of the conquistadores. The roses were the sign of God's care, though the most tender human interactions; the roses showed that God's graciousness never departs.

We cannot overlook the tenderness of the events we celebrate in this season--a young woman about to give birth, a fiance trying to figure out his place, and the simple gesture of visit that we hear about this morning. Mary, having encountered God in the form of an angel and the power of the Holy Spirit, runs in haste, through the countryside hills, to see her cousin Elizabeth, whose pregnancy she just heard about. Having been visited by God, she now visits in the name of God. And when she does, the world is charged with love and grace.

The baby lept in my womb, says Elizabeth. "For who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" Indeed, who are any of us to be cared for by this God, always present to us? The leaping of the baby, the feelings of joy, come from that essential knowledge that we have been loved eternally by God. And now we know it, because now God shows that love completely. We might forget it most of the time. We might even act against God's love. But God still comes, filling us with grace, lifting us from the brokenness and the incompleteness of our lives. There is an energy in every meeting we have with another, pregnant with the possibilities of kindness, friendship, and love. What kind of energy, then, comes from this God who draws intimately near us in Jesus?

Mary experiences this intimacy as powerfully as any human can, apart from Jesus. And what does she do? She spreads it. The visit of God to her through the Angel generates her visit to Elizabeth, her kinswoman. We see her running across the hills, overwhelmed by the news of the births about to happen, and overwhelmed by the prospect of the rebirth of humankind. Visits lead to visits. God's visit to us in our faith leads to the visits we make every day in our lives, with our families, friends, neighbors, co-workers. Through us God visits the world today. We are the roses God sends as signs of divine presence.

Last Monday our eyes were fixed on the ongoing sadness in Newtown, CT; people came together to be with each other, clergy and dignitaries came, and the president himself arrived. He acknowledged that his words could do little in that scene of endless tears. But still he came because when we cry, the worst thing we can do is run away from each other. When we cry, the last thing God does is run away from us. God comes, through the simple humanity of a woman, a humanity transformed because she is totally open to God. Angels, messengers, for sure come to us all the time. God visits us at every point in our lives. As God has come to us, as we open ourselves to this God, so, in God's name, we go to each other, we go to the world, filling it with the energy of divine grace.

ADVENT 3 C

Back in my days of opening Christmas presents, sometimes parents would tease us. Which box do you want to open first? they’d ask. So you’d be torn. Here was a plain box, and here was a present wrapped in golden shiny paper. Or here was a box that felt rather skimpy, but this other box felt heavy and made a thunky noise when you shook it. What could be in there? Which one do you open first?

We are inclined to go for the fancier boxes, aren’t we? To go for the ones with the larger ribbons, or the ones that look bigger, or seem heftier. Why not? They must have a greater present. Of the two, we naturally want the present we think will be best.

Today’s Gospel begins to give us a contrast between John the Baptist and Jesus. It comes on a Sunday when we light the rose candle, a color brighter than Advent purple, a color that brings a smile. We hear the word “joy” throughout the readings—this used to be called in Latin “Gaudete Sunday”—from the opening of the Latin text of the day—rejoice! So the Gospel is telling us something about joy.

The contrast between John and Jesus plays out in a subtle, but powerful, way. The people, aroused by John’s words, ask him, “Well, then, what are we to do?” We are almost disappointed by John’s reply. He says, in effect: do what you should do. If you are a soldier, don’t bully people. It you are a collector of taxes, stop cheating people. If you have extra, then give your extra to one who needs it.

There’s a way in which, when we do what’s expected of us, we feel satisfied—and we should, given the numbers of people who do not do even what they are supposed to do. They do not even approach the minimum that’s expected. Look at how faith is practiced today? Or the businesses that have to be fined just so they do not launder money, or sell phony investments, or produce corrupt and dangerous products. Or the service we often get as customers. Yes, no one should put down people who are meeting expectations.

But one is coming, says John, who is greater than I. Greater because he baptizes, not only with water, but with water and the Holy Spirit—that excessive, love-brimming, joyful, and generous Spirit of God. Once one receives this Spirit, life is far more than the minimum. Rather than doing just what we have to do, we want to do all that we can do. Like a young lover, we cannot do enough for the beloved. Here, take it all! Jesus is the greater present—not, the greatest!

