Year of St. Joseph

 Feast of the Holy Family

     On Tuesday, 8 December, to the surprise of many (there wasn’t any Catholic gossip that this was going to happen of which I was aware), Pope Francis proclaimed a special Year of St. Joseph, on the 150th Anniversary of Pope Bl. Pius IX naming St. Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church.  As St. Joseph is part of the Holy Family, I thought it would be good to preach about him today, as we begin this special year dedicated to the Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Foster-Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  While the entire homily won’t be directed only at men, ladies, I would ask your forbearance for those parts that address only the males.
    I had seen a post on Facebook that jokingly challenged everyone to memorize every word that St. Joseph said in the Gospels by the time the holy year ends on 8 December 2021.  The joke is that St. Joseph, while mentioned numerous times in the Gospel, never has a recorded word spoken in the gospel accounts.  This lack of talking may make him, in the view of many wives, the perfect example of a husband: always silent.
    What can we learn from a man who never had a word that he said recorded?  There is much we can learn from this saint, and I’ll highlight one in particular.
    St. Joseph was a man who had a deep relationship with God.  Before even Jesus was born, Joseph was attune to God speaking to him in dreams.  Joseph took Jesus and Mary to the temple 40 days after the birth of Jesus in accord with the Law of Moses.  And the Holy Family traveled to the temple for the pilgrim festivals of the Jewish faith, like Passover and the Feast of Booths.  While we have no direct evidence, Jesus seemed very familiar with the synagogue and how the services were conducted, so Joseph must have taken Jesus to synagogue throughout Jesus’ life.  
    Fathers: in many ways, we fathers have lived up to our call to help our families have a relationship with God.  This is certainly true of certain spiritual fathers, priests who preyed on the vulnerable and led them away from God.  But it’s also true of biological fathers.  How many children consider religion to be a things that mostly girls do?  How many times is it the mother who is making sure that the kids go to Mass, while the father makes excuses about golf, watching sports or sleeping in?  
    I encourage you, fathers, to make sure that your families (including you!) are going to Mass every Sunday and Holyday, except in case of illness (or a pandemic).  Why don’t kids practice the faith after they leave the house?  Because, in so many cases, the faith clearly wasn’t that important when they were living at home.  It certainly isn’t the only part of being Catholic and developing a relationship with Jesus, but it’s an important part.  Most people who attend Mass will tell me that they never had a choice when they were growing up about attending Mass; it was non-negotiable, even on vacation.  I dare say that most people, at some point in their lives, do not want to go to church.  But that habit of going is so important.  Because when life gets rough, as it always does, without faith, it’s so much harder to get through and to know where to turn, than it is with a practice of going to Mass.  
    Another part of our faith is daily prayer.  The Mass is necessary for our relationship with God, but so is daily prayer.  Sometimes that prayer can be formal prayers that we learned, like the Our Father, Hail Mary, and/or Glory Be.  Maybe during this year of St. Joseph we can learn the Memorare of St. Joseph.  But prayer isn’t always formal.  Yes, in the Mass, we use special, elevated language to communicate with God.  But in our daily prayer we are encouraged to use everyday language to share with the Lord our hopes and fears, our desires, our struggles, our needs, and everything that is a part of our life.  If you can talk with a friend, you can talk with God.  And, like with our friends, we also need to learn how to listen, so that we can hear God’s voice.  Fathers: teach your children (or grandchildren) to pray.  Teach them to be able to speak to Jesus and to listen to Jesus.  
    There are so many other ways that St. Joseph is a great model for all Catholics, especially, but not only, for men.  He is a great intercessor for chastity, for work, for the importance of fathers in a family, as well as the patron of a happy death, which is not something to be neurotic about, but something for which we should always be prepared by living the best life that we can, centered around God.  I’ll close today with a prayer to St. Joseph, which closed the Apostolic Letter, Patris corde, with which Pope Francis inaugurated the Holy Year of St. Joseph:


Hail, Guardian of the Redeemer,
Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
To you God entrusted his only Son;
in you Mary placed her trust;
with you Christ became man.

Blessed Joseph, to us too,
show yourself a father
and guide us in the path of life.
Obtain for us grace, mercy and courage,
and defend us from every evil.  Amen.

