Working Out With God

Passion Sunday

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Two Thursdays ago I met up with Sgt. Anthony Dent to work out with him and some other Troopers and Cadets of the Michigan State Police.  Anthony likes to push me when we work out, and I think one of his proudest moments working out with me is when his workout made me throw-up.  This particular workout was in the cross-fit style, and had us paired up, going against other pairs of Troopers and Cadets.  For the workout, each pair would share the following exercises in this order, not moving on to the next exercise until the previous was completed: 100 burpees; 100 calorie row; 100 barbell thrusters; 100 ab-mat sit-ups; 100 push presses; 100 box jumps; 1-mile run with a 14-pound medicine ball.  The first set was a challenge.  The second set started to kick my butt.  The third set and following got much harder, until I couldn’t even do the box-jumps, but had to substitute 2 box step-ups for every 1 box jump.  As each set progressed, Anthony did a greater percentage of the exercise.  I even had another sergeant help me with the box step-ups, because I was very gassed.
    When it comes to salvation, we might feel like we just have to muscle through and do it ourselves.  God gives us the rules (the workout), and we have to do it in order to get to heaven (rest).  While I’m loathe to compare Anthony to God, because he already has a very-healthy sense of self-worth, what we often find is that the harder we try to keep up, the more we fall behind.  We give it our all, but get more and more tired, until we are exhausted and don’t feel like we can do anything else.  And, unlike working out with others, you can’t have someone else do the exercise for you.
    So today’s first reading provides a great reminder for us: Christ already saved us!  His sacrifice, not ours, however good they may be, won reconciliation for us and the Father.  Before Christ, we tried all sorts of things to be saved: living according to the law, offering different sacrifices that God Himself had told us to make.  But that old covenant, written in stone, could not bring us into right relationship with God.  As the Apostle says elsewhere, it was only a tutor for us, to know how wrong our passions led us astray.  The new covenant, sealed in the Precious Blood of Christ, opened for us our eternal inheritance of heaven.  
    But so often, we try to do it all ourselves.  We live as if our entrance into the heavenly Temple depends only on us and our moral rectitude.  But if we live that way, we become more and more tired, are able to do less and less, and end up in failure.
    So, does that mean we can say that we simply believe in the Lord, confess that the Savior died for our sins, get baptized, and then never worry about going anywhere other than heaven?  While that is what some of our Protestant brothers and sisters seem to espouse, that is the other extreme, which we also need to avoid.  Rather, virtue lies in the middle between trying to earn our salvation (which we cannot do) and presuming our salvation (which we should not do).  Our response is to put faith in what God has done (which we could never do) while also working out our salvation with fear and trembling, to paraphrase St. Paul.
    Our good actions find their goodness inasmuch as they are connected to Christ.  By themselves, they do no more than the blood of goats or calves.  But if we unite to the cross our daily efforts to live in according with the covenant written in our hearts, prophesied by Jeremiah and fulfilled by Christ, then we will get somewhere.  We will advance in holiness because our efforts are now connecting to the “effort” that truly made a difference, the sacrifice of the unblemished Lamb of God.  To go back to my cross-fit analogy, it’s as if God has already done the entire workout and won us the prize.  But He wants us to engage in it because it will help us become more like Him.  Still, He knows we cannot do it all on our own, so He’s right there, by our side, picking up our slack, doing what we can’t, and encouraging us to do more than we think is possible, because all things are possible with Him.
    That is the day that Abraham saw from afar and in which he rejoiced.  Abraham longed for the day when God would close the gap that we had created by our disobedience.  He looked forward to a time when he would not simply have to act by faith, and presume his own efforts would be enough.  He rejoiced in God accomplishing what no mere human could: defeating sin and death and opening up eternal salvation.  And Abraham’s faith was not disappointed.
    So, by all means, in these last two weeks of Lent, may we not slack off on our Lenten disciplines and penances.  Work hard to put to death all within us that is not of God.  But do so knowing that God has already saved us; salvation doesn’t depend on us.  But God does want us to cooperate with Him in the work of salvation, complete the race, and enjoy the prize of eternal rest with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

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.