Do Not Fear

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

What do we do when we’re afraid?  When we’re younger, we often try to hide underneath the blankets (sometimes even going into the fetal position because the blankets don’t quite cover everything from the tip of the head to the soles of our feet).  We might turn lights on to see what is there.  I’m sure night lights are still on sale and a popular buy for some children’s rooms.  We might run to a parent when we’re afraid, either as a child or as an adult.  I’m sure some parents here have been woken up in the middle of the night with a child crawling into their bed after a bad nightmare.  Some parents have received heart-wrenching phone calls from an adult child who is going through a difficult or traumatic time.  Fear is a very powerful force.

But Jesus today says not to fear three different times: “‘Fear no one’”; “‘do not be afraid…’”; and again “‘do not be afraid…’”.  In the first place he speaks about fear of someone concealing something, or a secret, or not being totally honest.  In the second place he speaks about fear of those who can attack our person.  And in the third place he talks about fearing about our physical needs.

Sometimes we can be afraid of speaking the truth.  We’re afraid of what someone might think, or maybe that if we speak out, someone will say something else about us.  Maybe we’re afraid about talking about Jesus.  Maybe we’re afraid because we worry that someone will think we’re a Jesus freak or a hyper-religious person.  To that fear, Jesus covers us with the blanket of His love, and says, “‘Fear no one.’”  In our first reading from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, Jeremiah was afraid of what the people would say about him because he was speaking the word of God.  He hears the whispering of those around him; he hears his so-called friends denouncing him to find fault with his message, which is not his message, but is a message from God.

Fear of those who can do physical harm is also easily understood.  Our bodies naturally put us in a fight or flight mode when we think someone might do us harm.  And certainly Jesus is not saying that we cannot defend ourselves.  But He is inviting us to trust in Him, even when we are threatened with bodily harm.  Because while the body is good, it is the soul that is the most important.  We can struggle with all sorts of bodily ailments, disfigurements, or disabilities, but our soul could be as strong as ever with God’s help.  If our soul is in a good place with God, then while our body can be tortured (either from enemies, or even just from old age or sickness), what others do to the body does not necessarily have any effect on what happens after we die, which is what we should be most concerned with.

Think about our brothers and sisters who are Catholic and Orthodox in the Middle East.  Some of them, especially in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, go to Mass, and they must know that, given the terrorists in those countries, their church could be bombed or set on fire.  And yet they go to Mass.  Why?  Because they want Jesus; they want to hear the Word of God and receive the Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist; because in some cases there, and in other places around the world, they only have Mass once a month, and it means that much to them.  But they are willing to risk life and limb to be connected with Jesus and spend time with him (and their Masses are often even longer than one hour!!).

Fear about our physical needs is also a tough fear to fight.  We know we need food, water, housing, and clothes to survive. But we are worried that we will not have enough.  Especially here in Flint, we are afraid that our water is not drinkable.  Those outside Flint don’t understand why at least some people, and maybe some here, are skeptical when the city or the State or the feds tell us that the water is fine to drink.  But we have been burned before.  So how can we trust in God to provide these things?  

We can trust in God to give us the gifts we need to work hard and contribute to society to the best of our ability, and receive as payment the money we need to take care of ourselves.  Certainly, we need to prioritize.  If we put cable TV ahead of a meal, or even fancy food ahead of the basic staples that we need to survive, then our priorities need to be rearranged.  While the cost of living has gone up, and maybe more than our wages, think back to your parents or your grandparents: so many of them were able to provide a good living on one income.  I’m not saying only one person should work, but I think our parents and grandparents prioritized better than we do (at least in general).  Our parents or grandparents probably didn’t take exotic trips every year for Spring Break, or have the newest gadgets.  But they put good food on the table, and often times they paid for a Catholic education.  There’s nothing wrong with Spring Break in Panama City Beach or having a gadget, but they should be placed behind other more important needs and wants.  And think about your parents or grandparents: maybe they didn’t have it all, but they never wanted for anything they needed.  And for those who had more, they often passed along their resources to those who legitimately could not work, or maybe just helped someone make it for a few weeks who had fallen on some hard times.  We also become the ways in which God takes care of all His children.  But no matter what, God cares for us, and knows what we need.