The winnowing fan in the hand of Jesus removes the chaff, that is, those who think that following Jesus can be a stingy and small thing. Of course not! Joy expands, makes us laugh, gives us a feeling of exploding from happiness. That’s why Christ comes. Taking on the sadness of our lives, he pours the Spirit into our hearts—a Spirit that makes us like him, exalting in life’s abundance. If we catch the Christmas spirit, it is exactly this: one of excessive joy. One that should radiate from us because Christ has touched us.

We don’t have to guess what’s in the box. John, the prophet, tells us who we should follow, who is the greatest prize. John feels unworthy to touch the sandal of Jesus. But Jesus lets us touch his whole being, coming to us in the Eucharist, filling us with himself, and sending us forth in his Spirit into our often glum world. Not to be miserly semi-Christian Grinches, but joy-filled witnesses of his coming.

ADVENT 2 C

I am told there’s such a thing as a Lipitor brain and I suppose I use that as an excuse for my growing inability to recall dates, names, and facts. Often it’s like I’m rummaging around inside my head, knocking on mental doors, trying to find out the information that I want. “I know it’s in there,” I’m thinking, but it just won’t come out. So I greatly admire those folks who have a great command of data, history, details. I know people who can not only tell me about Ancient figures in obscure lands, but details of generals from World War II. How do they do that? How do they master all that information?

It might feel like Luke is showing off all he knows in the first part of the Gospel reading. He lists prominent figures, and the realms they governed, with names that challenge anyone reading the Gospel. What’s he doing here? Is he giving us a history lesson? It has to be more than that.

Luke is elaborating here something that is essential to his view of the Gospel. For him, Jesus did not come just for some small chosen nation in the Middle East. For him, Jesus came to change all of world history. Jesus came for every nation, for every culture. That’s why when Luke gives us the origins of Jesus, he goes back not to Abraham, but to Adam. And that’s why when the second book in his collection, the Acts of the Apostles, comes to its conclusion, we find Paul not Jerusalem but in Rome, in the central and major city of the civilization and culture that he knew.

We can think of our faith as something primarily for ourselves, our little group that is privileged to have the sacraments, the Scriptures. But that’s now how Luke sees it. He uses the language that we read in Baruch, in the first reading, and which we also find in Isaiah. God is building a highway, a straight road; just as the ancient Jews would be able to return to Jerusalem after the exile, so in Jesus God will be able to touch all of humankind. Lower those mountains; fill in the valleys. There will be no obstacles, no moats, to keep God from touching human life. All are involved in the salvation God offers.

This should challenge us in a big way because we now live in a culture that seems to resist the Gospel and faith. More and more, our modern world seems to want to rid itself of religious language, and focus itself on money, power and business. How do we speak faith there? Pope Benedict often uses the phrase, “desert,” to talk about modern life, a world without reference to God. How do we raise a voice in the middle of this desert?

To be sure we do not have trumpets and huge banners to accomplish the proclamation of faith today, but every single one of us interacts with our world. Every one of us talks to neighbors and friends, is involved in our commercial world and the work place. It is through the witness of our faith, our everyday conversations, the way we show our values, that faith speaks to our modern world. We have to be the prophets crying in today’s desert.

How we prepare for Christmas, the religious attitude we take during this sacred time, is part of the prophetic voice that God would speak to our world. Our reception of the Word of God at Christmas, as individuals and as families, is part of the Word God would speak today. We can do that only if we let God’s voice penetrate us, let Advent hope seize us, during this season.

In the two-thousand-thirteenth year after the birth of Christ, when Barak Obama was re-elected president of the United States, and war raged throughout the Middle East, when Vincent Gray was mayor in Washington, and Justin Beiber ruled the hearts of teen-age girls, the Word of God came to earth, and a Catholic people, in the desert of modern life, brought that to their world….

Advent 1 C

There are two debates raging around education. One concerns teachers, their tenure, their competence. The other revolves around testing. How, after all, do you know what children are learning without giving them a test? Behind all the published scoring data about how much, or how little, children have improved in reading and math, we have millions of children sweating and straining as they take these exams. What does a test show? Is it a fair measure? What if I don’t get an A?

