More Than Rules

Second Sunday of Lent
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  The Church Fathers have consistently taught that the Gospel we heard today, that of the Transfiguration, allowed Christ to assuage the distress of the announcement of His Passion, so that the Apostles could know that, after the Passion, the glory of the Resurrection would follow. 

    The Transfiguration also demonstrates what Christ desires to happen to us if He joins us to Himself through Holy Baptism.  The glorification of the head also means the glorification of the body.  God does not keep His glory to Himself, but shares it with those whom Holy Baptism joins to Himself and those who, through a holy life, keep that union strong. 
    And during our Lenten observances, as we discipline ourselves and “waste away” from fasting and abstaining, it is good to keep our eyes on the prize and realize for what God made us.  Because God did not solely destine us for this earth and all of its fallenness.  God made us so that we could live with Him eternally in heaven, and the glory that He has by nature He would share with us by grace.  We, too, are meant to be transfigured.
    So often Catholicism is simply presented as rules to follow.  St. Paul today tells us not to give in to fornication and not to give in to lust, as do the pagans.  And in this way, St. Paul tells us, God will make us holy.  Certainly, many people think about the Church’s teaching on sex as “don’t do [fill in the blank].” 
    But the Gospel reminds us that Catholicism is not, at its heart, about rules.  Catholicism is about letting God transfigure us to be more like Himself, which is how He made us.  Rules can often seem very external, but God desires that His grace not only affect our actions, the externals, but also affect our entire being, both externals and internals.  The chief complaint from the Lord about the Pharisees was that they only cared about the externals, so He calls them cups where only the outside is washed, while the inside remains dirty, or white-washed sepulchers, finely decorated on the outside, but full of death on the inside.  The catch-word for Lent, repent, comes from the Greek 𝜇𝜀𝜏𝛼𝜈𝜊𝜀𝜄𝜏𝜀, meaning a change of mind or a change of being. 
    And as we hear St. Peter say that it is good that they are at Mt. Tabor, and should stay there in three tents, even he, in a sense, thinks only about the externals.  Christ allows His divinity to shine through, and Peter is awe-filled.  But it doesn’t require any change of his own life.  He can simply watch the Lord and bask in His brilliance.  But a disciple is not just about “me and Jesus,” to use a common Christian phrase.  Following the Lord means that we allow God to transform our life, which pushes us out to share that new life with others.  When we conform our lives to God, we conform them to love, which is diffusive; it wants to be shared with others, not kept to ourselves. 
    This transformation cannot only be on the outside.  St. Paul, elsewhere, talks about the glory of the law, which pales in comparison to the glory of righteousness.  Moses, the Apostle writes, had this glory, but the glory faded, which is why Moses covered his face: so the Israelites didn’t see the slow fade of the glory.  The Law had some transfiguring effect, but not a total transfiguration.  Moses could give the law, but grace and truth came through Christ, as we hear in St. John’s prologue at each Mass. 
    It is all too easy to “do the right things.”  It is easier to simply do the external things that we are told that we need to do than to allow those things that we are supposed to do change us, both outside and inside.  But the point of the externals is to change the internals.  God does not only want us to look good, He wants us to be good.  And so those things that we do should change our interior dispositions to be more like Christ.
    So as we engage in our Lenten disciplines, ask yourselves: is this discipline opening me up to the grace of God so that I can be transformed?  Or is it only an outward action that does nothing to my interior spiritual life?  And if we’re not being transformed, it’s not that we stop our penances.  We can’t simply eat meat on Fridays because we don’t experience how abstaining from meat on Fridays transforms us to be more like Christ.  What it does mean is that we have to examine how that practice, or any others that we undertake, can make us more receptive to God’s grace.  Maybe by not eating meat by choice, I ponder those who cannot choose what they want to eat because they have no money.  My heart grows in love for the poor, and I am led to consider how I can help them according to my own state in life.  I no longer see them as “others” who annoy me, but as beloved of Christ, and even Christ Himself, as He says in Matthew 25, for whom I have a responsibility to care. 
    I know I preached about externals and internals on Ash Wednesday, but the Gospel of the Transfiguration reminds us that Christ did not come only to change religious practices.  Christ came to make us more like God, not on our own terms, like what Adam and Eve tried to do when they disobeyed God, but on God’s terms, with a transformation that shines more brightly.  May our Lenten practices not only discipline our bodies, but also help us to be more like Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Are You Saved?

