Speaking of Segue

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  In conversation, there are times where you really want to talk about something, but it’s not really part of the conversation at that time.  So you just wait for some word that bears some tangential connection to the point that you want to make, and then pounce and try to steer the discussion to the topic you desire.  Or, if the conversation is not going well, or going in the wrong direction, I will sometimes use the cheeky phrase, “Speaking of segue…”

    Last Tuesday I attended the episcopal consecration of Bishop Edward Lohse, the fifth bishop of Kalamazoo.  Archbishop Vigneron, the metropolitan of the Province of Michigan, gave the homily.  And he said something that I wanted to preach on here, but I didn’t know if it would fit with the readings.  The phrase was, “You are no poorer than Jerusalem at the beginning.”  So, when I came, as I prepared my homily, upon the words, “when Jesus drew near to Jerusalem,” I was so excited!
    So, speaking of Jerusalem, speaking of segue, I would like to draw us deeper into these words of Archbishop Vigneron.  He was speaking, of course, of God providing a shepherd to the Church in Kalamazoo, and how Christ pours out all necessary gifts for every local church, just as He sent the Holy Spirit to the Apostles and disciples gathered at Pentecost. 
    But the same applies to us, even without consecrating a new bishop today.  We are no poorer than Jerusalem at the beginning.  We have all the gifts that God gave to His nascent Church in that Upper Room fifty days after Easter.  We lack nothing of what it means to be a true church, an 𝜀𝜅𝜅𝜆𝜂𝜎𝜄𝛼, a people “called out” (𝜀𝜉 𝜅𝛼𝜆𝜀𝜊) of darkness into the light of Christ.
    What are the necessary aspects of being a Church?  First, it is that we are founded by Jesus Christ, and faithful to what He taught.  All other religions in the world are about man seeking out God.  Judaism, and its fulfillment in Christianity, is about God seeking us out.  We don’t make up teachings because we think they make sense to us.  We read and ponder the revelation of God, given to us through the Scriptures, and interpret it through the authentic teaching of the bishops in union with the pope.  We cannot contradict what Christ taught or what Christ did.  We do not refrain from ordaining women priests because we hate women.  Indeed, the holiest person ever is a woman, the Blessed Virgin Mary.  But Christ did not ordain her a priestess, nor anyone else.  It was only to the Apostles that He gave the sacred office.  We do not use rice and rice wine in Asia because we reject those staple food and drink of another culture.  We use bread and wine because that is what Christ Himself used.  We are not the masters of theology, but the servants of preserving it, even as we delve deeper and come to understand it more fully. 
    Even our Protestant brothers and sisters, who are united to us in baptism, while they can point to Christ, cannot claim that their ecclesial communities (things which look like churches but are not, strictly speaking, churches) were founded by Christ.  They were founded by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, the Wesley brothers, etc.  It strikes me that so many of the communities founded on sola scriptura are now divided because at least some in their official governance bodies want to walk away from Scripture because it is no longer fashionable, or seems, to the modern person, discriminatory.  To be a church, we must be founded by Christ and be rooted in what He has revealed.
    To be a church, we need to have all seven sacraments, all the major vehicles of sanctifying grace, that God has given us to become saints.  We share baptism with most of the Protestant denominations (I say most, because some have messed with the necessary words that effect validity).  But we also have six other ways that God makes us holy: the Sacraments of Penance, Eucharist, Confirmation, Holy Matrimony, Holy Order, and Anointing of the Sick.  God  takes these ordinary elements (water, oil, bread & wine, voice, consent, the laying on of hands) and makes them a way that His life is given to us, in a way that sitting in nature, or watching a religious movie never could.  The sacraments, which not only remind us of Christ but actually cause His life to increase in us, help us to develop in our relationship with Him, and then share that relationship with the world. 
    To be a church, we finally need connected to the Apostles.  We are truly an apostolic church, because our bishops can trace themselves back to the college of bishops at Pentecost, with Peter as their head.  Our Lord founded His Church in a particular way, such that those who listened to His Apostles listened to Him.  We mention their names at every Mass (in this form) in the Roman Canon: Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Jude (and Matthias gets mentioned later in the Canon).  And even every post-Conciliar Eucharistic prayer mentions the Apostles.  Those Apostles laid hands on their successors, giving them the Holy Spirit to continue their work and their connection to Christ. 

