31 July 2017

Jack Sparrow's Compass

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
I will admit: when I first heard that Disney was making a movie based on the ride “Pirates of the Caribbean,” I was very skeptical that it would be a good movie.  But, 7 movies later, I am happy to be wrong.  One of the staples in every movie has been Captain Jack Sparrow’s special compass, which doesn’t point towards north, but points towards whatever the person holding it wants most.  The compass helps Jack find the Black Pearl, the fountain of youth, and all the other things and places that Jack or the other characters want, especially rum.  

Of course, a compass that points toward what we want is not real.  It would be a nice invention, but, as far as I know, it doesn’t exist.  If it did exist, though, where or to what would it point?  Would it be a new house, a new car, or something?  Or would it point to a place, or even to a person?
We are a society that generally gets what it wants pretty quickly.  If we want to know something, we simply ask Siri or Alexa.  If we want to buy something, we put it on the credit card, even if we don’t have the money to buy that thing.  Our desires are satisfied quite rapidly.  But we are probably also one of the most miserable societies in this history of the world, because more often than not, our desires fluctuate between very transitory or passing things or relationships.  When it comes to the deeper things of life, many people seem to set those aside.
And yet, our deepest desire is for God.  The cliché phrase puts it this way: we have a God-sized hole in our heart.  St. Augustine, the great Doctor of the Church, puts it this way in his book The Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  We seek after so many things and people, but what we really want, what all those things and people cannot give us, is a deep relationship with God.  And the things and even other people cannot fulfill those desires because we really want the infinite, and those things and people are finite.  
A person on the road to heaven would have a compass that would point right here, to the tabernacle, because inside is Jesus, who is the deepest desire of our hearts.  The person who is living out the call that God gives to every baptized person to be a saint would want to have God.  Yes, that person would probably have other things–a house, a car, personal relationships–but they would all come second to God.
Is God the treasure that we desire?  Is God the pearl of great price in our life?  The person who is working in the field and finds a treasure, then does everything he can to buy that field so that he can have that treasure.  The merchant who is searching for a fine pearl sells everything he has so that he can get that one, perfect pearl.  What do we do to deepen our relationship with God?  What are we willing to give away?
Because in order to say yes to God, we have to say no to other things.  That’s not just true with our relationship with God, it’s true with everything in life.  Whenever we say yes to one thing or person, we say no to another.  When I said yes to becoming a priest, I was also saying no to every single woman that would cross my path for the rest of my life (in terms of a romantic relationship).  For a married woman, when she says, “I do,” to her husband, she is also saying, “I don’t” to every other man, no matter how handsome or kind he might be.  When a student says yes to partying on a Tuesday night, he or she is saying no to the homework that is due the next day.  Saying yes to anything means saying no to the other options.  That sounds tough, but it’s the way life works.  And it’s true whether the choice is for something good, or for something that is a lesser good.
Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, is getting more difficult to live.  We no longer have a culture which supports living out our faith.  The truths of the faith which cannot change are so often now opposed by friends, family, and even the government at times.  We have not yet reached systematic persecution in the United States, but the groups who call those who live out Catholicism bigots, backwards, and hate-filled seem to grow every year.  More and more we will have to decide what religion we will say yes to: Catholicism or hedonistic secular humanism–a secular type of religion that tells us to do whatever feels good, whatever we want?  And that decision will be made by what we love the most, what we truly think is the treasure in the field or the pearl of great price.  

If we had a compass that pointed to what we want the most, where would it point?  If it doesn’t point to that tabernacle, more precisely, to Jesus who is inside it, then Jesus invites us to reprioritize our lives.  God has made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.  May God be the strongest desire in our life.

24 July 2017

Being Patient with God and Ourselves

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Probably each of us has been on the receiving or the giving end of the question, “Are we there yet?”  If we’re on the receiving end of that question, maybe we responded with some form of, “No; and if I hear that question one more time…”  Especially as kids, we may not always have a lot of patience, but even as adults patience can be difficult.  It never seems to fail; whenever I’m in a rush, I always seem to end up behind a person who wants to drive 5 mph lower than the speed limit without a safe way to pass, or I manage to hit every red light.  

