31 May 2016

Bread: Not As Ordinary as You Might Think

Solemnity of Corpus Christi
One of my favorite foods from my pilgrimages to the Holy Land is the bread.  The way it is made, we would likely call it pita bread, but it’s an unleavened bread that has a pocket in it, though it’s totally enclosed until you rip into it.  It puts Wonderbread to shame in my opinion.  Of course, it’s not made just for sandwiches.  It’s also for dipping into hummus, sopping up some of the sauce or gravy with the food, and other ways of eating.  It’s the same type of bread that you can get at Middle Eastern restaurants like the Beirut in Toledo.  And while Adrian has more restaurants than you can shake a stick at, there’s no place that really sells good, Middle Eastern bread that I have found.
It may seem odd to focus so much on bread.  Bread is so ordinary.  No matter what kind it is, most people expect it with their meal, even if sometimes as a roll.  As much as I go on about bread, there is nothing too special about it.  And yet, Jesus used bread as one of the elements, or what theologians call the matter, of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood.
Our readings today on the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ all revolve around bread (and also wine).  In our first reading, Melchizedek, a prefigurement of Jesus, offers bread and wine, and then blesses Abram.  A good chunk of the Letter to the Hebrews focuses on this small passage we heard from Genesis, and what it prefigured.  And we, as Catholics, should have our sacramental sense tingle every time we hear bread and wine in the Old Testament.
St. Paul in our second reading recalls Jesus instituting the Eucharist, that Jesus offered bread and wine, but no longer referred to it as bread and wine, but as His Body and Blood.  And the Gospel we heard is the multiplication of the loaves and fish.  Now, to be clear, Jesus did not use fish as a part of the Eucharist, though maybe it does explain why Catholics love having fish fries.  But Jesus multiplies the bread, bread which satisfied everyone who was there, around five thousand men, not counting the women and children.  
Why bread?  Why did Jesus choose bread as part of the matter of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood?  We can only speculate, but many have thought over the years that it has to do with the different aspects of bread.  In the first place, bread is ordinary.  It was a staple of the Middle Eastern diet.  God takes the ordinary, and makes it extraordinary.  He does that with bread, but He also does that with us.  God takes our bread, our ordinary lives, whatever they entail, and He accepts them from me, your priest, and then returns it to you, no longer bread, but the Body of Christ; no longer your common life, but transformed.  Bread is a metaphor for us: nothing special, but common.
In the second place, we can look at how bread is made.  In a document of disputed origins called The Didache, some parts probably dating from the 5th century, others dating from the 12th or 13th century, there is a prayer that purports to be said at the Eucharist.  Part of the prayer reads, “As this broken bread was scattered over the hills and then, when gathered, became one mass, so may Thy Church be gathered from the ends of the earth into Thy Kingdom.”  This prayer examines how bread is made.  First, the grain is scattered across the field.  Then it is gathered together.  After it is gathered, it has to be crushed to make flour.  Then flour is added to water, is baked, and then you get bread.  Humanity, too, is scattered across the field of the world.  But Jesus unites what was scattered; He gathers all of humanity in Himself, and gives them the opportunity to be one with Him through faith.  Humanity, too, is broken, often crushed.  We each have our own crosses in life, the ways in which we suffer.  When we unite our suffering with the waters of Baptism, our participation in the suffering and death of Christ, and are warmed by the love of Jesus, we become one loaf of bread, bound together in the Kingdom of God.
Wine, too, has a rich symbolism, as it is taken from grapes on the vine (we recall Jesus saying that He is the Vine, we are the branches), crushed and pressed into wine which, as the psalms say, gives joy to the heart.  But maybe I can talk about wine in a different homily.

So maybe bread isn’t so common.  It certainly has a vast symbolism which is perhaps why God chose to use it so often in the Old and New Testaments.  Whenever we hear bread, hopefully our minds will immediately think about the Eucharist and about Jesus’ abiding presence with us.  As we walk through the streets of Adrian today in our Walk with Jesus, we will follow what looks like a small piece of unleavened bread.  But we know by faith, that it is no longer bread, but is truly Jesus’ Body.  May our joy for what Jesus did with bread, changing it into His Body, be manifest when we come to Mass, when we walk with Jesus today, and even in our daily lives, that we might truly be a Eucharistic people, a people who are always grateful and on the lookout for the presence of the Lord.