Joy to the World–Even in 2020

Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord–Mass at Night and During the Day

    Our Savior, dearly Beloved, was born this day.  Let us rejoice.  Sadness is not becoming on the Birth Day of Life Itself, which, now that the fear of death is ended, fills us with gladness, because of our own promised immortality.  No one is excluded from sharing in this cheerfulness, for the reason of our joy is common to all men.  Our Lord, the Conqueror of sin and death, since there was no one free from servitude, came that He might bring deliverance to all.
    …Let the sinner rejoice, since he is invited to grace.  Let the Gentile exult, for they are called to life.  For the Son of God, in the fulness of time, has taken upon Himself the nature of our humanity, as the unsearchable depths of the divine counsel hath decreed, in order that the inventor of death, the devil, by that very nature which he defeated, would be himself overcome.

These words are not mine, but those of Pope St. Leo the Great.  He invites us to rejoice at Christmas.  But, you may say, Pope Leo the Great didn’t have to deal with COVID-19.  He didn’t have to cancel family celebrations.  He didn’t have to miss seeing children and grandchildren whom he hadn’t seen in the better part of a year, if not a year or more (though, as a pope, it’s good that he didn’t have children or grandchildren).  He wasn’t a waitress who had her job taken away, given back, and then taken away again, just in time for the holidays.  He didn’t have to quarantine because a student in his child’s class was diagnosed with the virus.  
    And that’s all true.  Pope St. Leo the Great had his own difficulties–Attila the Hun sacking most of central Europe, into Italy; barbarians sacking Rome; heretics seeking to divide the Church with their errors; emperors being murdered; the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire in the west.  But Leo’s happiness wasn’t based upon something transitory or temporary, and certainly not simply on the twenty-fifth day of December.  Leo could encourage the people of Rome, to whom he preached this homily, to rejoice because of what we celebrate on the twenty-fifth day of December: the birth in the flesh of our Incarnate Lord. 
    What we celebrate on Christmas is that God loved us so much that His Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, was born for us in Bethlehem.  And that birth is, in itself, great enough news that there is no room for sorrow, because God has become like us so that we can become like Him.  How much love does it take for someone in a distant land, not needing anything, perfect in himself, to travel to a far away land in enemy territory, subject himself to all kinds of humiliations, just to be close to us?  And yet, that is what God did for us! 
    And if that wasn’t enough, that little baby, whose birth we celebrate today, would grow and would show even greater love, as He chose not only to become like us in all things but sin, but to die for us, so that we could live forever.  Matthew Kelly describes it this way in his Sacrament of Confirmation program called “Decision Point”: there is a virus that is infecting and killing everyone, and try as they might, scientists cannot find a cure.  As they try to work out how the virus works, more and more people keep dying.  And then, one day, they discover this one person, whose blood contains the antidote to the virus.  From his blood, a vaccine can be made that will eventually save everyone on earth from this virus.  The only problem is that, in order to make the vaccine, every drop of blood is needed; the person will have to give up his life.  That person, not thinking only of himself and how he will be fine, but all the people he can save, agrees to die so that others could live.  That Confirmation program was developed years ago, but it hits home even more so now, in the midst of this pandemic.
    Jesus’ Nativity is a reason to rejoice, no matter what is happening in our lives and in the world.  Jesus’ Nativity is the hope that gives us the strength to keep going, these 9 months after “14 Days to Flatten the Curve.”  As Catholics, we don’t live for this world.  While we treasure and care for the creation that God has entrusted to us, we have our minds on the world to come.  And this “momentary, light affliction,” as St. Paul says, is as nothing compared to the glory to be revealed in heaven.  We care for ourselves, and make prudent choices about our health, but we don’t obsess and fret about death because Jesus has freed us from the fear of death.  Death is not the end, but for those who follow Jesus, a transition to new life, glorified life, joy-filled life. 
    This is not to make light of the many sacrifices that have been made and are being made by people each day.  This is not to brush off the real hardships that many find themselves in during the pandemic.  But Jesus’ Nativity is a great reminder that these experiences are not all there is to life.  If anything, this pandemic has revealed to us how much we have lived like this life is all there is, and have not focused on heaven enough. 
    No government official nor any created thing can stop our joy that comes from this day and the hope the newborn Jesus brings to us.  Though our celebrations may be smaller, and maybe not happen with family and friends at all, and though we rightly find some level of happiness from our time spent with loved ones, the true joy of today comes the fact that God’s love for us has been revealed in Jesus being born for us to save us from sin and death, and open for us the way to eternal salvation.  So “let us rejoice.  Sadness is not becoming on the Birth Day of Life Itself.”  “Joy to the world!  The Lord is come!”