Whether we’re young or more advanced in age, we can also struggle with being patient with the world.  We see so many bad things that happen, so often to good people, and we get impatient.  We wonder why these bad things are allowed to happen.  Maybe we even get impatient with God as we get upset that someone we know and love goes through a difficult time and the person causing them a difficult time seems to have everything going right for them.
Things were not much different 2,000 years ago when Jesus preached in Palestine.  He tells this familiar parable about a farmer planting good seed, but an enemy going through the field and planting weeds that start to come up with the wheat.  Those working the fields ask if they should pull the weeds, but the sower tells them not to, lest the wheat get pulled up prematurely as the weeds are pulled up.
It is not a surprise to us that good and evil are so often intertwined with each other.  We may like this good trait of that particular person, but dislike the bad trait of the same person.  Maybe we see a good thing happening, but then it leads to someone else suffering.  Our world seems to be one large, mixed field of weeds and wheat.  And that may frustrate us to no end.  We just want the pure good, we want evil to be defeated and eliminated from the earth.
That desire is good.  It shows that we have a desire for heaven.  In the Book of Revelation, the cry of the martyrs under the throne of God is how long will God allow the evil to continue and His servants to suffer?  But God is more patient than we are, and His patience is meant to allow for conversion, for a change of heart and life.  God’s forgiveness is there to give time, as long as the person still lives, to turn away from evil and turn toward God.
Because it’s not just the world that is a mixed bag; it’s not just the outside world that is weeds sown amongst wheat.  Our own hearts are the same way.  There are parts of us that seek to do God’s will, that are full of His grace and love.  There are also parts of us that prefer our own will, that are full of wickedness.  It can be very easy to demand the justice of God, that evil be finally vanquished.  But if we look into our hearts, how much of us would be destroyed if God were not patient with us, if God exacted His justice upon us rather than His mercy.  I know I would be in trouble.
It is easy to think that the Church herself is a place for good people.  And in one sense, the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is untrained by sin, because Jesus is untainted by sin.  But, in a different sense, the Church on earth in her members, is what St. Augustine of Hippo calls a corpus permixtum, a mixed body which has both saint and sinner.  The Church on earth is not simply for the righteous, but is also for sinners.  Pope Francis used the image of the Church as a field hospital that goes out to treat the mortally wounded.  We might extend that analogy to also say that in a field hospital, some are wounded in minor ways from the ricochet of shrapnel, while others have missing limbs and life-threatening injuries.  That is who we are as a Church.  Some of us are more injured than others, but we all suffer from the wounds of sin.  And if we don’t know that, if we think that we’re good, then we no longer need a Savior.  And if we don’t need a Savior, then we don’t need Jesus.  And if we don’t need Jesus, then we are the most pitiable people of all, and heaven is not the place for us.
Now, all analogies limp, and even as Jesus talks about the weeds and the wheat, and even as our hearts are fields mixed with weeds and wheat, it doesn’t mean we let the weeds go.  We cannot simply ignore our sin because God is merciful and patient with us.  We need to ask ourselves how the weeds got in our fields, and try to make sure they don’t get there again.  In reality, each morning of our life is the time for sewing seed, and each evening of our life is the time for harvesting.  Every day we can ask ourselves what good we did, and thank God for that.  Every day we can ask ourselves what evil we did, big or small, and ask God to forgive us, and help us to avoid those sins tomorrow.  It is especially effective if we confess those evils in the Sacrament of Penance, aka confession, because we receive the very life of God in order to help prevent the weeds from being sewn in our hearts.  

We may struggle with patience, especially when it involves someone else suffering evil.  But if we are impatient with others, then we should ask if God should be that impatient with us, or if we’d rather receive His mercy and give us time to turn back to Him.  And if we want God to do that with us, so we should do with others.

17 July 2017

Becoming Rich Soil

Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
I would never say that I have a green thumb.  In fact, plants inside my room or house tend to die.  I once even killed a cactus that I had in college.  And yet, I love planting things.  Last October I planted a couple of small rose bushes and some mums; this past April I planted some of the left-over Easter plants along the sidewalk, and in May I planted some lily bulbs and a few peonies starters.  Some of them are doing well; others I haven’t seen make it through the dirt yet.