17 May 2016

Not Only the Externals

Solemnity of Pentecost–During the Day
If there’s one thing Jesus got after the Pharisees about time and time again in the Gospel, it was doing only the external things, without having the internal change of heart and life.  I know that it is very easy for me to think, “How could you simply do the religious deeds on the outside, without letting it change you on the inside?”.  And yet, how many times does the same thing happen to us at Pentecost?  Many people wear red for Pentecost, to match the vestments of the priest, and to remind themselves of the Holy Spirit, who is always celebrated with the color red.  But how many of us go beyond the externals of wearing red, and actually try to have the Holy Spirit be a more active part of their lives?  There’s nothing wrong with wearing red on Pentecost, but if it’s all we do, then we’re in the same boat as the Pharisees.
In our faith life, we can be like a story from the Acts of the Apostles.  St. Paul was preaching in Ephesus, and finds some disciples.  He asks them, “‘Did you receive the holy Spirit when you became believers?’  They answered him, ‘We have never even heard that there is a holy Spirit.’”  We’ve probably heard of the Holy Spirit, but how many of us live like we don’t even know He exists.  As I asked a few weeks ago, how many of us pray to the Holy Spirit?  
Catholics can sometimes be afraid, I think, of the Holy Spirit.  We see Pentecostals doing what we consider to be weird sorts of stuff when they claim to have the Holy Spirit.  Catholics who belong the Charismatic Renewal will sometimes talk in tongues, or will heal people, or speak about a “word from God” or a prophecy.  Because many Catholics don’t have those gifts or talk in that way, it can seem quite strange to us.  But unless we believe that the Holy Spirit decided to call it quits after the age of the Apostles, then there’s no reason why those gifts cannot be active in the Church today.  Maybe none of us have any of those gifts; maybe some of us do.  But those special charisms, those special gifts which are meant to be used for the building up of the Church, are still active, as are many other gifts in the Church, all given to us by the Holy Spirit.

In one sense, we should all be Charismatic Catholics.  Not necessarily in the sense that we need to attend Christ the King parish in Ann Arbor, but in the sense that we should live a Spirit-filled life.  It is the Spirit who helps us to pray as we ought, the Spirit who gives us strength to resist temptation and sin, the Spirit who gives us the courage to proclaim Christ by what we say and by what we do.  If we do not have a relationship with the Holy Spirit, then all those things which God calls us to do by baptism and confirmation, will be impossible.  
We might be scared; we might think we don’t have what it takes.  So did the Apostles.  Why do you think they were hiding in the upper room?  Jesus told them to return to Jerusalem and wait for the Holy Spirit, but they didn’t necessarily have to all stay in the same place.  Still, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they were so overcome with joy that people thought they were drunk.  They heard them proclaiming Jesus in many different languages, the languages of the pilgrims who had come from Jerusalem from all over the world.  
God wants us to live a Spirit-filled life.  The Spirit gives us the grace we need to be saints.  He brings the peace of Christ.  He forgives sins.  We need the Holy Spirit.  Adrian needs more people on fire with the Holy Spirit in order to be transformed.  Without the Holy Spirit, we cannot be the people God wants us to be.  Without the Holy Spirit, we will remain timid and stay in the upper room, instead of going to those we know to introduce them to Christ or to strengthen their relationship with him.  We need to be reminded of what Jesus told us, and be taught by Jesus, rather than by our fallen world.  

Pray for the seven-fold gift of the Holy Spirit.  Pray that God pours His Holy Spirit upon all the residents of Adrian, that they will be alive with His love and power to transform this city into the city God wants it to be.  Pray to the Holy Spirit and grow in relationship with Him so that we will not be like the Pharisees who have the externals down but are dead inside.  Pray to the Holy Spirit to give you new life!

