21 January 2015

A Call, Not a Text

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Until I was around 25 years old, I was convinced that I was never going to have a cell phone plan that included texting.  No one texted me, and I didn’t text anyone.  It seemed like texting was really pointless.  Why not just call and talk to the person?  What was so wrong about physically hearing the voice of the other person, and what was so right about typing out a short message to the other person?  I don’t know when that exactly changed, but I remember thinking how much easier it was to ask a person if they wanted to go out to dinner, rather than going through the whole formality of, “Hi!  How you doin’?  Thanks, I’m doing well.  Hey, I was just wondering if you had dinner plans tonight.  No?  Where would you want to go?  Yeah, that’s a good place, but I just went there last week.  Want to try a different place?  Or what are you in the mood for?  Italian sounds great.  Meet you at the restaurant at 5?  Oh, ok; 5:30 then?  Great.  Talk to you later!  Bye!!”  Now it’s just, “Dinner? Italian? What time? Cya then.”  
Texting has seemed to replace calling.  Usually the only phone calls I get are from much older family members, businesses at work, and emergency calls.  Almost everyone else texts.  And yet, it means more when there’s a call.  Calling is to texting what a letter is to an email.  It just shows so much more commitment and personalization.  
Today’s readings focus us on a call from God, especially the first reading of the call of Samuel, and the Gospel with the calling of the first disciples of Jesus.  But in each case, God doesn’t send a text to Samuel, nor does Jesus text Andrew and Peter.  He personally invites them to a special relationship with him.  In the case of Samuel, God calls Samuel to be a prophet.  In the case of the disciples, Jesus calls them to leave everything behind and follow Him.  Even the Psalm takes up this theme, as we heard, “Sacrifice or offering you wished not, but ears open to obedience you gave me.  Holocausts or sin-offerings you sought not; then said I, ‘Behold I come.’”  There is a call from God that is meant for a response.
There are many calls that God makes to us.  And each involves us personally.  It’s not a group message.  When we are baptized, our name is spoken out loud in the church for the first time.  And God calls that child by name to be a saint, a holy man or woman.  That is our universal call or vocation to holiness.  When we are confirmed, our name is called once more and we are given the mission of proclaiming Jesus by how we live our lives and what we say.  That is our vocation to be evangelists.  When we commit to a vocation, after God has led us there, our name is spoken once more, and we are given a specific way of glorifying God.  We can glorify God through a vocation to serve the Church as a Deacon or a Priest in the Sacrament of Holy Order; to put on Christ in a special way, as Christ the Servant or as Christ the Head.  We can glorify God through a vocation to serve the Church as a consecrated man or woman, as a monk or nun, as a brother or sister, or as a consecrated virgin; to dedicate our entire life to Jesus and give Him all that we are.  We can glorify God through a vocation to marriage to serve the Church by witnessing Christ’s love for His Church, a love which sacrifices all for the other; to cooperate with God in forming new life and new disciples of Jesus.  Whether in the Sacrament of Holy Order, the Sacrament of Marriage, or consecrated life, God personally invites us to these ways of life as our names are proclaimed in the church.  
But in addition to the large scale calls, what we might call the macro-calls, there are also the small scale calls, what we might call the micro-calls.  These are the daily calls that God makes in our life to follow Him in a particular way.  Maybe He’s calling us to help someone at work going through a difficult time; to stop gossiping; to love more; to share; to pray for someone.  Each day the Lord invites us to follow Him.  And each day we say yes we are responding to the large scale call.  But whether macro or micro, each call requires a response.  There is no conversation with a person if we don’t answer the phone call.  There is no conversation with God if we don’t listen to what He wants to say to us and respond.  Sometimes it will come in a very powerful way that is out of the ordinary like with Samuel.  Sometimes it will come in a very mundane way that doesn’t seem like a big deal, like when Jesus told Andrew, “‘Come, and you will see.’”

Through the Eucharist which we will receive, God is extending a call to grow more deeply in union with Him, and is giving us the strength through the Body and Blood of His Son to respond to that call.  This week I encourage you to listen for the call of God.  It won’t come impersonally like in a text, but will be a personal invitation from God to love Him more and share that love with others.