The Hard Way

 Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord–At the Vigil Mass

When I was a freshman in high school I had a science class.  I like science, in general, but I’m not good at science.  One of our final projects in the class was to make a car from a mousetrap and have it travel 3 feet or so.  We could use anything we wanted to, as long it didn’t include a motor.  All we were given were the mousetrap and four plastic wheels.  I had seen someone else use CDs for wheels, and though that was a good idea.  Besides, what else would I do with all those AOL CDs that we got in the mail each month?  Try as I might, I could not get it to go forward.  I was left with simply pulling the arm of the trap back, and quickly releasing, trying to get enough forward momentum from my arm releasing it quickly.  It didn’t work.  When it came time for us to demonstrate what we had done, I watched my classmates and saw their cars.  They used strings or rubber bands attached to the arm of the trap, which were connected to the axels of the wheels, which, when the arm was released, propelled the mousetrap car forward.  It seemed so obvious, and yet it hadn’t occurred to me at all.  I certainly hadn’t found the easiest way to do things.  In fact, I have a special gift for often missing the easiest way, and finding the hardest way to do something.
    It may seem like God also chooses to do things the most difficult way.  St. Paul gives the basics of the Gospel as he is preaching in the synagogue in Antioch in Pisidia, which we heard in our second readings.  God chose a people, is where St. Paul starts.  The story would have been familiar to the Jews.  But in case it’s not as familiar to us, let’s make sure we know that the people God chose were not a strong nation, or the best warriors, or the smartest.  No, God chose a family, Abram and Sarai, who were very old, had no children, and lived in modern-day Iraq, and told them to go to the land of Canaan.  That family, starting with the miracle child, Isaac, slowly grows into a small household, who sell one of the brothers into slavery, and then they have to beg from that brother for food during a famine.  
    The family makes its way to Egypt, lives comfortably there for a while, before Pharaoh gets nervous about their fecundity, and enslaves them.  God sends them Moses to free them from slavery, but this people, this nation now, always seems to think life was better in Egypt as slaves as God tries to give them Canaan and freedom.  God promises them the land and peace as long as they follow Him, but they can’t do it for even one generation.  So they struggle with the surrounding nations, until they beg God for a king, even though God tells them they have a king: Him; they don’t need another.  But they whine some more, and God gives them what they want.  First comes Saul, who is pretty bad at following God, and then David, who is much better at following God, except when he’s murdering to cover-up his adulterous relationship.  Still, David is mostly for God, which is good, because he’s the last king like that.  
    The people, throughout the centuries, wander away from God, get in trouble, cry out to God, and then God saves them, only for the people to get comfortable again, and turn away from God.  Then God sends John the Baptist to prepare the way for the Messiah, Jesus.
    One would think that the Messiah, God’s own co-eternal Son, would have things easier.  Instead, His mother is almost divorced by His foster-father; He has to make numerous trips, first in the womb, then as an infant, then as a young boy.  Jesus’ foster-father, Joseph, dies before Jesus reaches the age of thirty, and then Jesus preaches God’s message, first welcomed with open arms, but eventually rejected by his followers, betrayed by one of his closest friends, and then dies on the cross, abandoned by almost everyone except His mother and few others.
    That’s not the easiest way.  As we celebrate Christmas, we celebrate that God took flesh, and so could feel the jostling in the womb on the road to Bethlehem; was cold as he was delivered in a cave, because no inns had room.  Jesus, the eternal God, could be hungry and thirsty, could stink from soiling his diapers, and could feel the emotional struggle of rejection as He grew up, similar to everyone else in appearance, but clearly very different from his neighborhood friends.  
    God didn’t choose the easiest way to save us; but He chose the best way.  He entered into our forsakenness, our desolation, so that He could change us into His Delight and His Espoused.  It was not clean and easy, but neither was humanity.  Whether it’s building mousetraps or trying to live as disciples of Jesus, we seem to choose the harder, not smarter, way.  But God loves us enough to enter into that messiness so that, by His grace, we can clean up.  
    What we celebrate at Christmas is that God didn’t take the easy way out.  He could have simply willed to save us, but instead He sent His only-begotten Son to become like us in all ways but sin.  He took on our messy history, the saints and the sinners, and made it His own history.  God became man, so that man could become God, to paraphrase St. Athanasius.  
    This Christmas is hard, no doubt about it.  But the Good News is that God is here, and He understands our challenges, our difficulties, probably better than we do ourselves.  But God is still working to save us, no matter how hard, how difficult.  And that love, that dedication to us and to our eternal happiness that humbled itself to become like us in all things but sin, is definitely worth celebrating, and is something that not even COVID-19 can take away.  O come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord!