In some ways, tests show at least how you prepared for the test and where you ended up. Because often we know a result from how it ends. One of my peculiarities is that I love to watch golf. It sounds strange but how a golfer ends his shot is one of the most important parts of the shot. Off balance? Leaning to one side? Shortened swing? Where the club ends up shows the trajectory of the club from the beginning. The end tells the story.

We have the great paradox of Advent when, every year, we begin a new liturgical church year reflecting on the end. Each year we hear the imagery of the moon and stars, the heavens shaking, of wars and tribulations. What a way to start off? we might ask. Why begin with downer images like this?

Because we can only live our present life if we have images of hope, if we have a picture of the end in mind, if we know what we are working for. “When you see these things happen,” Jesus say, “hold your heads high!” Everyone else may be gasping and dying in fright, but not the followers of Jesus. Why? What do they know that the rest of the world does not know?

What they knew, what we know, is that God has offered humankind infinite and overflowing love, and that the whole point of our life now is to be swept into that love. “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another,” Paul writes, because the love we have for each other is God’s love poured into our hearts. Only if we keep in mind the fullness of God’s Kingdom will we live in response to that Kingdom. Because the truth is that the Kingdom of God is always coming upon us, the end of the world is being worked out in every moment, and every second of our lives is a judgment. How we end up shows how we got there, how we lived.

Some of the excitement of our faith, the tension of love and grace, can dim. When I was in Rome in October for the Synod on the New Evangelization, I heard our Holy Father talk about Catholics growing tired in their faith, forgetting the great drama of our lives: to receive God’s promise of justice and life, to accept Jesus Christ as the center of our lives, and to walk in the path that he shows us.

Yes we can grow sluggish, walk around like people who drank too much as the Gospel puts it, thinking that life is about my next meal or the next click on my entertainment device. Life is about God, the passion of God for us, and the passion we have for God’s cause, God’s Kingdom, God’s realm of love and life. Wake up! Like a coach telling his team about the victory to be won, God begins this year inviting us to look toward his victory, his triumph in Jesus Christ.

Some of us smarty pants like tests; most of us do not. God’s test, however, is something else. It is not about our failure, it’s about God’s victory and our openness to be part of that, to receive it, to accept it. For we who live in Christ, the test is happening. When we choose to follow him, we begin to see that our redemption is already at hand. Come, says Jesus, come to the head of the class.

Easter 5 B

Cutting things out is one of the hardest things we are called to do. I know, for example, when I have to write something that is 250 words, and I’ve already got 275, I go crazy trying to figure which 25 words I’ll get rid of. And I suppose it’s much harder for a coach who, say, has 25 fine players, but has to get his roster down to 20, or a mother who has only so many hours in a day—and has to cut things out to fit in her responsibilities.

So while the image of cutting, which Jesus gives us in the Gospel, may initially put us off, Jesus is driving home something which we are all familiar—to make progress, we have to get rid of things; to stay focused, we have to remove things that clutter up our vision.

Why? Because of the main point that Jesus wants to make—the implication of him calling himself the vine, and calling us the branches. Jesus is dealing with his own life, divine life, pouring into us the way sap pours into branches. He’s talking about identity, about unity, about one life shared between himself and his followers—and between his followers with each other. Can anything be more crucial for believers than to have unity with Christ?

But so many things in our lives can slowly begin to choke the flow of Christ’s life into us. Number one, I suppose, is our own egoism, how we think the world revolves around us, and how entitled we feel we are to just about everything, and how resentful we feel when we think we’ve missed something. If Christ’s life is fundamentally love—that divine love which underlies all existence now flowing into us—nothing crimps this love more than our big fat egos. Just look at our marriages, our friendships, and our basic loyalties—how all of these are damaged because we keep putting ourselves in the center.

Another factor that slows God’s life in us is our closed-mindedness. It’s easy, isn’t it, to shrink the world down to what I know and what I’m comfortable with, and to dismiss or put down anything else. Perhaps racism has receded a bit in our society, at least in its more outrageous forms; but are we not always pulling rank, putting people into pigeon holes, wrinkling our noses at others we think are inferior? Just look at what Paul has to go through to get accepted into the Christian fold—of course the Christians had a right to be suspicious—but look at how he spent his ministry expanding the minds of people to accept others into the Church who looked different.