Today Jesus talks about being good soil to receive the seed of God’s Word.  We’ve heard this parable a lot, and I have to be honest, as a preacher, this is one of the hardest Gospels to preach on, because Jesus Himself explains what it means.  I have a kind of dread when this Gospel comes up, because I don’t want to be a boring preacher, and I’m especially afraid of that when this parable is the Gospel for the day.
But I thought that this year what would be helpful would be looking at the kinds of things that we can do to be good soil.  Again, Jesus’ point is obvious, we should be rich soil so that we can hear the Word of God, understand it, and then have it make a difference in our life.  But maybe we’re not rich soil yet; maybe we’re rocky ground, maybe we surrounded by thorns that want to choke the Word of God out.  So how do we change that?  How can we be rich soil?
There are a few things that can change our faith lives to be more receptive.  I won’t give an exhaustive list, but I’ll give a few basic ideas that almost anyone can do to help make them more receptive to God, and to grow in their relationship with Jesus.
The first basic thing we can do to change our lives to be more God-centered, to help in our relationship with Jesus, is to actually read the Word of God.  Other than at Mass, how much exposure do we have to the Word of God?  We have Bible studies from time to time that we offer through the parish.  But even if you can’t make those, read a chapter of the Gospels each day.  Start with Matthew, chapter one, and go through John, chapter twenty-one.  And when you finish that, read the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul’s letters, the other Catholic letters, and then finish up with Revelation.  One chapter per day won’t overwhelm you (hopefully), and most Bibles have footnotes in case there’s a passage you don’t understand.  If you want something more in-depth, you can also get a Catholic Study Bible, or get a Catechism and look up what the Church says about that passage.
Another basic thing we can do to change our lives to be God-centered, to help in our relationship with Jesus, is to pray the Rosary and/or the Chaplet of Divine Mercy.  For some Catholics now, the only time they pray the Rosary is the night before a funeral.  But the Rosary is a beautiful prayer focused on the mysteries of the Lord’s life, beginning with His conception at the Annunciation, and ending with Him crowning His Blessed Mother as Queen of Heaven and Earth.  You don’t have to pray all 20 mysteries every day, but maybe try to pray one Rosary each week, especially together as a family.  Yes, the kids probably won’t like it; I didn’t when I was younger.  But it made a huge impression on me and gave me a way to pray.  You can even now use your smart phone to pray the Rosary.  During each Our Father, Hail Mary, or Glory Be, think about the mystery, joyous, luminous, sorrowful, or glorious, of Jesus’ life, Death, and Resurrection.
The Chaplet of Divine Mercy is another great prayer.  We have our Divine Mercy Apostolate that meets on a regular basis, but it’s also something you can do in your home.  And if you feel one Rosary is too long, try the chaplet.  It’s prayed using Rosary beads, but the prayers are shorter.  The Chaplet of Divine Mercy focuses on Jesus’ merciful love for us, shown especially in His sorrowful Passion.  You might have to look up the prayers the first few times you pray it, but it’s easy to memorize them.
Speaking of mercy, another great way to be God-centered and to deepen our relationship with Jesus is through regular confession.  You don’t have to be a horrible sinner to go to confession (though if you are a horrible sinner, you definitely need confessions!).  So-called devotional confession, where one confesses even simply venial sins on a regular basis is a great way to weed the garden of our hearts.  I hate weeding, usually because I let the weeds go a long time, and then it takes a long time to get them out of the ground.  But if I would weed regularly, there wouldn’t be as many weeds to pull (or, in my case, spray Round-Up on).  The same goes for our spiritual life: the longer we let our sins go, the more invasive they become.  Even venial sins add up and make it more likely to commit major (we call them grave or mortal) sins.  And if we go regularly, it’s easier to remember what we need God’s mercy for, and be strengthened to avoid those sins in the future.  We offer the Sacrament of Penance every Tuesday from 5:30-6:00 p.m, and every Saturday from 3:00-4:00 p.m., and by appointment if those times don’t work.  

None of these things is rocket science.  None are overly complicated.  And yet, if we try even just one or two of these simple things, I am confident we will find our spiritual lives changing for the better.  We will become, by the grace of God, rich soil, which is more receptive to His word, so that we can bear fruit “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.”

