27 December 2016

"Lord, help me get one more"

Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord
One of the questions I am commonly asked is what I do on my days off.  And when I get the chance, I like to see a good movie (when there are good movies out).  In early November I saw a movie called “Hacksaw Ridge.”  It’s based on a true story about a Seventh-Day Adventist, Pfc. Desmond T. Doss, who wants to be a medic in the Army during World War II.  Unfortunately, the Army makes a mistake (even though, as one character states, the Army doesn’t make mistakes), and he is assigned to an infantry division.  I don’t want to ruin the movie for you, but I will say that at one point during the movie, as Private Doss is stationed at a Pacific island, his division tries to take an elevated position, Hacksaw Ridge, which the Japanese have held on to despite multiple sorties.  As the healthy soldiers evacuate after being pushed back, again, by the Japanese, Doss states, at the top of that ridge, “Lord, help me get one more.”  And he rushes back, into enemy territory, to try to save injured members of his division.  He pulls them back, one at a time, and lowers them down the ridge, and then always goes back to find another soldier while saying, “Lord, help me get one more.”  

Now, it might seem odd to talk about a war movie on Christmas Eve/Day.  And this movie is certainly not a Christmas movie.  It’s Rated R for good reason: it’s one of the bloodiest movies I’ve seen in a while.  Children should not see it.  But that line has stuck with me since I saw it: “Lord, help me get one more.”
The Letter to the Hebrews states that, “In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets; in these last days, he has spoken to us through the Son.”  All of the Old Testament was a story about God seeking His people, who had fled Him because of their sins, and the people seeking God, who was no longer able to walk among them because of their sins.  All of the Old Testament pointed to God ending this separation by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, the Word through whom all things were made, as St. John says in the Prologue of his account of the Gospel.  It is as if Jesus, God-made-man, God-with-us, was saying about us to His heavenly Father, “Lord, help me get one more.”  We were not injured in a pitched battle, but were beat up by our sins and Satan, who enticed us into evil, but then accused us after we gave into temptation.  We could not save ourselves, and we were dying in the battlefield of the world.  So Jesus came to us to save us.  He came for all of us, but we can also say He came for each one of us individually.  We are the one more Jesus came to help.  
Jesus helped us by being the light to those who walked in darkness, by destroying the yoke of sin and death which enslaved us, by being born as a defenseless child in a part of the world that no one cared about.  Seeing how wretched we were, how lost we were, how injured we were, Jesus could not help but enter our world of sin and sorrow, though He had no sin Himself, and give us the healing, without which our souls would perish eternally.
“Lord, help me get one more,” was fulfilled in the Blessed Virgin Mary, in Joseph, Jesus’ foster-father, in Zechariah, in Elizabeth, in the shepherds, in the magi, and in all those who came into contact with Jesus.  Jesus, whether as an infant at His Nativity, or as a man in His earthly ministry, or hanging on the cross in the sacrifice that put an end to sin and death, came to offer every person the gift of eternal salvation.  Jesus came to rescue us from Hacksaw Ridge.
But Jesus offering to help us didn’t end when He ascended into heaven.  Jesus established a Church to continue His saving work, by the power of the Holy Spirit.  He gave His apostles, who gave to their successors, the bishops, and their assistants, the priests, the authority to act in His name.  They are the ones now who are called to live out, “Lord, help me get one more.”  As long as there is a human on earth who has not come into contact with Jesus, Jesus remains on Hacksaw Ridge to help one more.
Tonight/Today, as at every Mass, Jesus comes to us under the appearance of bread and wine, which are truly the Body and Blood of Jesus.  Every time Mass is celebrated, Jesus becomes flesh once more, and so says to the Father, “Lord, help me get one more.”  He offers to heal our wounds through sacramental confession, and then gives us the food that strengthens us, because we are allowed to partake of Jesus’ own divinity, and puts us on the road to heaven, where there is no more battle, no more Hacksaw Ridge.  

If you’re here tonight/today as a Catholic who attends Mass every week, Jesus is here to heal you and strengthen you; He is here to save you.  If you’re here tonight/today as a Catholic who has been away from the Church or doesn’t come that often, Jesus loves you no less, and wants to heal you through the Sacrament of Penance, and strengthen you through the Eucharist; He is here to save you.  If you’re here tonight/today as a visitor who is not one with us in our Catholic faith, Jesus loves you no less, and is still seeking you on the battlefield to bring you into a full relationship with Him, and heal and strengthen you; He is here to save you.  Tonight/today, Jesus says to our heavenly Father about each and every one of us: “Lord, help me get one more.”