So do I want Christ’s life? Do I want divine life abiding within me? Do I want my vision expanded to the breadth of this God who lets rain fall “on the just and unjust,” as the Gospel says, on the pretty and the less pretty, the smart and the less smart, on all of humankind? Do I want to live with a sense of constant unity with God, with the sap of Jesus flowing inside me? Do I want to be a branch of his vine?

If so, there has to be some snipping, some cutting, some throwing out. We all have dead twigs inside us. We all have lifeless limbs inside us. We all need as much of Christ’s life in us as possible.

It’s spring. People are cleaning their houses and getting their gardens ready. Putting down mulch and getting rid of winter debris. If we want our lawns and houses to look good, how much do you think God wants us to be cleaned out and looking good—looking like his Son?

Easter 4 B

This past week, Dianne Rehm was interviewing Russ Douthat, the somewhat conservative New York Times columnist, who is also a committed Catholic. His book is called, Bad Religion: How We Become a Nation of Heretics. Behind the provocative title is one clear thesis: that Americans reject formal religion because they think religion is only inside us, in our hearts, in our feelings. Douthat says that, with this view, we have nothing outside ourselves to correct our distortions.

Even apart from the way Douthat pokes at the bees nest, it is a very good question: do we think we need a guide in religion? Do we think there is anything objective, beyond ourselves in faith? Or, in the image of the Gospel today, do we think we need a shepherd?

A shepherd does two things: he protects and he guides. Plenty of generations of Christians have felt a need for protection; how many centuries were filled with overt persecution? How many more centuries were filled with religious wars? Perhaps our own culture, when there is no overt hostility, however, has the most danger in it: our faith can be sweet-talked away. We can be seduced from even having a vision of faith.

And a shepherd guides. Why Jesus can guide us is pretty clear in the Scriptures. Jesus has come to take on our life, and to live that life ahead of us, to the full, guiding us even through death. In other places in the New Testament, Jesus is called a "pioneer" because he goes ahead of us. “I lay down my life on my own,” Jesus says. Giving himself completely, he invites us to follow him; he even talks about extending that invitation to all the world—the other sheep not of his fold. Where is it that Jesus would lead us?

To his path of absolute, generous love. To his path of living for the cause of his Father. To his path of total giving. Not an easy path, is it, for us to follow? Not a path we can readily do without guidance, inspiration, encouragement, help.

There’s a part of us that feels awkward with the words “sheep” or “children”—we feel that our modern life has given us tremendous technical ability, vast insight into the human mind, tons of information literally at the tip of our clicking fingers. We think we can figure it all our on our own. Why do we need a shepherd? Why do we need a church? Why do we need a church that has the audacity to guide us?

This modern disposition shows why we need to pay special attention to this shepherd. Jesus wants to show us places where we would never go on our own. He wants to take us beyond our own natural default of self-concern, self-interest, our comfort zones where we are not stretched beyond ourselves. He wants to bring us to a daring love of self-gift and self-sacrifice. He wants our hearts to expand to his heart, to the heart of God.

The shepherd guides. He does not beat his sheep, does not jab his stick at them. He walks ahead of us, calling out with syllables of love. Perhaps his voice is harder to hear today than ever before. But it is there—in his Scriptures, in his sacramental presence, in his moral vision, and in his community of the Church. We may not feel we need a shepherd. But if we dare to follow his path, to walk in his steps, we’ll find the opposite is true. Our partial self-wisdom pales before the divine wisdom Jesus imparts.

Every eight grader believes he or she knows everything. Thank God mommy and daddy are around! God guides us no less surely, no less lovingly.

Easter 3 B

If you go to TGIF to eat, you’ll notice, in small text beside each order, the amount of calories an item contains. It’s pretty shocking. One piece of chicken might have 400 calories, and another 1400. Salads, which we all think are ways to stay slender, sometimes have 1500 calories, almost enough food for the average person for a day. In spite of all this calorie counting, every once in a while you hear stories that outlandishly buck this trend. I heard about one restaurant that offered a “heart attack burger,” with over 3000 calories, just in the burger, let alone the fried potatoes and milkshake that went with it.