So we don’t need a blanket to hide us; we don’t need an LED lightbulb to illumine the darkness; we simply need God, and to trust in Him to help us not be afraid.  Talk to others about Jesus; work on having a strong soul; prioritize life with the truly important things at the top of the list.  With God, we need not be afraid.

Spiritual Comfort Food

Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ

Probably each of us has a comfort food that we go to in times of distress or trial.  Sometimes it’s a particular recipe from a loved one, sometimes it’s just a type of food like homecoming or an ethnic cuisine.  It may betray my youth, but for me, pizza is definitely one of my comfort foods.  There’s nothing quite like a few greasy slices of bacon and pineapple pizza to make me feel good inside.

The Eucharist is, or should be, our spiritual comfort food.  It was prefigured by the manna in the wilderness that satisfied the Israelites in the desert for 40 years (which we heard about in our first reading).  Psalm 78, speaking about the deliverance from Egypt and the sojourn in the desert for 40 years was meant to be a reminder of this spiritual food as it said, “God rained manna upon them for food; grain from heaven he gave them.  Man ate the bread of the angels.”  The very popular Corpus Christi hymn, “Panis Angelicus” in fact means, “Angelic Bread” or “Bread of the Angels.”  

But the Eucharist is not simply a reminder.  St. Paul tells us that when we receive the Eucharist, we participate in the Body and Blood of Christ.  So many Catholics (a 2010 study by the Pew Forum put that number at 50%) do not believe that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, a cornerstone teaching of our faith.  And yet, we heard Jesus very clearly in our Gospel today: “‘Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.’”  In order to share in the life of Jesus, we need to be connected to Jesus, and the best way that we can be connected with Jesus is by receiving His Body and Blood into ourselves in the Eucharist.  And our belief about what the Eucharist is changes the way we act.

During the Eucharistic Prayer, as the bread and wine become by Transubstantiation the Body and Blood of Jesus, we kneel.  We lower our bodies to express what is (hopefully) happening interiorly: the humbling of our souls as this miracle takes place.  Even before we get to Mass the Church asks us to refrain from any food and drink which is not water or medicine for 1 hour before we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, so that we may truly hunger for Jesus.  Some of you are old enough to remember a Communion fast which was much longer than just 1 hour!  But we try to prepare ourselves by not brining in coffee or juice to the church, by not chewing gum during Mass, and by doing our best to focus all our senses on Jesus who humbles Himself to become truly present under the appearance of bread and wine.  

The Church also asks us, based upon St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, to examine ourselves to see if we are in a state prepared to receive Holy Communion.  Does our life witness to what the Church teaches as true?  If not, if we find ourselves rejecting, either in thought or in deed, a major teaching of the Church, then we are asked to refrain from the Eucharist so that our communion with Jesus, which always means communion with His Mystical Body, the Church, may be real, and not lip service.

But besides the before of the Eucharist, there is also the after.  If we receive the Eucharist worthily, then it should transform our lives.  From time to time we may think, ‘If Jesus was walking this earth, then I would follow Him and live as a faithful disciple.’  Jesus does come to earth, especially through the Eucharist.  In fact, we don’t even need to have the separation of Him being outside of us that the Apostles and disciples experienced.  Jesus, in the Eucharist, enters into us so that we can be a faithful disciple.  The reception of the Eucharist is meant to have an affect on the way we live our lives.  It is meant to give us hope, give us strength, and help us to bring the gift of Jesus to those we encounter every day.  Maybe people who encounter us wouldn’t know exactly why we’re different, but could people recognize the difference in us after we receive the Eucharist?

Jesus promised at the Ascension that He would be with us always, even until the end of the age.  And He fulfills that promise in the Eucharist.  Do we prepare to receive our spiritual comfort food?  Do we examine our lives before receiving Holy Communion?  And does our reception of the Eucharist transform us to be more and more like Jesus each week?

Communion Cannot Come through Facebook

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

One of the great blessings of technology is the ability to keep in touch with people that we would otherwise not see.  It can be notoriously difficult for priests to meet up with friends sometimes because of the nature of our vocation.  I have one friend who has lived in Ann Arbor for the past four years.  But even though we’ve been only 45 minutes to an hour away from each other, we’re generally doing pretty well if we can meet up twice a year.  So we rely on texting to catch up and see how each other’s doing.  Technology is certainly great for that.