   At Pentecost, even in seminal form, all these things were present: right belief; seven sacraments; apostolic foundation.  And we retain all those elements.  And those elements allow us, clergy and lay faithful, to proclaim the Gospel, just as the Apostles and disciples did at Pentecost, leading to the conversion of many peoples.
    It seems like every one to two months, Amanda, our Director of Faith Formation, is telling me about another person who wants to become Catholic.  Some have never been baptized; some have been baptized in other ecclesial communities.  And we don’t just “make them Catholic” and never see them again.  They continue to participate in the life of this parish community.
    We are proud of our two young men, Joseph and Glen, who have heard the call to become priests and will continue to discern that call in seminary.  You strongly participate, whether at home with your families, or in our different formational groups and classes, in growing in your faith and deepening not just your knowledge of facts about the Lord, but your knowledge and love of Him, a real Person who lives.
    We don’t have money for fancy programs.  In many ways our parish, in both ways that the Mass is celebrated, is not culturally up-to-date or cutting edge.  We are certainly not the largest parish in Genesee County, not by a long shot.  But I would argue that we’re doing something right, because we do continue to bring people into relationship with Christ.  How?  Because we are no poorer than Jerusalem.  God has given us everything we need to proclaim His Gospel: fidelity to the teachings of Christ; the sacramental life of the Church; apostolic foundations and succession.  As long as we have that, we will continue to draw others to the truth and beauty that are part and parcel of our Catholic faith, founded by Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.  

Captain Jack Sparrow's Compass

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    When the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie came out in 2003, I was a bit skeptical.  How could you make a good movie based upon a ride at Disney World?  But, the movie was quite good, and led to a number of even decent sequels following (some better than others).

    One of the main characters is Captain Jack Sparrow (played by Johnny Depp), who is a pirate.  He always seems to get in and out of the oddest types of trouble through the strangest set of circumstances.  His goal, especially in the first movie, is to get back his beloved ship, the Black Pearl, of which he was mutinied when he was commanding.  To aid him, he has a strange compass, which doesn’t point north.  It’s not until later that we learn that this compass always points to what his heart desires most, which makes it a little complicated when he falls in love with one of the female leads, Elizabeth Swan (played by Keira Knightley). 
    Jesus today in the Gospel talks about the kingdom of heaven as a great treasure, or a pearl of great price.  Once a person finds it, they give up everything in order to have it.  To those in the parables, the compass would have pointed to heaven (if that were possible).  There is something about heaven that makes it worth everything else that we have. 
    And in some sense, we all probably can intellectually agree with that evaluation.  Heaven is eternal happiness with God.  We no longer experience pain, sorrow, death, or any of the fallen realities of this life.  We see God face to face, and God, who is love, surrounds us and embraces us eternally.  We worship God in His majesty with all those who are saints, whether canonized or known only to God.  That sounds pretty good.
    And yet, like Captain Jack Sparrow, the compasses that reflect the desires of our hearts, do not always point to heaven, but sometimes go every which way.  Perhaps we feel that no one else knows about the treasure in the field, so we figure we can do some other things before getting back to the treasure.  Or we tell the pearl merchant to hold the pearl on lay-away, and will come back some other time to pick-it up.  But we start to value other things ahead of heaven, and we chase after those these, even when we’re not sure what we will find, or if it’s even worth it.