First Sunday of Lent
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  Are you saved?  This is a question that we can get from some of our Protestant brothers and sisters when we encounter them.  Or we might hear them talking about how they were saved on a particular date or at a particular age.  A week ago yesterday I attended the funeral of the mother of the Flint Post Administrator for the Michigan State Police.  She was baptist, and the preacher asked that very question to us, and talked about how Nadine was saved at a particular age when she accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior.
    We as Catholics don’t use that language.  And so when we’re asked, perhaps we don’t know how to answer.  But as we begin Lent, it’s a good thing to explore.  St. Peter in his first letter [today] talks about being saved by baptism, which was prefigured by Noah being saved in the ark from the great Flood.  In terms of baptism, we can point to a day in which we were saved from original sin and became a child of God in the Son of God and, therefore, a member of the Church.  Baptism is a one-time event because it forever claims us for God and washes away, not only original sin, but any other sins that we have committed up to that point (if we’re not baptized as an infant, who wouldn’t have any personal sins that would need to be wiped away).  When it comes to baptism, we can rightly say that we were saved on that day.
    However, baptism isn’t only about a day.  Baptism begins a life of following Christ.  It’s not as if that one day means that we never have to worry about salvation after that.  Even though original sin is washed away, we still retain concupiscence, a desire for lesser goods.  While many Christians reject the idea of concupiscence after baptism, it seems quite obvious from human existence.  We probably can’t count the number of times even in just one day that we are tempted to do things that we know we shouldn’t do.  It doesn’t mean we have to give in to those temptations.  Through baptism, we have all the graces we need to avoid all mortal sins throughout our life.  But we still want what we shouldn’t want, as St. Paul himself describes.  Adam and Eve, who had no sin at first, were still tempted to reject God, and their choice to reject God affected all of us.  And Satan even tempted our Lord in the desert, as the Gospel for the First Sunday of Lent describes.  Our Lord had no sin whatsoever, and yet, due to His human nature, Satan thought he could get Christ to give in to lesser goods, just as Satan had tempted our first parents. 
    So, in this sense, we can say that we are being saved, in as much as we are choosing each day, more or less, to follow Christ.  To the extent that we follow Him, we are participating more in the salvation that God first offered to us in Holy Baptism.  To the extent that we choose lesser goods, things that we shouldn’t do, we are participating less in the salvation that God first offered us in Holy Baptism.
    And that leads to the last aspect of salvation for us as Catholics: we hope to be saved.  Life is our time of accepting or rejecting God and the promises of Holy Baptism to live as a disciple.  Each day we move closer to or farther away from eternal life in heaven.  There is no staying put or coasting.  But at some point, we will have cemented our decision because we won’t have any more decisions to make because we’re dead.  At that point, our life will witness to whether or not we accepted the salvation that God offered us in Holy Baptism and we will receive our eternal reward in Heaven (or the time preparing for Heaven in Purgatory) or our enteral punishment in Hell.  Once we die, there are no more second chances.  And so we hope that the decisions we make throughout our life show that we have accepted the salvation that Christ won for us by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  Only then will we know for sure if we are saved, though we have hope, because of baptism and because of being in a state of grace, that is, without mortal sin, at the time of our death. 