All of this obsession about our food, whether we are eating too much or too little, shows pretty clearly that food is an inescapable part of our lives.Whatever eating disorders beset modern Americans, however we study food and talk about the best way to eat, we do have to eat. We like to eat. Food defines us.

There should be no surprise, then, that Jesus, who spent so much of his ministry at table with his disciples—and with the reprobate—now eats with his disciples in his Risen body. The point is not biology. Rather, the point is the victory of Jesus over the forces of death. Just as he shows them his wounds—signs both of defeat and Easter triumph—so he eats with them to show them that his body, once broken and buried, now represents the triumph of God over sin.

There is a sense of justness, even of necessity, in all these Easter readings. The logic of the scripture puts it this way: it was necessary for Jesus to die; it is totally appropriate for Jesus to be raised from the dead. Jesus’ death demonstrates that the brokenness of sin, of our relationship with God, cannot be eliminated by some magic wand. Sin tears apart the fabric of existence itself; sin scars all our lives, body and spirit. Jesus being hoisted on the cross shows sin in its undeniable force.

Jesus’ Resurrection, then, represents the definitive sign of God’s overcoming of sin: though people might do anything to eliminate the totally Just One, ultimately God’s love and life will conquer in ways we could not imagine. “Peace be with you,” the Risen Jesus says again and again. God’s reconciliation has been accomplished. God’s peace now lies open to all who draw near.

We draw near when we eat with Jesus, when we are part of his Eucharist, his ongoing meal of reconciliation. Do we not say this again and again in our new translation—the sacrifice of reconciliation, the sacrifice of Jesus that shows God’s reconciliation with the world. In the Eucharist, Jesus continues to eat with us. “Lord I am not worthy,” we say; but the Lord makes us worthy by joining his flesh with ours, by becoming our own food, by letting us feed on his Resurrection.

When Jesus ate with his disciples before he died, Jesus anticipated eating again in the Kingdom. This eating happens through the sacrament of his Body and Blood, now made food for us, now given to us to sustain us and transform us. How are we transformed? Be becoming what we eat, by being Christ’s living Body, by being, through the way we live, Christ’s life in the world. As we feed off the Risen Christ, so we, through our service and love, help the world feed off our faith, our Easter faith, our unity with Christ Jesus.

We approach the altar Sunday after Sunday, but often we do not reflect on what it means to receive the Lord. We think of it as a pious thing, Jesus coming to us. But it is also a dare that Jesus places before us: will you live my life? Will you accept my conquest over death? Will you live my reconciliation? Will you extend my Risen life to the world?

We Americans are obsessed by the food we eat, alternately stuffing and starving ourselves. But we dare not refuse the meal Jesus gives us. The physical calories of our bread and wine are miniscule; but the Easter energy we receive can bring true health, real healing, to the world.

B Easter 2

I have a very good friend who cannot swim. He tells me this with a slight hint of shame, and a bit of defensiveness. I imagine, naturally, what it would be like to teach an adult to swim—and also remember how I learned to swim in the small pool on West 59^th Street, one open to every apartment-dweller in our neighborhood. I assure you, they used lots of chlorine. I remember, particularly, how impossible it all seemed to me, how I would go to the shallow end of the pool and flail my hands in mock imitation of swimming. Once a teacher got me to float—fill those lungs with air and just rest in the water—then the fear vanished. If I could float, then I would not drown. Then I could swim.

Some things are like that. We can only overcome our fears, or our doubts, by engaging in action, a process, a method. It’s the behavior that overcomes our doubts. Riding a bike. Driving a car. Having a child. Preaching a homily. All our hesitations start to shrink when we begin to act.

In the powerful Gospel we have today, there are many things going on. Perhaps it’s typical of us modern people to move immediately to Thomas, doubting Thomas as he’s called, because we live in a world marked by doubt, especially religious doubt. It’s easier for us to believe what scientists tell us about little specks in the sky millions of light years away than it is for us to hear about God. Doubt is easy, faith seems hard.

Doubt, of course, has many functions. It not only deals with what we can touch with our finger, to use Thomas’ words. It also deals with the way we get out of things. If I doubt I can swim, I don’t have to deal with water. If I doubt I can do college work, I don’t have to deal with SATs. If I doubt the Easter message, I don’t have to deal with the life-changing hope God sets before us.

