27 August 2018

"Do you also want to leave?"

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
So the second week of August was not a great week for me.  It was one of those weeks, I know you’ve had them, where everything seemed to come together, but not in a good way, but in a way that kept draining me emotionally and spiritually.  I had my regular responsibilities of taking care of parishioners, which is both something that gives me joy and something that tires me out, and then my grandmother was dying (she passed away on Tuesday, 7 August), and then the news came out about Archbishop McCarrick and how he is accused of abuse of minors and engaging in homosexual relationships with seminarians and priests.  I buried my grandmother on Friday, 10 August, buried a parishioner of St. John the Evangelist in Davison on Saturday (because their church wasn’t available).  Then the weekend schedule, then continuing with my usual parish duties with a few hospital visits, and also working with the State Police trying to comfort a woman whose husband had just committed suicide and left her four children fatherless.  And then the grand jury report came out of Pennsylvania, talking about the horrific crimes perpetrated against children, some which could best be described by the word diabolical.  Let’s just say my emotional and spiritual tank were running on E.  
Bishop Mengeling, when he was still bishop of Lansing, would often say that he quit frequently, usually at the end of the day.  And I can honestly say that at points, especially as the news about Archbishop McCarrick and the priests in Pennsylvania came out, I wondered what sort of organization I was working for, and whether it was worth it.  I don’t mind all the work, and in fact I love helping others find God in difficult times, especially sickness and death when God seems so absent.  But to hear about so many brother priests who were priests in name only, who did not serve God’s people but preyed on them, that just killed my morale.
So today’s Gospel really hit home.  Jesus is finishing with what we call His Bread of Life Discourse.  He has told the people that unless they eat His flesh and drink His blood, they do not have life within them.  He has told them that what He is giving them is even more precious than the manna that God gave them in the desert.  And what do His disciples, those who followed Jesus, do?  “‘This saying is hard; who can accept it?’”  And they mostly leave.

What’s interesting is that Jesus doesn’t stop them; He doesn’t run after them to say that they misunderstood, that they were thinking about eating human flesh, when He was talking about the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist under the appearance of bread and wine.  He doesn’t even expand His teaching where He is.  If it were a numbers game, Jesus was not doing what He should have to keep His attendance high.  All Jesus does is ask the Twelve, the Apostles, “‘Do you also want to leave?’”  And honestly, in the midst of my fatigue, my lack of energy, my disgust at people who betrayed Jesus and misused the sacred office entrusted to them by Jesus, I felt like Jesus asked me, “Do you also want to leave?”  
There are a million reasons to leave the Church.  In heaven she is the immaculate bride of Christ, but on earth, she is made up of sinful members, sometimes very sinful members.  And I don’t have to look beyond myself to find a sinner in the Church.  There are myriad historical examples of the Church not doing what she should have, even if we take off our modern way of thinking, which would have been very odd to those who lived centuries and a millennium before us.  We’ve had popes, bishops, and priests who fathered children why claiming to live a chaste life; we’ve had lay people in public office who claimed to be doing the will of God even while they were anything but godly in their governance; we’ve been on the wrong side of history more times than we’d like to admit.  Sometimes pastors make decisions that we don’t like, that we think are bad decisions.
But while there are a million reasons to leave the Church, there’s only one real reason to stay: Jesus.  If Jesus really is God, and if the Church is really the Mystical Body of Christ, then even when the Church on earth messes up and does horrible things, my faith in Jesus can still remain.  If Jesus said that we need to be baptized, to be born again in order to have eternal life; if He said that unless we eat His Body and drink His Blood we do not have life within us; and if He set up His Church in such a way as to continue that power to make His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension–His Paschal Mystery–present for us through bishops and priests, then even when some whom He has chosen as priests act in a polar opposite way than Jesus, it does not shake my faith in Jesus and His Mystical Body.  It may break my heart, first and foremost for the victims who suffered so horribly, and then for an institution that I love which is going through a very painful purification from its sinful members.  But it doesn’t make me leave, because my faith was never in those individuals, but it was in Jesus.  They were supposed to lead me to Jesus and act in His name, but they weren’t Jesus Christ Himself.  

In the midst of this trial, Jesus asks us, “‘Do you also want to leave?’”  And you’ll have to decide how you will respond.  Maybe you want to leave because of the horrendous news over the past few weeks.  Maybe you don’t like the new Mass schedule.  Maybe you have a different reason that makes you want to leave the parish or the Church.  But to that question from Jesus, asking if I want to leave, I have to make my own the words of Simon Peter and Joshua: Master, to whom shall I go?  You have the words of eternal life.  I have come to believe and am convinced that you are the Holy One of God.  As for me, I will serve you, Lord.