Powers Catholic Varsity Hockey Team

    While all analogies limp, think of it like being a hockey player.  When you first were able to skate on your own and hold a stick, you were, in a very beginning sense, a hockey player.  Sure, you didn’t have the ability to skate all that well, or the power from your muscles to push the puck far, but you were at the beginning.  Later, you developed more skills, and grew in your ability as a hockey player.  You also had times where you could decide to follow your desire to be a hockey player, or you could have chosen something else to do and abandon hockey.  Even for those of you who won the State Championship last year, you would each probably acknowledge ways that you can still grow as a hockey player.  Maybe we could, using this analogy, say that making to the NHL means that you are truly a hockey player, something some of you may hope to achieve someday.  So you were a hockey player when you just started out; you are still working on being a hockey player now; and you hope to truly be a hockey player in the NHL someday. 
    But for all of us, hockey players and non-hockey players alike, our goal is to continue to accept the gift of salvation that God offers us each day.  And our Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are meant to train us in a special way during this time of year to be able to choose the higher goods of following God’s will, and say no to the lesser goods of following only our will.  May those things that we have given up and the extra things we’re doing during Lent; may the extra prayers we say as we talk more and listen more to God; and may the generosity that we show to those in need during our Lenten season continue us on the path of salvation that God has set out for us [the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen].

How We Build

Anniversary of the Dedication of St. Matthew Church

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  When we think about this building, we think of the many parts that came together to make this such a beautiful church.  We have the brickwork, the plaster, the doorframes, the marble, the paint, and everything that fits together in just a particular way so as to make up this church building.  Those different materials and items had to be shaped and placed together particularly so that we could have a temple in which we worship God.  They didn’t simply exist and magically come together.  It took work.  But with the work accomplished, we can rightfully say that we are the most beautiful church in Genesee County, and one of the most beautiful in the Diocese of Lansing.
    St. Peter tells us in his first epistle that we are living stones, being built up into a spiritual house to offer acceptable sacrifice to God through Jesus Christ.  This building is important because it reminds us of what we are called to be.  We each have our different gifts and talents.  But when we are shaped and placed together, united in a single purpose, we form something beautiful that aids in the worship of God. 
    As we celebrate the Anniversary of the Dedication of this church, I wanted to share with you what the leadership team (me, Amanda Williams, Mike Wilson, and Jason Tower) discerned for how we will continue into the future as a parish; how we exist as the invisible temple that this visible temple makes present.  We, with the help of the Catholic Leadership Institute, worked hard over three one-day sessions in the fall, to make sure that we clearly understood and could articulate what makes St. Matthew Parish St. Matthew Parish, as well as how God calls us, not only statically, but dynamically, to continue His work of spreading the Gospel.  And I want to communicate with you our parish purpose, vision, values, and priorities, with the hope that we can each find ways to work together to be purposeful, guided by our vision and values, and working towards the priorities that we believe God has given to St. Matthew.