Thomas’ doubt is quite specific. He doesn’t believe his brothers and sisters—those who said they saw the Risen Christ. He’s still part of the group, but only somewhat. He can play on the sides, the way many modern people do, calling themselves “spiritual” but being reluctant to commit to anything specific. He wants it from the horse’s mouth. He wants it from Jesus.

And he gets it from Jesus, in the humiliating detail in which Jesus invites Thomas to verify the resurrection. “Come, put your finger right here. I dare you!” Dares Thomas to touch those wounds, the wounds of defeat and now of victory; dares Thomas to get involved with him. Curiously, Thomas doesn’t use his finger to verify things. He uses his heart, he uses his faith, he sees what he refused to see—not a risen body, but a whole world open to him. “My Lord and My God,” he cries. You don’t see that with eyeballs, that’s for sure. Only with faith.

For me the exciting part of the story happens not with Thomas, but with Jesus’ first encounter with the disciples. He breathes on them. He blows the Holy Spirit upon them. He does this right after saying, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” I mean, don’t these words just explode as we hear them. As the Father sends Jesus—in service and love to accomplish the Father’s works—so Jesus sends us! We are sent. It’s part of Easter, and it’s part of Easter faith. Only by doing the works of Jesus—his compassion, his affirmation, his outreach, his humble service—does our doubt begin to resolve.

This is why we can be as blessed as those who saw Jesus’ actually risen body. The same sending, the same empowerment, the same faith can come to us, because the same Spirit empowers us and makes the Risen Christ present through us. It’s all right here for us, if only we give up our hesitations, our hedging, our doubts, and embrace the Risen Christ.

Renewal doesn’t stop with Lent. It goes on, even more spectacularly, in this Easter season when, week by week, we see the Easter gifts God bestows on us through the Risen Christ.

There are many things that make us flinch, make us hesitate, make us doubt. There’s a bit of Thomas in all of us. So Jesus comes before us, in his Sacrament and in his Spirit. He’s not asking for our finger, but our heart. “Come, give me your heart, and then you will begin to see Risen Life.”

B Easter

Over the past 5 weeks, the unsettling killing of Trayvon Martin has grown in our national conversation and our national conscience. It is one of those ambiguous situations that teaches us how conflicted we are as a people. We may never clearly know what happened on a Florida street, just as we may never clearly know the ambiguities, conflicts, and racial drives of the American mind right below the surface of our lives. Can the killing of a 19 year old be justified? Just who was wrong?

This contrasts strongly with the feasts we are celebrating. We may never know exactly some details of the death of Jesus, but it seems unambiguously clear what happened. A preacher from Galilee, performing remarkable signs to show a new relationship between God and humankind, utterly innocent, is unjustly murdered in a power play that still shocks us. “We want Barabbas,” the people shout, as the pieces of the plot against Jesus all fall into place.

So the contrast could not be clearer: innocence and goodness attacked by people with base and self-concerned motives; trust and faith besieged by plotting and conspiracy; the author of life, as the Scriptures put it, caught up in the forces of death. This is why Easter is the decisive event in human history. The battle has been all laid out for us—and today, in the Resurrection , we learn who wins the battle, what is the greater force, what is the foundation of our existence.

“He is not here,” the angel tells the women—angels always tell us what we cannot surmise on our own, what makes sense in God’s vision. The women worry about who will roll the rock back,--but the rock has already been rolled back. God has already acted in human history, things have already changed—when will they see it, and when will we?

For if the forces of evil are defeated, if the powers of life are established in us and for us by God through Jesus, we still often live as if this has not happened, as if the rock were still there, as if we were stuck and immobilized. The messengers—the angels—tell us that death has been overcome, but we still live caught up in the grip of death, with our attention only on the next moment, on mere survival, on the next passing trophy to enthrall us.

If Jesus is raised, if he has bestowed his Holy Spirit, if death is defeated, then why do we live so often without hope, or with only half hope, or hedging our bets, or without ultimate faith in the power of God? When do we see that the rock has been rolled back already, that God has already given us the beginnings of eternal life, that the deepest loves and values of this life are forever secure in him? He is risen! Do we believe?