13 January 2015

Sensing God's Presence

Feast of the Baptism of the Lord
Today we come to the end of the Season of Christmas.  It’s the shortest season of the year, usually only lasting 20 or so days.  This year it was only 17 days.  And yet, what we celebrate at Christmas changes everything.  It is more monumental to human history than the discovery of fire; than Aeneas traveling to Italy from Troy or Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon; than the Battles of Lepanto and Vienna stopping the Muslim invasion into Europe; than the storming of Normandy on 6 June; than the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the resignation of Richard Nixon; than the terrorist attacks on 9/11.  
The Incarnation was bigger than all those world-changing events.  God Himself was able to be seen in His Son, Jesus.  When you looked at Jesus, you saw God.  When you heard Jesus, you heard God.  When you touched Jesus, as so many people did for healing, as Mary did in holding her baby, you touched God.  This was a radical change from what had come before.  And it changed radically what would come after.
Because of the Incarnation, God communicated Himself through physical reality.  This includes the Sacraments.  Through the Sacraments, we experience God.  And this is an effect of the Incarnation.  Water remains H20, but by the power of the Holy Spirit and the ministry of the priest, it also gives God's grace and makes a person a child of God and a member of the Church for all eternity.  Olive oil remains what it is, but becomes a vehicle of God’s grace to strengthen, console, and anoint a person for a mission in the Church.  A promise between one man and one woman remains a valid agreement between two free people, but is strengthened by God’s grace to allow the married couple to share God’s grace with others just by living their married life with God.  The Sacraments are possible because of the Incarnation.  In the Sacraments we encounter God and share in the events of the life of Jesus Christ.  As Pope St. Leo the Great said, “Our Redeemers’s visible presence has passed into the sacraments.”  Every time we celebrate a Sacrament, we are coming into contact with the Risen Lord.
God uses material things to make Himself known.  That is the great news of the Incarnation.  He made us to come to know reality by our senses.  There is nothing that we know that we did not learn, at least at its heart, by our senses.  Numbers, which are immaterial, are learned through physical things: if we add one orange to one orange, we get two oranges.  We learn about history through hearing.  We learn to do so much by experiencing it.  God knows that we learn through our senses because He created us this way.  And so He continues to come to us through our senses.  
Look at today’s celebration, the Baptism of the Lord.  When Jesus is baptized, the Holy Spirit, like a dove, descends, and God the Father’s voice is heard.  God makes Himself known.  St. John talks about this in our second reading, when he says that, “there are three that testify, the Spirit, the water, and the blood.”  Even the blood of Jesus, a blood that was seen poured out, and the water the flowed from the side of Jesus, and the Spirit who rent in two the veil of the temple, make known God’s presence.  God does not leave us simply to imagine that He exists, imagine that He comes to us, imagine that he loves us.  God shows us that love by physical signs.  God’s presence is effective.  His Word, another way God communicates through our senses, changes us, just as Isaiah prophesied in the first reading: “just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down and do not return there till they have watered the earth…so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me void.”

In the Sacraments, we are meant to have an encounter with Christ, no less than when John the Baptist and the people at the Jordan River saw Jesus rising from the waters, saw the Spirit descending like a dove, and heard the voice from the heavens.  In the Sacraments, especially the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we are meant to experience Jesus who helps us to know if we are called to be a priest, a consecrated man or woman, or married.  In the Sacraments, Christ wants to strengthen our priesthood, our consecration, and our marriages.  But we have to be open.  God wants to reveal Himself to you in the Sacraments.  Today, as we prepare to receive the Eucharist, ask God to reveal Himself to you.  If you are open to His presence in the Sacraments, you will know of His presence.  