    The parish purpose and vision give us the “why” of St. Matthew.  Why do we exist as a parish?  What motivates us and moves us?  Our purpose, as discerned by my leadership team, “is to use beauty and truth to inspire and develop disciples to transform the secular order by the grace of God, for His glorification and the edification of man.”  That’s a mouthful, I know.  But basically, we focused on two of the transcendentals, beauty and truth, as a way that we form disciples.  And why are we trying to form disciples?  Because the world is not as it should be.  The world is not as God created it.  But we can work together, by His grace, to make it more like it should be, more according to the plan of God.  And this not only glorifies God, but also builds us up into the people God wants us to be.  You can see this purpose each week on the front page of our bulletin.  It’s meant to be a reminder to each of us of why we exist.
    As to our vision, the big view of what we want to be and accomplish, “We are a Roman Catholic parish in the heart of Flint that worships God with reverence, forms disciples, and serves the physical and spiritual needs of our neighbors in communion with the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.”  Our purpose could be applied to any parish.  Our vision puts our purpose in our particular context of where we are (“in the heart of Flint”) and what we do (“worships God…forms disciples…serves the…needs of our neighbors”).  But what we do is not by our own imagining, as if we create the Church.  Our vision happens within the context of the one Church that Christ established, which, as Lumen gentium states, “subsists in the Catholic Church.” 
    That vision is made manifest in our values as a parish.  The leadership team discerned three values of St. Matthew Parish that are important to everything we do: reverence; faithfulness; and family/community.  By reverence, we mean that we “strive to promote the awe and respect that is owed to God.”  How do we do this?  By following the rubrics the Church sets out for the celebration of the sacred liturgy; by allowing time for sacred silence so that God can speak in our hearts; and by appropriate posture and dress, so that the way we carry ourselves and present ourselves in parish life manifests how we live in wonder and awe in God’s presence.
    By faithfulness, we mean that we “support fidelity to the Magisterium and the 2,000 year history of the Church.”  So many love to be only what is happening now.  We stay faithful to what the Church officially teaches, and how that has been revealed to us by God over the entire history of the Church, not just before or after the Second Vatican Council.  How do we do this?  By incorporating legitimate liturgical traditions; by promoting orthodoxy and refuting heresy; and by striving to imitate Christ in all that we do.  In this way we show that we are truly Catholic: welcoming all that is good, while preserving the world as salt from all that is bad.
    Lastly, by family/community, we mean the value we place on every human life from natural conception to natural death.  How do we do this?  By supporting families of all ages; by welcoming families into our parish by what we say, but also by what we do; and by helping families create a strong domestic church, a strong place in their homes where God is present. 
    Based on these values, then, we are currently prioritizing the support of the Domestic Church, the family; evangelization and apologetics so that we can share the faith with others; and community outreach, so that we may serve Christ in the least of his brothers, as He says in Matthew 25. 
    So what?  A lot of ink was spilled, but does it make a difference?  Again, if we are going to continue to be built into the spiritual temple of God, then we have to have an organizing plan.  We cannot simply exist and hope that we’ll all come together, anymore than the bricks, plaster, paint, marble, etc. just existed and then came together without any effort.  All that we do as a parish should fit within these paradigms, paradigms that we did not create so much as discern that God wants us to use.  When you’re donating your money; when you’re volunteering; when you’re asking for this or that activity or program; all of it should fit into one of these categories that I have outlined for you today.  And if we do that, we will continue to grow as a parish, and form a new generation of disciples who will carry out the Great Commission which was given to us by Jesus Christ [who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen].