A Tour of Salvation History with the Holy Spirit

Solemnity of Pentecost–At the Vigil
Why?  That is the question in some of your minds right now.  Why so many readings?  This may remind some of you of the Easter Vigil.  But this is the Pentecost Vigil, and it is one of two Masses in the year that the Church gives us the option of an extended Liturgy of the Word, to hear the Word of God and meditate on it to a greater extent than usual.  Just as we prepared for and began our celebration of one of the great mysteries of our faith, the Resurrection of Jesus, with an extended time of prayer, so as we prepare for and begin our celebration of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples, we have an extended time of prayer.
The introduction that I said at the beginning of Mass, also reminds us that tonight, as we gather, we are following the example of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Apostles and disciples, who were waiting for Jesus’ promised gift of the Spirit, who would be their Advocate, and help them to proclaim Jesus to the world.  We are invited to relive all of salvation history in a quick glance, and see how God’s promise of the Holy Spirit was from the beginning and continued through the Old Testament, as was the Resurrection of Jesus.
The readings that we heard tonight tell us something about how the Holy Spirit acts in us, as He acted in the Apostles.  The Holy Spirit unifies what sin divided.  In Genesis, sinful humanity tried to get to God on their own terms by building a tower to the heavens.  But it didn’t work.  We cannot get to God on our own terms.  And where our sinful pride led to the multiplication of languages, the Holy Spirit, given at Pentecost, allowed the Gospel, the new of way life and the way to eternal life with the Father, to be proclaimed so that all could understand.  
The Holy Spirit is the source of power, and consecrates the People of God.  In Exodus, we are told of how God’s people are called to be a “‘kingdom of priests, a holy nation.’”  And Mount Sinai gets wrapped in smoke and thunder and fire, with trumpet blasts, so much that the people are afraid to approach God.  Through Baptism, we are made priests, so that we can offer our spiritual sacrifices in union with the perfect sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, and we are given power from on high.
The Holy Spirit is the giver of life.  If we are just flesh and bone, then we do not have life.  But if the Spirit of God fills us, then we are no longer zombies, no longer the walking dead, but are filled with life.  When God first made us, He breathed His life into us.  We lost that divine life when Adam and Eve disobeyed God.  But through the Holy Spirit, new life is given to us.  Finnian will receive that new life today as he is baptized, so that he is not dead in his sin, but alive in Christ.
The Holy Spirit helps us to understand the things of God.  In the Old Testament, only certain people were able to speak for God, and they were called the prophets.  God would speak to individuals like Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Joel, and they would pass on what God had said.  But in this new age after the Resurrection, all of God’s people have access to His voice, and have the possibility of seeing with the eyes of God.  All flesh has the possibility to receive the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is a well-spring of life.  We cannot live without water.  But Jesus promises the Holy Spirit will be a river of living water flowing from within us.  It will give us new life so that we can truly live, not for ourselves, but for God.  The Holy Spirit helps us to believe in God the Father and His Son, Jesus, and to quench our thirst for the infinite and the eternal, that can only be satisfied in God.

All of what I mentioned happens today as Finnian is baptized.  Finnian is united to God, receives power and consecration to be a member of God’s priestly people, receives new life, is able to understand the things of God, and is given the ability to live for God.  All of that happened to us when we were baptized.  And it was given to us in a new way in the Sacrament of Confirmation.  Union with God, power and consecration, new life, seeing things through God’s eyes, and living for God are all possible because of the great gift of the Holy Spirit, who continues the work of Jesus.  That work is continued in us.  Will you cooperate with the Holy Spirit in proclaiming the Gospel and living as a disciples of Jesus, as the disciples did after they received the Holy Spirit?  Will you put into action in your life what was foreshadowed in the Old Testament?  Will you receive the Holy Spirit?