12 December 2016

One of Those Days

Third Sunday of Advent
Have you ever had one of those days?  You know, the day when your car won’t start; or you overslept, and while racing into work get pulled over for speeding; or when you forget about a test that you have today; or when you end up wearing the delicious lunch that you were so proud you brought to work; or just when everything seems to be working against you in general?
Life can be rough sometimes.  We try to do our best, but sometimes our best is not enough, is not appreciated, or simply doesn’t work out at all.  I think we all have those days.  Misery loves company, and so today we can commiserate (at least a little) with St. John the Baptist.  There he was, just preaching God’s word, preparing the way for the Messiah, baptizing people in the Jordan, and then, because he was preaching against the immoral marriage of King Herod and Herodias, gets locked up in jail: no trial, no chance to plead his cause, just locked up indefinitely.  He doesn’t know it, but at some point in the future, he will become the victim of a hastily-made promise in response to a dance by King Herod’s step-daughter, Salome.  Life was not dealing St. John the Baptist good cards.
We can understand his questioning.  Nothing seems to be happening the way he thought it should.  So he sends messengers to Jesus, just to make sure that his second cousin is really the Messiah.  The floor has seemed to come out from under St. John the Baptist, and he’s grasping for some solid footing.  
But Jesus rarely answers questions with a simple yes or no.  There is always more to His answers than an everyday affirmation or negation.  So Jesus says, “the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.”  Jesus’ ministry is confirmed not simply by word, but by what Jesus does.  Jesus’ own actions testify that Jesus is the Messiah, and even more than that, is God Himself.  But then Jesus has that curious line: “And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.”  In other words, blessed is the one who can accept God’s plan for salvation, even when it’s different from our plans.
The kingdom of heaven is still at hand.  It is still present in embryonic form on earth, and is still coming in its fulness with Jesus’ return.  Somedays, especially on one of those days, we may think, ‘God, can’t you just make things work the way they’re supposed to?  Isn’t it time for all of this brokenness and messed-up reality to come to an end?’  But St. James reminds us that it will happen in God’s way and in God’s time.  He reminds us in the second reading to be patient, and be stout-hearted.  Just as the prophets in the Old Testament kept waiting and waiting for the Messiah to come; just as they preached God’s word without often seeing the fruits of their own preaching, so we are called to wait and let God establish His kingdom in His way, which is often not our way.  If it were up to us, the kingdom of God would likely have come in shock and awe years or even decades ago.  But then, if God were doing it our way, the kingdom of God may have come in its fulness centuries ago, and we would not even exist.  
Today we rejoice, because we are more than halfway to Christmas.  We rejoice because our waiting for the celebration of the Nativity of our Lord is close to an end.  We rejoice because our salvation is nearer now than it was years or decades ago.  But we are not there yet.
Still, God is faithful to His promise, and He is preparing, in His time and His way, a new kingdom where there is life even in the desert; where glory and splendor will be the norm; where feeble hands, weak knees, and frightened hearts will be strengthened.  Isaiah prophesied that the kingdom of God would include the blind seeing, the deaf hearing, the lame leaping, and the mute singing.  Jesus was affirming to St. John the Baptist in His response that the kingdom of God had already begun, and that even though it was not present for St. John in its fulness, it was present in its fulness in Jesus.

If we have Jesus, it doesn’t mean that our life will be easy and carefree.  The gospel of prosperity and a happy-go-lucky life is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  But the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that we have take hold of the kingdom of God in the midst of brokenness and error, and that the darkness, though it surrounds us, cannot conquer the light of Christ.  And that should cause us to rejoice.  Because even on one of those days; even on the days when everything seems to go wrong, we have Jesus, especially in the Eucharist, and spending time with Him and receiving Him gives us the strength to persevere in our hope and our faith until Jesus returns again, and ushers in the fulness of the kingdom of God at the end of time, when God will be all in all, when God will put a definitive end to sin and suffering, and when perfect happiness will be the reality for all those who persevered with Christ on this earth in the new heaven and new earth.