The Generosity of the Sower

Sexagesima
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Conservation of energy: in the world of physics and chemistry, this law states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant and is conserved over time.  In my world it means that I want the least amount of work for the greatest amount of results.  I don’t want to work any harder than I have to work.  Whatever effort I put in should yield some positive result. 

    God does not seem to operate that way, as Christ tells us in the parable.  We have a farmer who has seeds, from which he expects some sort of yield of crops.  But he’s sowing seed on the road, and on rocky soil, and among thorns, and finally, among good soil.  What a waste!  Any simple person trying to plant grass would know that if you throw seed on the road, it will get trampled upon or eaten by birds; if you throw seed on rocks it won’t have enough place to expand its roots and gain nutrients; if you throw seed among thorns it won’t grow above the thorns.  Here is the farmer putting all this work in when it, most likely, will not yield any results.  And remember that, in our Lord’s day, you couldn’t simply go to Home Depot and pick up a pack of seeds.  The seeds you had were likely from the harvest the year before.  You were working with a limited quantity.
    Most often when I’m preaching about this Gospel, I focus on the type of soil that our souls are.  And it can yield real spiritual fruit to meditate on how open we are to receiving the word of God and letting it take root in our lives.  But today I want to focus on the farmer, and how it reveals to us how God operates and, therefore, how God wants us to operate.
    God is wasteful when it comes to His Word.  He does not scrimp and save.  He shares His Word in ways that otherwise would make no sense.  And why?  Because, as St. Paul tells us in his epistle to St. Timothy, God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.  God shares His Word with those who probably will not receive it, but just in case they can, He sows those seeds anyway.  And, unlike soil, people can change.  Roads and rocks and thorns can become good soil.  So God thinks nothing of scarcity of resources, but shares His life with everyone, in the hopes that something will bear fruit.
    And we see this in other parables, too.  In the parable of the lost sheep, the shepherd leaves behind the 99 sheep who are doing just fine in order to find the 1 who is lost.  No shepherd in his right mind would do this.  The math doesn’t make sense, unless, of course, you are the lost sheep whom the Good Shepherd finds.  In the parable about the lost coin, the woman tears her house apart looking for that one coin, and on finding it throws a party, which probably would cost more than that coin.  In the parable about the lost son, more commonly known as the Prodigal, or Wasteful, Son, no father with any sense would have welcomed back a son who told him to drop dead and give him his share of the inheritance now, then wasted it on loose living, and then returns to live as a servant.  But the father runs out to meet his son, and throws a party at his return.  In all these parables, God does what in earthly calculations seems inconceivable.  He is generous to the point of absurdity. 
    This would be too good to be true, if not for the fact that the description of the Father, the First Person of the Blessed Trinity, comes to us from the Son, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.  When Truth Incarnate tells you something, you can take it to the bank.
    But the parables are not meant only to give us the warm fuzzies about how God acts.  If we are truly disciples of the Lord, and the Lord reveals to us the Father, then we are called to act as Christ depicts the Father in each of these parables.  We are called to be pazzo d’amore, as St. Catherine of Siena says, crazy in love.  When a person is in love, a new logic takes over, and the love of the beloved becomes the most important. 
    So with our faith and work at evangelization: how do we spread God’s word and God’s grace?  Are we penny-pinchers, very careful with whom we share the Word?  Or are we generous, even to the point of wastefulness, with trying to gain others for Christ?

Fr. Gerard Timoner, OP

    I saw a talk from the Master of the Order of Preachers, Fr. Gerard Timoner, and I can’t even give you the exact context or date, but it fits well here.  He is addressing Dominicans, and especially their charism to preach.  But he uses two examples of those who have care for others in the Gospel: shepherds and fishermen.  To paraphrase and summarize, he talks about how shepherds are those who care for what is already there.  Their responsibility is to make sure that the sheep are safe from the wolves, and even to go after lost sheep when they wander away.  A shepherd has to make sure the sheep are led to good pastures.  It is, in some sense, more static.  A fisherman, instead, has nothing to guard.  He has to go fishing.  His role is going out to catch the fish and bring them into the nets; he cannot stand along the shoreline and wait for the fish to come to him.  In reality, the Dominican Master says, the vocation of a Dominican is both shepherd and fisherman: both to guard what is already there, as well as to go out and catch what is not there yet.  I would argue that our vocation as disciples mimics that of the Dominicans: we have a duty to guard the truth in our lives–family, friends, etc.  But we cannot simply hope that other people will simply come to us because we guard the truth so well.  We also have to go out and catch others and bring them into our nets.  In a sense, we are called to catch fish, and then turn them into sheep.  We invite people to follow Christ, and then help them stay in His one Church. 
    When it comes to our secular life, I’m all about doing the least to get the most results.  But when it comes to our life of faith, when it comes to sharing the Gospel, Christ invites us to mimic our extravagant Father, who shares His grace and His Word even when it doesn’t seem to make sense, and who lives and reigns with the Son and the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever.  Amen.  