Today we celebrate a communion of Divine Persons as we celebrate the Most Holy Trinity.  God is one.  But God is three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  How that works is beyond us.  Our finite minds cannot totally understand an infinite God.  But we do have some access to understand who God is.  God demonstrated His one-ness throughout the Old Testament.  The great prayer of faith of the Jews called the shema from Deuteronomy is: Adonai Elohim, Adonai ehad (The Lord is God, the Lord is one).  But in the New Testament, God also revealed that, while He is one, He is also Three Divine Persons, a communion of Persons, a communion of love.  That is why St. Paul can talk about Jesus as Lord (a reference to His divinity), and speak of the Holy Spirit in the same way that St. Paul speaks about God.  We hear that in the greeting at Mass, which comes from St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”  The Holy Spirit is also on equal footing with God the Father and God the Son in the command to baptize that Jesus gives at the end of the Gospel according to Matthew: “[baptize] them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  

But even though the Trinity is based in Scripture, the Church has unpacked what it means to be one God and three Persons for two millennia.  In fact, the first term to speak about God’s three Persons was trias, a Greek word, used by Theophilus of Antioch in 180.  That word would later be translated into the Latin word trinitas, from which we get our English word Trinity, and was used by Tertullian who died in the early 3rd century.  Many of the first Ecumenical Councils starting in 325 were about how Jesus and the Holy Spirit are God.

But one of the great developments of Trinitarian theology is that God is a communion of Divine Persons.  His unity is not such that He is alone, but shares love between the Father and the Son, a love that pours all of the Person out (except His identity) to the other, a love so strong that it breathes forth (spirates is the technical theological term) the Person of the Holy Spirit, which doesn’t happen in a linear fashion, but has always been and always will be.

I brought up technology at the beginning of my homily because, as good as it is to help people keep in touch, it cannot create communion.  Communion can only happen in the presence of the other.  God the Father does not text God the Son.  Their outpouring of deep and abiding love does not happen by technology, and so neither can ours.  We can stay in touch with each other, but we do not have communion with each other by text, FaceTime, or SnapChat.  

We are created in the image and likeness of God, and so we also have a desire built within us to have communion with others.  This communion can be the communion of faith, the communion of family, the communion of husband and wife, and the communion of friends.  Each communion has its own rules and expressions of love, but they are all forms of communion.  And we all need these to be a happy, holy, and wholesome human being.  And this is where our challenge is as modern people, especially the young: we seek communion through technology, but we cannot find it there.  As good as texting my friend from Ann Arbor is, it doesn’t even come close to actually spending time with him.  

But if we don’t realize that technology doesn’t really fulfill that need, then we can put ourselves in a vicious circle or seeking communion in a way that will never give us communion.  Why do so many people (especially young people) act as if they’re glued to their phones?  Because they want communion, and they think staying in touch will meet that need, but they’re never quite satisfied.  It’s like setting up a treadmill at the starting line of a track meet.  Running is still happening, but you’re getting nowhere.  

Pornography is an even more evil expression of this phenomenon.  A man or woman desires the communion that is proper between a husband and wife.  But seeking it in a video with a stranger or strangers only mimics that communion, cheapens it, and in the end, does not fulfill the desire of the heart.  And so a man or woman can easily get sucked in to seeking communion when that communion can never come through pornography.

Technology is not inherently evil.  It does allow people to stay in touch and keep updated on each other’s lives.  But it never creates communion, and because we are created in the image of a Triune God, that’s what our hearts desire most of all.  

So how do we fill that need?  One way is time-tested: have a meal with each other.  Have a weekly family meal, or meals with friends.  Even the sacrifice of Jesus in the Mass is in the context of the Last Supper–a meal.  These are the ways that we find communion.  There are other ways, too, but simply by having a weekly or occasional meal, especially as a family, can satisfy that need for communion and keep us from trying to seek it in artificial ways.  Does it take a little more work than a text?  Yes, but love always takes a little more work than simply affection.  