10 May 2016

Mom and Jesus Lead us Home

Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord
One of the great things about mothers is that they generally know how to make a house into a home.  Whether as a family you have as much money as Warren Buffett, or you’re struggling to make ends meet, a mother has a way of making a place feel comfortable, and making it a place where you want to return.  Home is the place you know you can go back, even if things aren’t going so well.  It’s the place where there is love and acceptance of the person, even if not everything the person does is accepted.  Home, as the saying goes, is where the heart is, and where mom is, there is always a lot of heart.
Today, in the convergence of the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord and Mother’s Day, we celebrate in the fact that Jesus has prepared a home for us, and is waiting for us to go there.  We have not been there, but the disciples saw Him go there.  Jesus ascended into heaven, our true home, and wants us to go there.  Heaven is the place of ultimate love, as those who live there forever are embraced by God, who is Love Itself.  Jesus is not our mother, but He wanted to show us the way home.  He has taken our Blessed Mother there, body and soul through the assumption, just as He is present there through the Ascension.  There are members of our Catholic family there already, the saints, both those who are canonized and those who are known only to God, hopefully including our mothers who have gone before us.  
But Jesus hasn’t shown us the way so much in a physical manner.  He did ascend, body and soul, into heaven, but it’s not as if we shoot up in a space shuttle that we can get to Him.  He has shown us the way in the manner He lived His life.  We are meant to imitate Jesus’ life, and in that way, we follow the way that Jesus has shown us to our home.  If we follow Jesus’ teachings in Scripture, some of which can be pretty hard, then we’re on our way, because, as Jesus Himself said, He is the way.  If we love others and God loves us; if we do not hate each other; if we are humble, poor in spirit, clean of heart; if we live marriage as God created it from the beginning; if we pray for those who persecute us; if we are willing to suffer for the ones we love, even to the point of death; then we are no longer living our life; we are living the life of Jesus, and, as St. Paul says, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  And if Christ lives in us, then we will know the way home to Him in heaven.
In the meantime, our Mother, the Church, helps us to allow Christ to live in us.  It cannot be forced.  No one can force us to live life in imitation of Jesus.  Holy Mother Church helps us through her laws, her rules, but also through her liturgy.  The Letter to the Hebrews talks about how Jesus entered into the true sanctuary in heaven.  And in the Solemnity of the Ascension, we celebrate that Christ is seated forever at the right hand of the Father to intercede for us.  Because He is there, in the heavenly sanctuary, our true home, we can enter through His way, to participate in His worship as High Priest of the New Covenant in His Blood.
In the liturgy, we are given a taste of heaven.  Of course, this isn’t heaven; this is Adrian (to paraphrase the movie “Field of Dreams”).  And because we live in a fallen world, even our liturgy is a shadow of the eternal liturgy in our heavenly home, which will be perfect.  But we get a taste of heaven in the Mass, where God is made known to us, just as He gives Himself to us in His Word and the Body and Blood of Jesus.  We get a taste of heaven in the Mass as we gather in a community, part of the communion of saints.  Of course, in heaven the only ones there will be perfected, and none of us is there yet.  But still, we get a taste of being in the communion of the saints of heaven as we gather here on earth.  We get a taste of heaven through the light, shining through our stained-glass windows, giving us a glimpse of what a glorified body might look light through the images of the saints that we have in our stained-glass windows.  We get a taste of heaven as we have union with (communion) God.  In all these ways, Holy Mother Church prepares us for the home that her Groom, Jesus, has prepared for us.

Sadly, and some of you know this all too well, sometimes children don’t go home.  Sometimes they choose to stay away from home for a variety of reasons.  And God will not force us to go home to heaven.  If we choose to live our own life, a life in contradiction to what Jesus teaches us, then we will not go home, will not go to the place of love and joy and peace.  But I pray that, by the power of the Holy Sprit, we will use the grace God gives us to live the life of Christ, to let Christ live in us, so that we can go to the place God has prepared for us, the love and joy and peace of heaven, our true home.

Don't Forget the Holy Spirit!