10 July 2017

Easy Living: A Christ-centered Life

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Though I don’t play, I love watching golf.  Lots of people make fun of me for this, saying things like watching golf is like watching the grass grow.  And I will admit that, on a Sunday afternoon after Masses, I do tend to doze in and out of watching the final rounds, but I attribute that more to my fatigue than to the game itself.  Probably my favorite golfer is Jordan Spieth.  He seems like a nice man, went to Catholic schools, and plays quite well.  Watching him play, even on tv, makes golf look so easy, though, from having tried to just hit the ball, I know golf is anything but easy!

Our life in Christ can sometimes seem like golf: the pros make it seem easy, but to the rest of us it’s quite hard.  Maybe we look at the saints and feel that they have set the bar terribly high, and those standards are not something that we could ever do.  But Jesus reminds us in the Gospel that “[His] yoke is easy, and [His] burden light.”  Living under the kingship of Jesus is something which is not meant to be a heavy burden on us.
I mention kingship because our first reading is a prophecy about the king, the Messiah, which was fulfilled in Jesus.  We hear this passage from the prophet Zechariah each Palm Sunday as it is fulfilled in Jesus entering His city, Jerusalem, on a donkey.  The donkey was not a sign of dominance for king (that would have been a strong horse), but a sign of humility and easiness.  A king who rode on a donkey came not to enforce his will by brute strength, but to invite people into his kingdom for its good.
Kingship also reflects that we owe our life to someone else.  As Americans we’re not so keen on monarchies and royalty (unless it’s the Kennedys or the younger British royals), but there was a relationship between king and subject, where they worked together to promote the kingdom.  We owe our life, really everything, to Christ, as I preached a few weeks ago.  And Christ our King, for His part, gives us everything we need to be saints, to be holy men and women, to be the best version of ourselves that we can be, so that we enter the kingdom of heaven.
But there is a prince working to undermine the kingship of Christ, and that is Satan.  He wants us to switch our allegiance to him.  St. Paul talks about that in our second reading.  When he encourages us not live according to the flesh, St. Paul means everything in us that is fallen, that gives in to the temptations of the devil.  Sometimes those temptations can be in our very flesh and blood, like the temptations to gluttony, sloth, and lust.  Sometimes they are more in the heart like greed, envy, or hatred, or even in the mind, like pride.  But they are not of the Kingdom of God; they are not the work of the Holy Spirit, who continues the presence of Christ our King in us.
Sometimes living the life of the Kingdom of God seems so hard, and living the life of obedience to Satan seems so easy.  After all, Satan lets us do whatever we want, because it enforces our selfishness, which keeps us from God.  Let’s be honest: it’s sometimes hard to make it to Mass, especially when sports, or even just vacation, is going on; it’s sometimes hard to hold back on amounts of food or even certain types of food, so that our stomach becomes the deciding factor in our life; given our sex-saturated culture, it can be very difficult not to engage in sexual relationships outside of marriage, not to ask for or send inappropriate pictures on Snapchat, not to live together before marriage; it can sometimes be hard not to hate or even simply hold a grudge against someone who has done something that we don’t like, or to speak ill of that person to others.  It can often seem very easy to give in to these and so many other temptations, and it can seem very difficult to live a Christ-centered life.
In the midst of those challenges, Jesus still says, “‘Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.’”  Living for Jesus makes for an easier life, and a life that prepares us for heaven.  Living a life where we give in to our temptations makes life much more difficult, and prepares us for hell.  A life spent trying to be a saint helps us to be more and more free; a life spent following our fallen passions wherever they lead us enslaves us.  Who lives the better, freer life?  The people who want the newest Lebron shoes, a Go-Pro, the newest phone, or Fidget Spinner, and who see if they really need it, and then, if they do, earn the money and buy it?  Or the people who steal it, get caught, then go to jail, then maybe can’t get the job they want, and are restricted to working less satisfying jobs?  