Be who God has created you to be: a person created in His image and likeness; a person created for communion with Him and with others.

Finish Strong!

Solemnity of Pentecost

In high school track I was a short distance runner.  I usually ran the 100m dash, 200m dash, 100m relay, and/or 200m relay.  I always said that as far as running went, if I wasn’t done in 26 seconds or less, something had gone horribly wrong.  But at one meet, perhaps because my track coach was a sadist, he asked me to run a 400m dash.  I had never run it before, never trained for it before, and had no desire to run it.  But, coach was telling me to run the event.  And how bad could it be?  It was only once around the track.

As the gun fired to start us, I tried to set a pace that I felt would make me competitive in the second heat.  Even though I wasn’t prepared for it, I didn’t want to lose and embarrass myself or my team.  So I pushed it.  After about 200m, I realized just how long 400m was as my legs started to ache.  The two things which were competing to win at that point were the fatigue in my muscles and my pride not to lose.  As I crossed the finish line, I think I got third.  What I remember more vividly was that my legs felt like jello, and I was sure I was going to fall down.  But, I had given it everything I had, and had finished strong.

Today, as we come to the end of our Easter Season and celebrate the Solemnity of Pentecost, we should want to finish strong.  Of course, we’re not totally done with life, but we are done with the Easter Season.  And we finish our Easter Season the way that the Apostles began their public ministry: with the gift of the Holy Spirit.

We hear about that gift in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, a story with which we are likely pretty familiar.  There is a great wind, and then the Holy Spirit appears over the heads of the apostles and disciples like tongues of fire.  Immediately the disciples are compelled to speak about Jesus and how He was raised from the dead and offers us new life in Him.

As Catholics we may be a little uncomfortable with the Holy Spirit.  God the Father is someone we’re familiar with, but we can often keep Him at arm’s length, since He seems so mysterious.  Jesus is someone with whom we’re much more familiar, we know the stories from His life, but even He can seem a little distant, since He is seated at the right hand of the Father.  But He tends to be the focus of most of our prayers.  But the Holy Spirit–that’s the one who seems to make things go out of control.  Maybe we’ve even seen people who claim to have the Holy Spirit and they do what we consider “weird” things like speaking in tongues or having the gift of prophecy.  Perhaps we’re not that comfortable with the Holy Spirit.

But we need not be afraid of the gift of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is the one who continues the ministry of Jesus in the Church.  He does give some people special gifts like speaking in tongues, prophecy, healing, etc., but He also showers His gifts upon all believers.  And we hear about some of those gifts that we can experience in the Scriptures.

At the Vigil Mass the first reading was from Genesis, and was the Tower of Babel.  The people all want to get to God on their own terms, but God makes them speak all different languages.  The unity of the people is not based on God, but on becoming the masters of their destinies, and so they are scattered.  But in the story of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit helps the people to have access to God by hearing the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus spoken to them in their languages.  And we experience that in our own way today: our Gospel was proclaimed in Latin, the mother-tongue of our Latin Rite church, and some of our petitions this weekend will be proclaimed in the languages of our parishioners, including Malayalam (from India), Tagalog (from the Philippines), Spanish, German, Arabic, and Italian.  And while perhaps we don’t all understand all these languages, they reflect the diversity of our cultures, and yet the unity of the faith, because what we believe is the same, no matter in what language it is proclaimed.

The Holy Spirit also gives us each gifts to build up the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church.  We all have certain gifts to build up our parish, our diocese, and the universal Church that the Holy Spirit encourages us to use.  Some of us garden and do yard work, some teach, some cook, some comfort the sorrowing, some serve as Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion or Lectors.  I am sure that some of our parishioners, besides being called to these ministries, are also called in the future to a vocation to the priesthood or diaconate, or to consecrated life as a sister or nun.  

The question for us is whether or not we are willing to respond to the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit may lead us to new circumstances that are unfamiliar for us, just as the foreign lands to which the apostles went were unfamiliar to them.  But if it is the Holy Spirit calling us to them, then we know it is for the building of the Church and the spreading of the Gospel.  Do not be afraid of the Holy Spirit, but be open to His gifts, and then, with the courage the Holy Spirit gives us, use all that we have to continue to ministry of Jesus in the world!