This week I became one of millions of people who have seen The Hunger Games. It’s a gripping story of many levels, but a story that we Americans seem haunted by—the survivor, who will last, who will be the biggest loser, the apprentice, the one left standing at the end? But as I think about it, The Hunger Games is only partially about surviving. Kateniss wants to survive, not for herself but for her sister, for her family, for others. Isn’t this what Jesus shows us today—that our lives are always about more than survival, about living for others, as God lives for us, as Jesus gives himself to us? In Jesus we have true survival, because in Jesus, and his Rising, we finally see our world suffused with life-giving love.

B Good Friday

No writer of a Gospel gives us more of Jesus’ saying from the Cross than does John. Two of them might be particularly puzzling. “I thirst,” says Jesus. And, “It is finished.” Each of these phrases springs from themes that weave long threads in the Gospel, and they show us how John wished to present the death of Jesus—as a triumph, an accomplishment.

We cannot hear Jesus proclaim his thirst without thinking of his first sign, at Cana, when he fills a town with enough wine to party for a weekend and more. Or when he proclaims that he is himself the Fountain of Life. “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink,” he cries out; the water that gushes forth will be the Holy Spirit, the life Jesus gives through his death. The normal thirst of a dying human, whose last drops of blood and water are dripping from his body, becomes a proclamation of the gift of the Spirit. Jesus’ thirsts to bestow his Spirit, his own Life, upon us.

Throughout the Gospel Jesus has referred to his hour, his works, and his work. Jesus had a distinct mission to accomplish—to show us what God is really like and to give us the Spirit. Jesus shows us God in all his great signs. The death of Jesus is itself his last and greatest sign, the giving of himself completely—to the end—in love for the world, as a definitive sign of the Father’s love. Now he has done this, hung in shame and disgrace, the ultimate victim of human hatred and sin. Having suffered the worst, he can now show God’s life and love are even greater. “It is accomplished.” It is completed. It is finished. Jesus has won.

In just two days, we will see Jesus standing before his astonished apostles, proclaiming peace. Then he will breathe on them—a pun for the same word as Spirit—breath—wind. “Receive the Holy Spirit. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Jesus’ work now continues in us, in his people, in the Spirit bestowed upon them and giving them life.

The Spirit comes as Jesus loves us to the end, because the Spirit is love, God’s love, poured forth in his Son and now in his Spirit. When we hear Jesus’ words in this Gospel, we are hearing our own destiny as believers. Drink in his water, the waters of baptism, the waters of new life. Jesus thirsts for nothing more than this. Continue his accomplishment, love completely to the end, without any half measures. Jesus work is done, but ours, in a way, is always just beginning, the work we have yet to do in his Spirit.

Palm Sunday

After reading the shattering words of the passion, we feel overwhelmed, and empty, often at the same time. The story moves along, figure after figure, each with its own drama. Our minds, of course, cannot pick up on all these figures, so they usually settle on one person to reflect upon. One person caught up in the drama of the death of Jesus.

In Mark’s Gospel, there is one figure that always raises intrigue, the young man who was so desperate to get away that he let the authorities grab off his clothes, so he could run away almost naked. It’s only one sentence, but Christians have reflected on this figure for millennia. Who is he, was Mark signaling something, was he Mark himself at a moment of weakness?

In a way this figure is the whole lot of us. He certainly represents all the other disciples who were so desperate to get away. The women hang around; the men, with all their virility, run away. This strange figure speaks to anyone who has ever preferred our his or her own safety to any danger, and who have ever preferred themselves to the Lord. It’s easy to pay lip service; it’s hard to be faithful. What kind of absolute trust in God does it take to face danger unflinchingly?

This man certainly particularly represents us as well, getting close to Jesus but not too close, following Jesus but often with some kind of escape hatch. The naked man obviously changed at some point, otherwise Mark would not know of him; at a later point, he undoubtedly joined the followers of Jesus. He probably thought back at this moment of self-interested survival, embarrassed but changed.

Maybe his story can help us reflect, this Palm Sunday, on the changes needed in our lives so we can live with greater trust, and greater faithfulness.

Lent 5 B

It’s a situation we all dread. We’ve made a contract. A reliable company is going to repair a part of our house. We are all excited. We give the contractor a wad of money. The work begins and the house is in disarray. Then the problems start; there are delays. The work stops. We’re out of money, patience, and time; and our frustration is endless.