    Part of our call as disciples is to ever-purify our desire for heaven.  I think the last time I preached on this Gospel I referenced the Kenny Chesney song that sings, “Everybody wants to go to heaven / but nobody wants to go now.”  Whether we’re parents training our kids, or simply training ourselves, we have an important role in making sure that we’re fixed on the trail of heaven, like a bloodhound seeking out an escaped convict, or Captain Jack Sparrow looking for his beloved ship. 
    Sometimes, the call to make sure that we’re on the road to heaven means ignoring the other sirens (Greek mythology, not emergency alerting devices) that call to us, and seem very attractive, but actually lead to destruction and death.  There are so many things that we, as followers of Christ, do not need to see or hear, because they lead us away from God.  Of course, we like to think that we are stronger than we are, that we can handle those sirens without being led astray.  But more often than not, we’re weak, and we will run headlong to destruction given the chance.
    At other times, we cannot avoid things that distract us from heaven, because they are all around us, and so we train ourselves to remember just how precious heaven is, or focus on other things that will not lead us astray.  I remember being in college seminary, which was on the campus of a small, Catholic, liberal arts co-ed campus.  As soon as it started to warm up in Minnesota, the college girls would bring out their towels and soak up the sun in the quad.  Our priests would sometimes remind us that, as we walked to class on those warm, sunny days, it was often good to examine just how beautiful the sidewalk could be, how many cracks were there, what weeds were popping up through the concrete, etc., just so that we wouldn’t be tempted to take that second, interested, lustful, sinful look. 
    Our hearts are often a mixed bag.  Age has a way of purifying that which we desire.  Older people tend to be quite serious about where they are going after they die.  But God doesn’t promise us that we will reach 80 or 90 years.  He promises to give us sufficient grace each day to say yes to heaven, and then we, in response, have to decide if we want to accept that grace or not.    Yes, at church, if we had Captain Jack Sparrow’s compass, our hearts would (hopefully) point to heaven.  But our goal is that the compass always points to heaven, not just for an hour on Sundays.  May we truly recognize how precious heaven is (and how sad and easy it can be to lose heaven), and have the strength to give up lesser realities and lesser desires for the eternal happiness of heaven.