13 August 2018

A Godly Diet

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
There are all sorts of diets these days: Atkins, South Beach, Paleo, No Carb, and the list goes on and on.  The different types of food you eat are supposed to help you either lose weight or maybe grow muscle mass, or help with a particular health goal.  Growing up watching cartoons, I was very familiar with the Popeye diet, where, if you wanted to grow strong, you downed a can of spinach.  I didn’t know what spinach was (we never really ate it at my house), but it seemed to work well for Popeye.  I have had spinach in salads and Greek food since, and it’s pretty tasty, but I can’t say that I have become as strong as Popeye when I eat it.

Our first reading, psalm response, and Gospel reading all have to do with eating.  So if you’re getting hungry, that’s understandable.  In the first reading, an angel tells Elijah to eat, or else “the journey will be too long!”  And our psalm and Gospel both speak about tasting the Lord.  The Psalm says that we are to taste and see the goodness of the Lord.  And Jesus in the Gospel talks about Himself as the Bread of Life, and if we eat of Him we will live for ever.  
We need the Eucharist.  It is our spiritual diet that gives us strength to live as Christians.  Vatican II called the Eucharist the source and summit of our Christian life: the fount from which we gain all of our strength to follow Jesus, and the goal of our life, because heaven in the wedding banquet of the Lamb of God.  We tend to talk about the Eucharist as food for our Christian journey with people who are dying, as we give them Viaticum, which literally means “on the way with you,” but in our daily lives, even when we are not dying, we need Jesus to be with us on our way to Him.  
The Eucharist is our spiritual life, because it is the life of God, the true flesh and true blood of Jesus.  We taste the goodness of God by tasting His Body and Blood in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.  And yet, from the very beginning, we have also protected the Eucharist and required preparation for it, since it is not any everyday food.  St. Justin Martyr, in the early second century, spoke about how the Eucharist was only for those who were baptized and believed what the Church taught.  It wasn’t for everyone.  And to this day, we still hold that, unless one is Catholic, one cannot receive the Eucharist in a Catholic church (with very few exceptions).  Those who are not Catholics, even if they believe in Jesus, cannot partake of Holy Communion with us, because they don’t have communion with us, and we are never closer to each other in the Body of Christ than we are in the Eucharist.  
But even beyond that, sometimes even Catholics lose communion with Jesus and with the Church through grave or mortal sins, sins that separate us from the saving grace of God given to us in baptism.  And so the Church requires us to have that communion restored, to be healed of our grave or mortal sins before we present ourselves for Holy Communion, for, how can we have communion with Jesus in Holy Communion if we have separated ourselves from Him through sin?  Now perhaps you are thinking to yourself, “Well, I’m not aware of any grave or mortal sins, nor have I been in some time, so you’re losing me, Father.”  Praise God that you have been sustained in grace.  But others may struggle more, and, as a good shepherd, I need to warn the sheep about pitfalls.  If we have skipped Mass through laziness, if we are guilty of adultery or fornication, if we have taken God’s Name in vain, or any other grave sin, then we need to go to confession first before we present ourselves for Holy Communion.  Otherwise, our unworthy reception of the Eucharist does not help us on our way, but becomes another obstacle to having God’s grace and life within us through the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ.
But beyond what we shouldn’t do, what does the Eucharist do for us?  If it is the food for our Christian journey, how does it give us strength?  For one, the Eucharist unites us to Christ more closely than we could ever be with anyone else on earth.  We often think of marriage as the greatest exchange of love between two persons, but infinitely greater than that is receiving the Eucharist, because we receive the love of Jesus which was made manifest for us when He died on the cross for you.  If no one else existed on earth, Jesus would have still died for you; that’s how much he loves you, and that love is consumed when receive the Eucharist worthily.
A second effect is that our venial sins, the small ways that we have said no to God, are wiped clean.  All those little things that we do, and we know what they are, that are not what we should be doing as followers of Jesus, those things are washed clean in our souls.  The Eucharist is a great way to find forgiveness for our small sins (not our mortal or big sins, but our small ones).  
A third effect is that we get to taste heaven.  We often talk about being so close to something that we can almost taste it.  In the Eucharist, we can taste heaven, because we receive Jesus who is in heaven.  When we receive the Eucharist, heaven exists within us, and the more that we live the life of heaven here on earth, the more we’ll be ready for it for ever at the end of our lives.  The more we practice for heaven, the more we’ll be ready for it at game time.  Through the Eucharist, the veil that separates heaven from earth is pulled back, and Jesus gives us Himself so that we can experience it in a small way.  What a great blessing the Eucharist is for us!  There is nothing more valuable on earth, because nothing is more valuable than Christ, and the Eucharist is His Body and Blood.
I want to leave you today with a beautiful prayer written by St. Thomas Aquinas for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of Christ.  I invite you to learn this prayer, and perhaps make it a part of your preparation prayers before Mass begins.