We're On a Mission from God

Third Sunday of Advent

     If I say the names Jake and Elwood, those of you who remember the 80s probably know exactly who I’m talking about.  Jake and Elwood are the Blues brothers, from the movie with the same name.  And as they work to get the band back together, they make it clear to everyone, that they’re on a mission from God. 
    Our first reading and Gospel today focus on a mission.  In the first reading from the Prophet Isaiah, we hear the mission statement that Jesus Himself will give as He preaches in the synagogue at Nazareth.  Jesus tells them, as Isaiah told Israel, that God has sent Him “to bring glad tidings to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, to announce a year of favor from the Lord and a day of vindication by our God.”  That’s definitely a mission from God, and a pretty good one!
    Our Gospel, too, makes clear that St. John the Baptist was “sent from God.  He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.”  We heard about St. John the Baptist, also called the Precursor, last week in our Gospel.  The Precursor is a man on a mission, to prepare the way for Jesus.  He is not the Messiah, as some had started to think, but wants everyone in Israel to be ready for the Messiah. 
    We, too, are called to be people on mission.  We, like Jake and Elwood, are on a mission from God.  I have used this quote before, but St. John Henry Newman wrote: 

God has created me to do Him some definite service.  He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.  I have my mission….He has not created me for naught.  I shall do good; I shall do His work.  I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place.

God has given us each a mission, a call, and it’s something that no one else can do like we can.  Can we respond to that call?
    Many times when we think of a call, we think of priests and consecrated men and women like monks and brothers, nuns and sisters.  But all of us are called, by baptism, to be on mission for God.  Many are called to be on mission as a wife or mother, husband or father.  Others are called to serve as a priest or deacon, or be in a religious community.  Some women are called to be consecrated virgins.  But all are called to advance the Gospel to others.
    How do we recognize our call?  Prayer is key.  A call is something that we choose, but to which God first invites us.  We make a deliberate choice to follow the urging of the Holy Spirit in our life.  Imagine how silly it would sound if I said I chose to be a priest simply because no one else wanted me.  Probably not a great way to start the seminary interview with the bishop.  Instead, a call is something to which we are driven.  A wife (hopefully) doesn’t agree to marry someone simply because no one else will have her.  She finds a man who cares for her, who puts her needs above his own, who wants to work with her to build a family according to God’s plan.  She chooses to love him because she senses that they are meant to become saints together.  And through daily prayer, taking time in silence to hear the voice of God, we learn what God wants for us.
    Sometimes our idea of the call develops or changes.  I didn’t always want to be a priest.  I wanted to be married, have a few kids, a couple of dogs, a really nice house and car, and work either in the military, or as a lawyer, and then maybe a politician (don’t let that last part lessen your opinion of me!).  But through prayer, I came to sense that I could only be truly happy as a priest.  Of course, the Church had something to say about it, too.  It wasn’t simply that I wanted a particular vocation.  But with the formation that the Church provided, and the “yes” that the Church spoke through her leaders, I came to be confirmed in what I felt God wanted me to do.  Sometimes our understanding of our mission changes or develops.
    Another key part of our mission is that we don’t replace the Messiah.  An older priest once told me that his spiritual director had counseled him when he became all-too-convinced of his own importance, “The Church already has a Messiah; we don’t need you!”  Our mission is to cooperate with God, not to take His place.  So many people feel that they can decide what they want to do, rather than God; that they can define what happiness will be–whom they can marry, how many kids they need to have, how they should spend their money–without any consideration of what God wants.  God has made the world a certain way, and has taught us, through the Scriptures and the Church, what truly makes us happy.  When we choose other than that, we are in an exercise of futility; we cannot be happy doing the things that God has said will not give us true happiness. 
    Some of you may feel, due to age or other factors, that you have already accomplished your mission because you know your vocation.  But, as long as you are alive, you still are on mission.  You can continue to spread the Gospel through your children, your grandchildren, and others.  You can offer suffering to Jesus on the cross for an intention.  You can continue to help others know the joy you have from your relationship with Jesus.  Don’t let COVID give you the blues.  You are on a mission from God!