Thinking Smaller

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    Perspective can change a lot.  There’s a comedic movie from 1989 called “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” where a scientist shrinks his kids (didn’t see that coming from the title, did you?) and two neighbor kids.  Small little crumbs of food become huge smorgasbords of sustenance.  Puny ants become both a large mode of transportation as well as elephant-like enemies.  Drops from the sprinkler go from small globs of refreshment to gigantic showers of death.  What once was small and insignificant, is now a matter of life and death.
    As we hear this parable about the weeds sown amongst the wheat, I know I often think of the big scale.  And, in fact, Jesus Himself uses this macro scale.  The sower “is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed the children of the kingdom.  The weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil.  The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.”  And this reality is very present to us.  As we seek to live according to the Gospel, we also notice that others do not.  But God is patient, and allows even evil to exist, because the work of removing the “weeds” could destroy the good crops as well.
    But I would encourage us to shrink the parable a bit.  Don’t look at it so much from the macro scale as from the micro scale.  Because when we stay at the macro scale, it can be very easy to be self-righteous and to presume that we’re all the children of the kingdom simply by virtue of our baptism.  But, unless you’re very different than I, we do not always live as children of the kingdom.  Sometimes we live more like children of the evil one, choosing to sin when we know we should do good, and choosing to listen to the temptations rather than to our heavenly Father.
    I would hazard a guess that most of us are a mixed-bag.  We are not all good, but nor are we all bad.  Our souls have good seed sown, by virtue of our baptism and the sacraments we receive, but we also allow weeds to grow in our souls by virtue of the times when we give in to temptation and do not do the good we know we should do, but instead do the evil we know we should not do. 
    Because of this, God demonstrates His great mercy in giving us time to pull up the weeds that exist in our souls little by little, rather than destroying the entire crop by spraying Round-Up.    He sees the good that we desire, and suffers the evil that we do, hoping that, in time, He can harvest more fruit from good seed than weeds that will be thrown into the fire.  God doesn’t approve of the evil, and certainly less so desires that it grow.  But He also knows that the good that we do can sometimes be quite fragile, and if the weeds are withdrawn too aggressively, it may also take out what good we could accomplish.
    Does this mean that we should continue in our sinful choices and actions, because God may let it slide anyway?  Certainly not!  God shows His patience so that we can have more opportunity to do good, not so that we can have more opportunity to sin.  And, in fact, as any gardener will tell you, it is still good to try to make sure the weeds don’t overtake the good seed.  But it has to be done carefully, often with painstakingly small successes, and the we often have to pull weeds from the same spot over and over again, because we have not pulled out the roots, but have only gotten the part of the weed that made its way above the ground level.
    How do we pull weeds gently, to increase the room for the good seed to spread, without being so aggressive that we pull up the good and the bad?  Part of it means being patient with ourselves, as God is patient with us.  If we have a bad habit, whether it’s a major sin or a small sin, it will take time to uproot that habit.  If we expect to stop it immediately, we are more often than not fooling ourselves.  Do the little things each day to try to stop the habit.  If you do it each day, try to reduce it to every other day.  If you act on the bad habit each week, try to make it a week and a half, or two weeks. 
    Secondly, God’s grace is, for the weeds of our soul, better than Round-up.  By opening ourselves up to God’s grace by frequent confession, reception of Holy Communion in a state of grace, and daily prayer, we make start pulling up those weeds one by one, and loosening the soil with the water of the Holy Spirit to soften the ground and make it more likely to succeed in getting not just the symptom but also the disease.
    Thirdly, persevere.  When you’re weeding a large flower bed, and the weeds have been allowed to take over a section or even the whole bed, it takes a while.  Maybe start with the bigger weeds, the bigger sins, first, but then go back and start pulling up even the smaller weeds, because, if they are allowed to grow, they, too, will become big weeds.  You may only progress through a few square inches of that flower bed, but at least you know that’s ready for the good seed to grow, and you can move on to the next section.  Don’t be afraid that you’re not seeing great progress, as long as you are cooperating with God’s grace and making what progress you can.
    I am a firm believer that God desires our salvation.  He doesn’t want us to fail, and enjoys seeing us make what progress we can.  Any success is due to His grace, accompanied by our cooperation.  If we keep striving to do the will of God, God will bless that effort, and will help us find success.  Yes, the world is a mixture of weeds and wheat.  But so is our soul.  Before condemning the world, start weeding out the parts of your life that need conversion.  It may be slow work, but it will also help the wheat grow even more, as we witness to the power of God’s grace in our lives.  

No Spirit of Slavery and Fear

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  A week or so ago I felt a little overwhelmed with all the stuff that had to get accomplished, and frustrated with things that I wanted to go a particular way and didn’t.  As I sometimes do, I called up my best friend to vent a little bit and hopefully get a little sympathy.  After I had finished my pity party, and explaining how tough my life was at that point, my friend said something to the effect of: “You act like life is supposed to be easy, and that you’re supposed to be perfectly happy on this earth.  Life is a fight until we hopefully make it to Purgatory or Heaven, and then we can rest easy and not have to struggle.”  What my friend lacks in empathy, he makes up for in straightforwardness.  
    I thought of that as I prepared my homily because of this line from St. Paul: “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but a spirit of adoption, through which we cry out, Abba (Father).”  When we look at the state of the world, and even sometimes the state of the Church (or at least parts of the Church), it can be very easy to give in to this mentality of “woe is me!”  We live in a fallen world, and so many things are not the way that they should be.  Further, as the world turns more and more away from Christ, the battle for us intensifies and calls for more fortitude to be loving but firm witnesses to the Gospel.  We also have to deal with others’ sinfulness and sinful actions (just as others have to deal with our own sinfulness and sinful actions), and it gets tiring.  And then there are simply the things that don’t go according to plan, not because of any ill will, but simply because our world is fallen and things don’t always go the way we intend or hope.