Show Off

Epiphany of the Lord
Being a show-off is not a good thing.  Doing something just to grab attention to yourself for some talent that you have is not something for which people usually praise you.  But today is the exception to the rule.  Today, the Lord is a show-off, or rather, is shown off, as we celebrate the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord.  In fact, the very word epiphany comes from two Greek words (epi and phanos) which is most commonly translated as to reveal or to manifest, but could also be translated as to show off.  
The Epiphany celebrates three times that God showed Himself off.  We’re all familiar with the first one: when Jesus revealed Himself to the Magi, the three Wise Men, who came from the East and presented Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  This is what we usually associate with this celebration.  But the Epiphany also celebrates when Jesus manifested Himself at the Wedding at Cana, where He turned water into wine, as well as the manifestation of Jesus in His Baptism in the Jordan River.  That last aspect our Western Church focuses on in a special way next Sunday on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, but in the Eastern Church, where this feast originated, all three were celebrated.
But notice that when Jesus shows off, it is not a matter of bragging, as is often the case when we show off.  When Jesus shows off, something else points to Him and makes His presence known.  When we talk about Jesus showing off to the Wise Men, it was really the star that pointed out the newborn King of the Jews.  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph didn’t go through the streets proclaiming Jesus as the new monarch of Israel.  The Magi had to follow the star, and when it finally came to rest, they recognized Jesus as the King of Kings, though He was in such a lowly circumstance.  When we talk about Jesus showing off at His Baptism, it is not Jesus who says, “I am the Beloved Son of God; listen to me!”  Instead, the Holy Spirit descends like a dove over Jesus, and the voice of God the Father is heard from the heavens declaring that Jesus is the Beloved Son of God and that we ought to listen to Him.  When we talk about Jesus showing off at the Wedding at Cana, it is not Jesus who says, “look what I can do!”  It is Mary, the Mother of God, who tells the servants, “Do whatever He tells you.”  When Jesus reveals who He is, He never does so on His own to draw attention to Himself.  Rather, He lets His heavenly Father and his Blessed Mother make Him known to others.  Jesus is not an attention junkie.
The question for us is whether or not we make Jesus known.  If Jesus doesn’t really bring attention to Himself, but lets others draw people into knowing who He is, then it is our responsibility to show off Jesus.  We are called to be like the star, or the voice of the Father, or the Blessed Mother, in helping others know who Jesus is.  We are called to be the evangelists, the ones who spread the Good News about who Jesus is.  We are called to help others to know that their mundane life, full of suffering and sorrow, is not all there is, but that God has so much more planned for them, even if none of their earthly circumstances change.  An unemployed person without Jesus can become bitter, despondent, and melancholic because nothing is going right for that person in helping him or her to provide for self or family.  An unemployed person with Jesus still may not have a job, but knows that God is in charge, and that, if the person continues to turn to God and offer those sufferings to Him, that something will happen for the betterment of that person.  A sick person without Jesus simply has a lack of good health that may or may not change based upon what medicine can offer.  A sick person with Jesus still does not have good health, but sees that sickness as a way to offer up suffering to God who can make it beneficial to eternal salvation.  Having Jesus makes all the difference in the world, and it is our call by our baptism to share Jesus with others so that they have hope in the midst of suffering.
One way that we show off Jesus is by talking about Him with other people.  That may seem odd for us Catholics.  It may seem very Protestant.  But the first disciples were not so driven to build a church building; they were driven to show off Jesus by talking about Him to others and sharing the wonderful things He had done in their lives.  When they showed Jesus off, others wanted that joy, that new outlook on life, and they joined the Church.  Whether it was Jews or Gentiles, slaves or free, when people heard about this Jesus who conquered sin and death and gave people freedom to live a truly happy life, they wanted it.
Pope Bl. Paul VI, Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis have all encouraged us to participate in the New Evangelization.  One way that we, as a parish, are going to participate in this together is by participating in faith-sharing small groups this Lent.   Next week we are going to have a sheet to fill out which will give our contact information and in which interest group we would prefer to share our faith.  The groups will be for 6-10 people, so they won’t be too large for you introverts, but will be large enough for extraverts to be able to share.  It will focus us on the love of God and the difference that love makes.  After Lent is over, there will be more opportunities for different kinds of faith-sharing groups to meet.  And the whole point is that we get in the practice of showing off Jesus to those we know, so that when God calls us to, we can share that faith with others whom we may not know as well.  

When Jesus shows off it is not about vainglory or bragging.  Jesus allows others to point Him out so that they can find happiness and joy.  May we show off Jesus by what we do and what we say.