What about the contract? What about our agreement? What about the conditions? What about the lack of faith?

We can look upon our relationship with God as a contract; we call it a covenant. We’ve been reflecting on covenants over all these weeks of Lent. God has made an agreement with humankind, but we are like the contractor who stops showing up, the worker who quits. We frustrate the designs of God. What can be done about that?

On our part, perhaps little. On God’s part, however, everything can be done. Jeremiah tells us that God will put his love and life into our hearts. I will place my law in your hearts. I will do the work for you because you cannot. You may be like Lazarus, inside the tomb, lifeless and powerless; but God’s life comes to us in Jesus, who takes on our pain, takes on our death, and brings us to God through his faithfulness and his love.

What is the work Jesus does for us? He carries our burdens, shows the rupture between us and God, between us and life, through his sacrificial death: God takes on what breaks us, so that we may be enriched by God’s own life. He takes our death and fills us with the Spirit that gives us life. He offers us a way to finally be faithful to the love of God.

Every Sunday we renew ourselves in the new and everlasting covenant—the covenant of the blood of Jesus, his death and his life. But so many Sundays we come without consciousness, without enthusiasm, without passion—we get too used to what God has done for us. Lent gives us this opportunity to realize what God has done in Jesus, and to make his work our work, his death our death, and his life our life. Lent gives us the opportunity to renew our discipleship.

Perhaps we will never be totally satisfied with our dealings with others. Perhaps others will always let us down. But it can be otherwise with our dealings with God. In Christ, we can give to God what we must—our hearts, our dreams, our love. When we do, in Christ the servant, we finally are set free.

Lent B4

“Strike,” yells the umpire. Boos echo throughout the ballpark. “That wasn’t a strike; it was a ball. You could see how high it was,” people yell from around the park. So America’s favorite pastime starts up, baseball, a game of careful watching and close scrutiny. Most of the time, umpires and fans agree. But do we not all enjoy the endless arguments that arise when the ump sees one thing, and everyone else sees another?

Of course, we all deal with not seeing things clearly from time to time. The sun shines on our car window, our bi-focals give us split images, we cannot find a pen that is right under our noses. When it comes to declining sharpness, it’s hard to know if our eyes are worse than our brains.

But what about deliberate blindness? Not the blindness that comes from losing one’s physical sight, as in the famous Gospel image, being born blind. But rather the blindness that simply refuses to see? How can we begin to understand this? If the man born blind stands as an image of someone unable to see, Nicodemus stands as an image of an enlightenment that we refuse. It’s the refusal of enlightenment that Lent wants to challenge.

We find a sober reflection from the second book of Chronicles, one of the later history books in the Hebrew Scriptures; it’s a blunt acknowledgement of the failure to live up to the covenants that God made with Israel, covenants we have been reflecting on in a particular way this Lent. Did it take that kind of devastation for people to recognize how far they drifted from God? The passage talks about the generations spent in Exile, after Jerusalem is destroyed 580 years before Christ, and how Cyrus, a pagan leader, finally let the Jewish people return home. Did it take total collapse?

Chronicles can see its blindness so clearly, looking back; but what helps us see the blindness of our own lives? Because we all adjust our vision, allowing in only so much light, not wishing the light to shine on the little, and big, compromises we have made in our own following of Jesus. Where does this blindness come from? Of course, it’s our willfulness, our pride, our insistence that we be the centers of our own world. It’s substituting our small vision for the brilliance of divine light.

Lent challenges this blindness. It probes the edges of our comfort, the distorted eyeglasses we wear looking at life, and God. It proclaims that God has given us Jesus, the eternal Son, as our brother and guide; it reminds us that we all walk, as Ephesians says, in the grace of God, or else we walk in delusion.

What do I want to see? What do I want to avoid seeing? Will I take the time to look into my own heart? Will I take the time to behold God’s abundant love, given to us in Jesus, as God’s eternal covenant offered to all of humankind—offered to me? Do I prefer the darkness?

Strikes, balls, touchdowns, and puts—we can argue about all of those. But not about God’s unbounded love. That’s there, for everyone to see, if only we’d just open our eyes, or, better, let God open them for us.