    How easy to wallow in the mud of self-pity!  And yet, we did not receive a spirit of fear, but a spirit of adoption, which gives us courage to keep fighting.  God does not call us to cower, but to fight on, each day, for His kingdom.  To return to the “Lord of the Rings,” which I reference all too often, we are each Frodo, carrying a heavy burden to Mount Doom, so that the world can be made right and evil can be vanquished.  And sometimes we say to Sam (those walking with us to Mount Doom) that we’re tired, that we can’t make it.  Sometimes Sam even has to carry us.  But in the end, Frodo finds strength to complete his task.
    Or, to reference another set of DVDs I own, I think back to EZ company in the HBO series, “Band of Brothers.”  Their task was monumental.  Nazi forces were well-positioned all throughout Europe, and fortified against external attacks.  Europe seemed lost.  But the men of EZ company decided to jump out of planes that were going to flying into Nazi-occupied France so that the men who would be storming the beaches of Normandy that following morning would have a better chance to establish their own foothold, from which they could liberate Europe.  EZ company had great victories, like on D-Day, but they also had epic failures, like Operation Markt Garden in Holland.  Days stretched into weeks which stretched into months which stretched into D-Day plus 336 days.  They sometimes didn’t have enough ammunition, were surrounded, lost friends, had to train new paratroopers, and even had to put up with bad leaders.  But they never gave up.  They never surrendered.  They kept fighting on.

    While we can apply this analogy aptly to the world, it also applies to our own spiritual life.  Our own souls are often battlefields, or have paths that lead to attitudes or habits that are contrary to God.  It seems like we all-too-often try to root out the same sins, sometimes taking two steps forward and one step back, or even one step forward and two steps back.  Opening ourselves to God’s grace to allow Him to sanctify us seems like a path that will never end, and fatigue can hit us after trying so hard and not always achieving the success we desire.
    In the midst of that, keep that phrase that we heard today in your mind: “God did not give us a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear.”  In Confirmation, the Holy Spirit gave us many gifts, including the gift of fortitude.  Fortitude is the virtue which helps us to keep pressing on when something is hard, to continue to fight in the face of danger, to stand up for what is right, no matter the cost.  If today weren’t a Sunday, we would celebrate St. Apollinaris in the 1962 calendar.  He was a disciple of St. Peter, and traveled with him from Antioch (where Peter founded a local church) to Rome.  He was then made the bishop of Ravenna, and preached the Gospel, while enduring many persecutions.  The pagans locked him in prison and exiled him.  St. Apollinaris died by being beaten to death in AD 79.  St. Apollinaris, like all of the martyrs, are great witnesses to us of what our acceptance of the gift of fortitude can look like if we seek it.  In those early days of the church, not much went as the Christians hoped.  Many rejected their message of the Gospel.  Those who did accept it often struggled with leaving their old life behind (as we especially hear from St. Paul in his epistles to the Corinthians).  Some converts tried to mix their pagan beliefs in with the Gospel (which is where Gnosticism starts to appear).  And more often than not, being a public follower of Christ meant imprisonment or exile at best, and, very likely, execution in a horrible manner at worst.  But they kept it up.  Not because it was easy; not because they were as successful as they wanted to be; not because everything went well, but because they had the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters in the Son of God.  And they knew that remaining faithful as God’s children was worth any punishment or seeming failure that could happen.  
    So today, recommit yourselves, as I also will do, to bringing the light of Christ into a world that prefers darkness.  Recommit yourselves, as I also will do, to staying faithful to Christ when so many walk away from Him.  Do not give in to the spirit of slavery and fall back into fear, but stand strong in the spirit of adoption as co-heirs with Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen. 

True Dichotomy

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  So often we’re nudged in the direction of a false dichotomy.  That phrase, false dichotomy, might sound foreign, might even sound like an obscure body part, but it’s the wrong assertion that there are only two choices.  For example, a person might say, “You have to vote for a Republican or a Democrat,” when, in fact, there are other political parties for whom you can vote.  Or, less weighty, you have to decide whether or not you can put pineapple on pizza.  As I tend to be the pop culture reference guy, it’s like Anakin in “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” saying to Obi Wan, “‘If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy.’” 