St. John Henry Newman

Thanos and Gamora

 Second Sunday of Advent
    Before COVID, we had these things called movie theaters that gathered lots of people together in a single place, sitting within two feet of each other, without masks, watching a movie on a giant screen, while eating food and drinking beverages.  Some of you may remember this distant, past phenomenon.  I remember going, each year, to see the newest movie that featured comic book heroes from the Marvel universe.  And one of those movies, called “Avengers: Infinity War,” came to mind as I prepared for this week’s homily.  Since it’s been out since 27 April 2018, or 687 days before the COVID-19 first lockdown, I don’t think there’ll be any spoilers in the homily, but if you haven’t seen it, you may want to cover your ears a bit (or at least now you don’t have to make up your own excuse not to listen to the homily).
  

Thanos & Gamora

In that movie, as part of the build-up to the climax, Thanos, the villain, in search for the Soul Stone to increase his power, is told that he has to sacrifice something he loves in order to get the Soul Stone.  Thanos has with him Gamora, his “adopted” daughter (I say adopted because in reality, Thanos killed her parents as he destroyed half the population on her planet, including her parents).  So Thanos kills her, and in doing so, gains the Soul Stone, part of his quest to gain all the six Infinity Stones which will give him the power to destroy half the life in the universe.  
    Perhaps not the cheery image you were looking for on this second Sunday of Advent.  But then again, maybe the word “repent” is not one that you associate with Advent, either.  And yet, that is the proclamation of St. John the Baptist, which prepares the way for Jesus.  We probably prefer the rosy, cozy message that we heard from Isaiah: “Comfort, give comfort to my people…Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.”  And that is also the message of Jesus.  But the comfort comes once we acknowledge our sins.  
    How does that work?  In order to our Lord to heal in us that which is sick and wounded, we first, by His grace, have to admit that we are sick and wounded.  Otherwise we’re like the Black Knight from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” whose arms and legs are being chopped off as he battles King Arthur, but pretends it’s not serious and says, “It’s just a flesh wound.”  The primary and first proclamation of the Gospel is that we are sick and wounded, and we cannot heal ourselves, but Jesus can, and will.

And people know that they’re not alright.  In the Gospel, people “of the whole Judean countryside and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem” were going to St. John the Baptist to acknowledge their sins and be baptized.  They all knew that they were not how they were supposed to be.  Who ignored their sins?  The Pharisees.  They were convinced that they didn’t need healing, so they reject the message of St. John the Baptist, and consequently, the message of Jesus.  The people, on the other hand, can accept the message of Jesus because they first accepted the message of repentance.  Repentance prepares the way for the Lord.
    It’s as if we’re Thanos, and in order to gain the Soul Stone, we have to sacrifice something that we love.  But we’re not to sacrifice a person, but our sins, in order to gain our soul.  In Greek, the word for death is 𝛩𝛼𝜈𝛼𝜏𝜊𝜍.  Those in death, 𝛩𝛼𝜈𝛼𝜏𝜊𝜍, in order to gain life, has to give up what they mistakenly treasure–sin–in order to become full of life or immortal, 𝛢𝜃𝛼𝜈𝛼𝜎𝜄𝜊𝜍 in Greek.  
    Which is why, as we assemble for Mass, we begin by acknowledging our sins.  We don’t pretend we aren’t sinners (at least hopefully we don’t).  We don’t have to be major sinners; but all of us sin.  Pope Francis himself said in one interview when asked who he is, “I am a sinner.  This the most accurate definition.  It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre.  I am a sinner.”  Or, as has been claimed, Pope Francis said when accepting the papacy, “I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  If Pope Francis can admit that he’s a sinner, then we all can.  I certainly am a sinner, in need of the Lord’s mercy.  And because I know I need the Lord’s mercy, I am much more likely to accept it.  Again, like the Pharisees, those who do not think they need the Lord’s mercy will not be able to accept it when it comes.  
    What do we value above God, or place before our love for God?  What is more important to us than God?  What sins, big or small, are we grasping onto as if our life depended on them?  If our hands are grasping onto our sins, then our hands are not open to receive the mercy of the Lord.  Whatever the sin, bring it to the Lord in confession.  Express sorrow for your sins (the asking is itself a gift from God), and open your hands and your hearts to the mercy of God.  You may not gain the Soul Stone, but you will allow God to save your soul.