All Things to All People

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Fr. Anthony and his sisters, (l-r) Amanda and Allison

    As any good parent knows, you can’t treat each child the same and expect the same results.  Each child is unique and has different personalities and means of motivation, even if there are similarities.  In my own family, all three of us children generally wanted to excel in what we did.  We generally all behaved, but we also all got into trouble in different ways.  For me, the oldest (the one whose perfection the parents kept trying to duplicate by having other children), usually simply setting out the expectation was good enough to keep me in line.  If not, a little punishment went a long way.  For the middle child, all my dad had to do was look at her the wrong way and she would start crying in penitence.  For the youngest child, telling her what to do usually led to some defiance, and then harsher punishments (she was the only one who had her mouth washed out with soap after mom told her not to say the word “punk” and she argued that it wasn't a bad word). 
    So as St. Paul says today, “I have become all things to all, to save at least some,” he is exercising good spiritual fatherhood.  He knows that each person responds to the Gospel differently, and so he had to tailor the tone and delivery of the Gospel, as well as his witness to it, to each person as best he could, so that some might convert to living as Christ has shown us.  Elsewhere in his letters he talks about using the power of the Gospel, and one can think of the miracles that God did through St. Paul (like raising a man from the dead who fell out of a window after falling asleep because St. Paul was preaching so long).  Or in another place we hear how he earned a living while preaching the Gospel (St. Paul was a tent-maker), so that they wouldn’t think he was trying to mooch off of them and get rich by preaching the Gospel. 
 

St. John Vianney

   This is still true today with my own spiritual fatherhood.  Some in this parish need strong words and the threat of divine retribution in order to change their lives.  Others are scrupulous, and don’t think that they can do anything right, that everything is a sin.  Some fall in between those two extremes.  St. John Vianney said that priests should be “a lion at the pulpit and a lamb in the confessional,” that is, strong words of preaching to bring about conversion, but gentle when a person comes to admit his or her faults to God in the Sacrament of Penance.  I may not always hit that goal, but I admit that, in my own estimation, that is the standard to which I apply myself.
    But being all things to all people in evangelization concerns not only priests.  It also applies to the lay faithful, you, in your work of sharing the Gospel in everyday life and transforming the secular world, the city of man, to be more like the heavenly world, the City of God.  Probably we all get this in principle, but do we apply it?
    When I was a seminarian I sure didn’t understand this principle.  It always perplexed me why people didn’t immediately convert after giving them a logical argument for the Catholic Church being the Church started by Jesus.  Or how self-styled Catholics could do things or promote things which were so antithetical to the Catholic faith.  To me, all a person needs is a good, rational argument, and they should convert.  And that works for some people.
    But for others, the truths of the faith are important, but only convince when they are lived out in practice.  You can give them every good argument from the Summa Theologiae, and still they would not be convinced.  But if they see a Catholic caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, comforting the sorrowful and afflicted, they are convinced that the faith must be real, because people actually do what they say Christ calls us to do.
    This can even go for the devotional life.  Some people love the warm, touchy-feely stuff.  They love the emotive nature of praise and worship music and need those emotional highs and lows to really move them in their relationship with God.  Others find the steady, metered pace of Gregorian chant more helpful to their prayer life.  Some just want to be still in silence and put the world outside.  Others need to use their imaginations and put themselves in the Gospel passages to envision how they would have responded and how they are responding to Jesus.  While the liturgical life has set standards that may come more easily or more difficult to us, based on our temperaments, the devotional life admits of a variety of expressions, based upon the individual desires and needs of each person or each type of person.  To pretend that Catholicism is monolithic in personal and devotional prayer, or that everyone should simply convert based upon intellectual arguments does not reflect the reality of the diversity of individuals. 
    So, our goal is the same as St. Paul’s: to be all things to all so that we can save at least some.  Again, this doesn’t mean that the Church changes her teachings to fit the times, or even that our common prayer, the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours, should have wide variations.  But it does mean that the way we present the Gospel, and the way that we help people to personally connect to Jesus through personal and devotional prayer will vary based upon the person.  May our diverse approaches, unified in the one faith given to us from God the Father through Jesus the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit transform our world to be more configured to Christ, and therefore a better place to be.