    But not all dichotomies are false.  Scripture, and especially our epistle today, talks about the dichotomy between sin and grace, death and life.  Sin brings death, grace brings life.  And St. Paul talks about the Romans had previously been slaves to sin and death, but now were raised to life through grace, “in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 
    But this is not just St. Paul.  It’s the overarching theme in the Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation.  In Genesis, after God creates everything good, culminating in the creation of man and woman in His image, our first parents have life.  They are living in the grace of God.  But then, Eve, followed by Adam, disobey God; they sin.  And by sinning, they welcome death into the world.  They are expelled from the Garden of Eden, and separated from the Tree of Life, so that they experience death. 
    And so throughout Genesis, we see that when evil is allowed to fester, it leads to death.  Think of the Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  But, when people follow God, they find life.  Think of Abram leaving Ur because God calls him to go to Canaan, and then becoming Abraham, the father of many nations.  The same could be said for Exodus, where God leads His people from slavery to sin in Egypt to freedom in following His law in the Promised Land.  Of course, throughout the journey, some disobey God, and they find death.  While others, like Joshua and Caleb, follow God, even when unpopular, and they enter the Promised Land.
    This same overarching theme repeats itself in the Books of Joshua and Judges, and then with the Kings of Israel.  The prophetic books are basically warnings from God through His prophets to live according to God’s will, because if they continue in their sin, they will die.  This culminates in the dispersion of the Northern Kingdom of Israel after they start worshiping false gods and oppressing those for whom God has a special love: widows and orphan; and the exile of the Southern Kingdom of Judah to Babylon after they, too, engage in idolatry and mistreatment of the poor and vulnerable.
    Of course, nowhere does this dichotomy appear clearer than with our Lord, who calls Himself, “‘the Way and the Truth and the Life.’”  To follow Him is to have life; to reject Him is to choose death.  The Savior even takes our rejection and the consequence of that rejection–death–upon Himself in His crucifixion, but because He was faithful to God He rises on the third day.  And the rest of the New Testament unpacks that choice between life and death, and helps those who follow the Lord to know what choosing life looks like to the nascent Church.  The Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul’s epistles, the epistles of St. Peter, St. Jude, and St. John all talk about how we can have eternal life and reject the death of sin.
    And at the end of the Bible in the Book of Revelation, we see the cosmic battle between good and evil, a battle that God wins convincingly.  But the Spirit also warns the churches that they have to continue to follow God to have that life.  It was not enough to choose life once or earlier; life must be chosen each day.  In the end, sin and death are defeated forever, and the fullness of the reign of God shines forth, with eternal life for those who remained faithful (and eternal punishment for those who rejected God).
    So which do we choose: life or death?  By our fruits, Christ tells us, you can tell what we choose.  Each time we sin, especially grave sins, we invite death into our lives.  Each time we follow God, we invite eternal life into our lives.  Indeed, though we often think of the judgment as Christ telling us where to go, either to Hell, or to Purgatory or Heaven, really we make that choice each day of our lives.  While the just are surprised that they served Christ through service to the poor, and the wicked are likewise surprised that they ignored Christ through ignoring the poor, they knew that they had served or ignored the poor.  In that way, their salvation or damnation was not a surprise, because they knew their choices, and whether or not they choose to do follow what God had instructed for eternal life.  Sometimes it was one act of following the Lord at the end of one’s life, like St. Dismas, the good thief, who received paradise for his defense of Christ crucified.  At other times it was more choices for the Lord, with some rejections sprinkled in, like St. Peter.  Or, in a negative sense, one great act of betrayal from Judas led him to despair of any chance of salvation.  But Dismas nor Peter nor Judas was ignorant of the choices they made and how each could affect eternal salvation.
    So where will we come out in this great drama and battle between life and death?  By baptism Christ claimed us for Himself and eternal life, and gives us the grace to stay faithful to the choices of life each day.  Each day the enemy works to enslave us once more to death.  Neither Christ nor the devil chooses for us.  We choose if we want death or life.  Praised be to God who gives us all the graces necessary so that we can accept the gift that salvation is, won for us by Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.