O Sacred Banquet, in which Christ is received, the memory of his Passion is recalled, the soul is filled with grace, and the pledge of future glory is given us.  Amen.  

06 August 2018

Want or Need?

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
In my first few years as a priest, I would, from time to time, buy lotto tickets with my own money.  Every time I would buy a ticket, I would remind God that I would give at least 10% to the Church, and how much good $15 million (I would usually only play if the jackpot were $150 million or higher) could do.  And yet, I never seemed to win; I barely even won enough to pay for the tickets.  So I stopped playing.

I’m sure some of you have done that, have told God that if He just gave you some money, or something else you want, how much good you could do with it.  We tend to be, especially in our younger days, better at knowing what we want than what we need.  Sometimes what we want is what we need, but not always, and often that comes with a certain level of maturity.  As a kid at Christmas, it was always better to get toys than to get clothes (especially underwear!).  But toys will fall out of favor or break, while clothes (even underwear) are more necessary.
In our first reading and the Old Testament prefigurement of John chapter 6, we hear about the Israelites who are not happy with what the Lord in the desert.  They’re so ungrateful to God that they would rather go back to slavery than remain with God.  It’s interesting to really think about that: they would rather go back to slavery, to barely making it, to being subservient laborers making the grand buildings of the Pharaohs, than stay with God, who had destroyed Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea while the Israelites passed through safely.
We also hear about the Jews in this week’s installment of John, chapter 6.  Jesus knows that they are not following Him because they believe in Him, even after He fed more than 5,000 of them from 5 loaves and two fish.  They are following Him because they thought Jesus was what we could call now a vending machine that gives out free food.  And when Jesus pushes them to believe in Him, they demand another sign, another multiplication of loaves.  Instead of giving them what they want, Jesus says that He is the bread of life, and if anyone believes in Him he will never hunger or thirst.  
In both the first reading and the Gospel, the people want what they want, and reject what they need: God.  And we might think it is silly for people to prefer slavery to God, and to not recognize that Jesus is God based on His miracles.  But we have not always come so far; in our own lives we prefer things to God, and prefer slavery of our favorite sins to God.
So many times in our daily lives we think about things that we want, things that we think will make us happy.  Maybe it’s a person, maybe a boyfriend or girlfriend that we’re convinced we can’t live without.  Maybe we want lots of money, because we’re convinced it will make our life easy.  Maybe we want a better home with more space, or maybe a pool, or maybe that cottage up north on a lake.  There are so many things we can want, and focus our attention on, that we think will make us happy.  And none of those things are bad in themselves.  But they all come second to God, and not even a close second.  The person who has nothing but who has God can still be filled with joy.  The person who has everything but does not have God is never filled, and always feels that emptiness in his heart.  St. Paul encourages us in the second reading to put behind us the old way of life, the way of life where we focus on what we have and on what we can get, and to live in the new way of life where we recognize that we have all we need in Jesus.   
In fact, St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the saints depicted in our icons, says that virtue and holiness is found when we order rightly our loves, with the love of God first, and the love of everything else in its proper place after God.  It’s not wrong to want things, but do we think about those things more than we think about God?  Do we work harder to obtain those things than we work on our daily relationship with God?
There’s a beautiful Gospel hymn called “Give Me Jesus” that echoes this point.  It starts out, “In the morning, when I rise / In the morning, when I rise / In the morning when I rise / Give me Jesus. //  Give me Jesus, / Give me Jesus. / You can have all this world, / Give me Jesus.”  The next verse starts, “When I am alone,” and ends, “Give me Jesus.”  And the final verse starts, “When I come to die,” and ends, “Give me Jesus.”  The Gospel hymn reminds us that, at all times of our life, and even at the end of our life, we should recognize our need for Jesus.  The others are all wants, all desires that we may not really need.

That’s a hard prayer.  I know that I’m not perfect in preferring Jesus to everything.  But it’s my goal.  I have friends that I prefer to Jesus sometimes; maybe not when I think about it, but in the way I act.  But, if they are more important to me than God, then I’ve made an idol for myself, and I need to re-evaluate my priorities.  Of course, just because we prefer God to other people or other things doesn’t mean that we will necessarily lose them.  But we could if God asked us to, because God is enough for us.  In these moments of silence, think about what you desire the most.  What takes up most of your time and energy?  The many things that you want in your life, or the one thing that is truly necessary: Jesus?  You can have all this world, give me Jesus.