Life in Christ, a life lived by the Spirit of God, can seem tough and difficult, especially when we’re not living it.  And certainly sometimes following God’s will entails challenges and having to say no not only to bad things but also to lesser goods.  But just like watching Jordan Speith play golf, the more we live the life of Christ, the easier it becomes, and the easier it looks to others.  And the more others see a Christ-centered life, the more they will want that freedom for themselves where they live in the Kingdom of God.

03 July 2017

"With What Shall I Come Before the Lord?"

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
The study of Canon Law, the law of the Church, is one of the least popular disciplines for priests to study after they have been ordained.  Recently, Bishop Boyea appointed one of my good priest friends, Fr. David Fons, to study Canon Law in the University of St. Thomas in the City (more commonly referred to as the Angelicum) in Rome.  Bishop Boyea’s two other choices were either Fr. Gary or Fr. Todd Koenigsknecht, the twins from Fowler who were ordained a couple of years ago.  They were very happy when Bishop Boyea chose Fr. David.  I joked with Fr. David that he should tell Frs. Gary and Todd: “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me,” quoting the famous line at the beginning of the movie “The Godfather.”

We don’t have to be in the mafia to want to do something kind for those who do something for us.  We hear about the Prophet Elisha who is taken care of by a woman of influence as she gives him room on the roof “with a bed, table, chair, and lamp.”  And without her asking, Elisha wants to do something for her to repay her generosity.  And he promises her that she will conceive a son with her husband, since she was childless and her husband was an older man.
Jesus Himself in our Gospel talks about how those who serve the servants of God will receive their reward: 

“Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward.  And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because the little one is a disciple–amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.”

Now, this isn’t a homily about trying to butter Father Anthony up in order to get something in return.  I may call my bulletin article Don Antonio’s Dispatch, but I’m not Don Corleone.  You, my parishioners, my family, are very generous, but you’ll never hear me say, “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.”
If we really think about it, we have received everything from Jesus.  I dare you to think about one thing, other than your sins, that you have not received from God.  Your talents–from God; your family, spouse, and children–from God; your house–God gave you the talents that helped you find a job that paid you that helped you to get the house, so from God; this building–it was built by the generosity of our parishioners who went before us, and some still here, who paid for it with the money they made from the jobs they worked using the talents they received…you guess it, from God; your priest–some of you might be saying from the devil, but I was sent here by Bishop Boyea, who, when it comes to parish assignments, speaks for God.  Everything except our sin, which is when we try to do things on our own without God, is a gift to us from God.  We are in God’s debt.  There is no two ways about it.  We owe everything to God.  So how can we repay God?
One of the choral anthems played at my first Mass of Thanksgiving and at both my installations as pastor is based on Micah 6:6-8: 

With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow before God most high?  Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?  Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with myriad streams of oil?  Shall I give my firstborn for my crime, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?  You have been told, O mortal, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.

But Jesus, as He so often does, raises the stakes.  He says that we must give Him everything of who we are.  If we love even our family more than Jesus, then we are not worthy of the gifts He has given me.  Only if we give away our life to Him will we find it.
And in this Mass we have the opportunity to do exactly that, at least as a beginning to our week.  Every Mass we are invited to offer all of who we are–our joys, sorrows, excitements, fears, job, family, vacation, and all that has happened since the last time we went to Mass–and unite it with the bread and the wine that is offered to God and changed into the Body and Blood of Jesus.  I know I’ve said that before, but have we done that?  Have we really put ourselves into what is offered on the altar?  I can tell you that when I do that, especially if I have something heavy on my heart, then as I hold the host in my hands and say, “This is my Body,” and as I hold the chalice in my hands and say, “This is my Blood,” there is a great weight lifted from my shoulders and I almost want to cry because of the great gift of freedom that Jesus gives me as I give Him my all.  And then God transforms it and gives it back to me as something that no longer weighs me down, but that gives me life.  But it’s not just for the tough stuff; it also applies to our joys.  And then, having given God our all in the Mass, we are then much more likely to give Him our all during the week. 

You might think that this is just my shtick as a guy who studied the liturgy–the Mass and the Sacraments.  But I truly believe it.  Give your all to Jesus, because He has already given His all for you.  And He doesn’t want a favor or a service like a mafia don.  The only thing that Jesus wants the thing only you can provide: you.