05 December 2016

'Twas the Night of Little Giants

Second Sunday of Advent
Two weeks ago we ended our Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy.  Maybe after hearing today’s Gospel we feel like we have begun the Year of Divine Wrath!  St. John the Baptist certainly did not pull any punches.  To those who were open to him, he was preaching, “‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!’”  To those who weren’t open to him, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, he was even harsher: “‘You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?  Produce good fruit as evidence as your repentance.  […] His winnowing fan is in his hand.  He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn in unquenchable fire.”
An icon of St. John the Baptist
from outside Ein Kerem, Israel
I often wonder about how St. John the Baptist drew so many people.  He definitely had positive things to say, but a lot of what he said was somewhat harsh and critical.  Who gathers to hear the message: you are sinners and you need to shape up!?  And yet we hear about the large crowds who came to him to be baptized.  I remember walking back from the MSU-Notre Dame game (the famous one with the Little Giants play), and there was a street preacher along one of the sidewalks yelling at people to repent from their sexual immorality, their drinking, and their sinfulness in general.  I was in my collar, and as I looked at him, he said, “And don’t think you are safe because you work in the church!” or some such thing.  But people weren’t lining up to listen to him; in fact, they just walked on by. 
St. Matthew tells us that St. John the Baptist was the one who was preparing the way for the Lord.  God prepares the way for the public ministry of His Son, Jesus, by having a guy who eats locusts and honey tell people that they are sinners.  Hmmm…not the first approach I would think of if I wanted to get ready for the Messiah.
But, as Isaiah says elsewhere, God’s ways are not our ways.  And if we stop to think about it, it actually makes sense (except for the locust and honey part; I’m still not sure I get that).  We did just end the Year of Mercy, and we were rightly focused on God’s generous love which forgives us.  But love cannot be forced or faked.  God does not force His love on us (nor His mercy), and God does not give His forgiveness to those who are not sorry.  And so as odd as we may feel it is, the call to repentance is an important one.
Certainly, God’s grace starts the process.  We cannot be sorry without God enlightening us about our sins and the ways we have separated ourselves from Him.  But then we have to take the second step and acknowledge that we are wrong.  It’s one thing to think, “Maybe I shouldn’t have done X;” it’s another thing altogether to say, “I sinned when I did X.”  And it is only after we say “I sinned when I did X” and are sorry for whatever X is and make a resolution to not do X again that God can forgive us, because it is only after recognizing our sinfulness and our need for being forgiven that we will be open enough to receive God’s forgiveness.
The call to repentance and to admitting we have sinned is vitally important, of eternal importance, because only when we admit we have sinned and repent are we able to be forgiven.  Without someone to remind us that we are not perfect, that we don’t have everything figured out in our life, that we are sinners, we are not in a disposition to receive the mercy of God which we just focused on for the past year.  We need people in our life like St. John the Baptist to tell us we are sinners, not to beat us up, not to make us despair, but to prepare the road that Jesus wants to take to our hearts.  
Is it hard to admit that we’re wrong?  I’m a perfectionist, and it’s hard for me.  But it’s the truth.  I am a sinner.  And I don’t have to be Hitler or Stalin to accuse myself of sin.  We are all sinners, and we all need to repent.  We all have things in our life that are not of God and which have damaged or even severed our relationship with God.  Maybe we are afraid of guilt; maybe we don’t like that feeling.  But feeling guilty is a sign that our conscience, the voice of God in our hearts, is working properly and is properly formed by the Word of God and the teaching of the Church.  I don’t worry about the kid who cries after being caught doing something wrong in our school; I worry about the kid who feels nothing after being caught doing something wrong.

But God does not intend for us to remain in our guilt.  Guilt is meant to move us to repentance and the Sacrament of Penance.  How long has it been since you confessed your sins in the Sacrament of Penance, the way Jesus taught us to receive His forgiveness?  A month? Six months? A year? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years?  No matter how long it has been, do not let it last one more month.  God wants to shower His mercy upon you, and is waiting for you to respond to His grace to go to the Sacrament.  I’ll be glad to help you through the process if you’ve forgotten how to celebrate the sacrament or your Act of Contrition.  Or we’ll have other priests here on Sunday, 18 December at 3 p.m. to hear your confession.  The Year of Mercy is over, but God’s mercy endure for ever.  “‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!’”