Sixth Sunday of Easter
No one likes to be ignored.  But if there’s one Person of the Blessed Trinity that we often ignore, it’s the Holy Spirit.  We tend to always remember the Father in our prayers, especially the Our Father, or sometimes we’ll just refer to Him as God.  Jesus, as the one who took flesh and was our means of being reconnected to the Father is usually at the front of our minds as well.  But the Holy Spirit tends to get left out.  How many prayers do we being with some form of: Dear Holy Spirit…?  Probably not many, if any, while we are very comfortable with beginning prayers with: Dear God… or Heavenly Father… or Lord Jesus.  
It’s important, then, that in these last few Sundays of our Easter Season, the Church really focuses in on the Holy Spirit.  Of course, every Mass we begin with the Holy Spirit, and He’s mentioned in the Gloria, and our opening prayers always say “in the unity of the Holy Spirit.”  But the readings in these weeks also remind us that the Holy Spirit is God and guides the Church in a special way since the Ascension of Jesus.
Our first reading reminds us of the role of the Holy Spirit in guiding what we are to believe as Catholics and how we are to live as Catholics.  Having discussed whether or not the Gentiles (the non-Jews) had to be circumcised and follow Judaic laws, and with the testimony of St. Peter, St. James sends a message to the Jews who had become Christians about what is required for Gentiles to become Christians.  And he writes specifically, that it was “‘“the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us not to place on you any burden beyond these necessities, namely, to abstain from meat sacrificed to idols, from blood, from meats of strangled animals, and from unlawful marriage.”’”  It was not simply a group of old men getting together and thinking of the most pragmatic thing to do.  It was the Holy Spirit, the love shared between the Father and the Son, who guided the apostles to decide that Gentiles did not have to become Jewish and follow those laws to become Christians.  In other words, every time you eat a cheese burger or bacon (which Jews cannot do because it’s contrary to kosher laws), you should thank the Holy Spirit.
But the Holy Spirit did not stop guiding the Church with this decision.  Throughout the 2,000 year history of the Church, the Holy Spirit has continued to guide the successor of St. Peter, the Pope, and the successors of the apostles, the bishops, in making decisions about what we are to believe and how we are to live.  Some of those teachings are crystallized in the Creed.  But also in all the 21 Ecumenical Councils, from Nicaea I in AD 325 to Vatican II in the 1960s, and even in Papal pronouncements in between, the Holy Spirit has continued to teach the Church everything and remind the Church of what Jesus told us.  He has guided us on how many books to have in the Bible; who Jesus is; how many Sacraments were instituted by Jesus; Mary’s Immaculate Conception and Assumption; that only men can be ordained priests; that marriage is between one man and one woman for life; all these are part of Jesus’ words, which the Holy Spirit has helped us to understand and which the Holy Spirit has guided the Pope and the bishops to proclaim as being what is necessary to be believed if we wish to truly call ourselves Catholic.  The Holy Spirit and the successors of the apostles, the foundation of the heavenly Jerusalem, work together to continue Jesus’ teachings into new times and new cultures.
But the work of the Holy Spirit is not limited to the Pope and bishops.  The Holy Spirit wants to give us life.  He helps us to understand what is right and wrong in our conscience.  We receive the Holy Spirit in baptism, and a new gift in the Sacrament of Confirmation, to help us as individuals know what is God’s will in our daily actions and in the major decisions of life: what vocation we should choose, how to use our gifts and talents in a job, how to educate and raise our family.  Of course, the Holy Spirit would never contradict Himself, and we as individuals do not have the gift of infallibility, as the bishops in union with the Pope, and even the Pope by himself on matters of faith and morals has.  So if our conscience is ever telling us to do something that is contrary to what the Church officially teaches as to what we need to believe or how we need to live, we should do some major research on what the Church teaches and why, because it is more likely to be right than what we think our conscience is saying.  But the Holy Spirit is in us, too, and wants to make our living of the Gospel a joy-filled experience.  The Holy Spirit wants to give us the power to say yes to God and no to our fallen nature and to evil.  And by virtue of our Baptism, all we need to do is ask the Holy Spirit to strengthen us.  

It may not come as naturally, but may we also pray to the Holy Spirit, especially when we are making choices.  We can pray in our own words, in conversation with the Holy Spirit, or we can also use that wonderful prayer to the Holy Spirit that we said as a Diocese a few years ago, and which I will lead today.  Please join in if you remember: Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faith, and enkindle in them the fire of your love.  Send forth your spirit, and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.  O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit, did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that, by the same Holy Spirit, we may be truly wise and ever enjoy His consolations.  Through Christ our Lord.  Amen.