Bars Low and High

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time–Rite of Sending
    Do the red and say the black.  When it comes to the sacraments, that’s what the Church asks priests and deacons to do.  The red refers to the rubrics, the words literally written in red type-face, that say what to do.  The black refers to the words that the minister should say.  When the priest or the deacon does the red and says the black, we know that God makes the sacrament take place.  So, for example, if the priest, while pouring water over the head, says the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” the person truly has received baptism.  If the priest changes the words, or uses a different liquid other than water, the sacrament didn’t take place.
    But that’s a pretty low bar.  Sometimes a priest will say, “As long as I do the red and say the black, I know I’m good.”  But there’s so much more to exercising ministry well than just doing the minimum.  A priest who deeply loves Jesus and wants to communicate that saving, sacramental grace will do more than just the least required.  I could say in a monotonous and quick-paced voice, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” and people’s faith that this person has just become a child of God and a member of the Church and had original sin washed away would not increase.  Do we really want our celebrations of the sacraments, especially by those ordained to act with the power of Christ, just to be the minimum?

    You may wonder right now what that has to do with you?  I’m not, after all, preaching to a seminary crowd, even if we have future priests in the pews.  But in our Gospel, Jesus, the new Moses, gives a new law that goes beyond the bare minimum and actually helps support the conversion to which God calls all His children.  The Ten Commandments are good and help us to lead a good life.  But they’re more of the minimum, not the fullness of living as a child of God.
    Not many, if any, of us have murdered someone, which the fifth commandment prohibits.  I can honestly say, as I’m sure many of you can, that I have not even planned on how to murder someone because I wanted them dead.  I have not even planned on getting a room with a woman of ill-repute to commit adultery.  I have never considered putting my hand on a Bible to make God as my witness and then lying.  So I, and probably many of you, have managed to reach the low bar of not breaking those three commandments.
    But how many times have we harbored serious anger in our hearts?  How many times have we wished ill on another person because of some wrong they have done to us?  Or in what ways have we used another person, even if only in our minds, to give us some sexual gratification?  How many times have we wished that we could get away with adultery without suffering any consequences?  How many times have we lingered on a image, be it in person or online, of a scantily clad member of the opposite sex?  Or when are the occasions where we “bend” the truth, or convince ourselves that it’s only a white lie and it won’t hurt that many people?  Or when do we make the mental calculation that a small lie will not hurt someone else’s feelings?
    What Christ reveals to us today is that He calls us not only to do the right things, but to go deeper and make sure our hearts really belong to Him.  If we truly wish to follow Him, we have to allow His grace to transform every part of our lives: not just our external actions, but even the desires of our hearts.  Some transformation of the world would certainly happen if no one murdered another, or committed adultery with another, or swore to God and lied.  But imagine how much better life would be if we didn’t give room for rage and vengeance, and didn’t use others at all as objects of our lust, or we knew that a person’s word meant clearly what was said.  As Louis Armstrong sang, “What a wonderful world”!
    My dear catechumens: today you will be sent, in a manner of speaking, to the Rite of Election.  Your formation up to now has included how Catholics are to live, what they are to do and what they are not to do.  But you hopefully have been growing more and more in love with God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  And during these next weeks, especially during the Scrutinies during Lent, we will ask God to draw you even closer to Him, and transform your hearts.  While a major change will occur at your baptism, where God will wash away all your sins, you, like all of us, will need to continue to work on allowing God’s grace to transform our hearts and desires throughout the rest of your life.  
    But God promises, both to you and to all of us, to give us what we need to meet, not just the low bar, but even the higher bar of Christian perfection.  God promises, especially through our worthy reception of Holy Communion, to make us disciples not only on the outside, but on the inside, where our actions begin.  Especially through our upcoming Lenten observances, may God help us to live as a people transformed from death to life, from darkness to light, from sin to holiness, so that we can be effective witnesses of the power of the Gospel and transform this world, by the power of God’s grace, to be the place He originally created it to be. 

Proven by Testing

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Aerial picture of the house that exploded

    On Monday, 22 November 2021 just before 9:30 p.m., I was preparing to got to bed in my old rectory at St. Pius X parish.  All of the sudden I saw a large flame down the road, felt the house shake, and heard a loud boom.  The house not even a block away from the rectory had exploded from (we later learned) a natural gas leak from a faultily-installed appliance.  
    As a chaplain with the Michigan State Police, much of my training has been for emergency situations.  But, up to that point, I had never been on my own in the case of a real emergency.  I always had Troopers who would take the lead, and I would try to assist them with what they said I needed to do.  
    After I saw, felt, and heard the house explode, I said, “Lord, have mercy!”, called 911 to give any information I had, and then rushed to get my State Police jacket on, find my flashlight, and run to see what had happened.  As the fire engines from Flint Fire Department started to arrive on scene, I then started directing traffic so that emergency vehicles could get access to the scene.
    Often, we don’t know what we will do unless we are tested.  If we are wise, we make plans for disasters, or maybe we just daydream about scenarios where we are the hero, but until that situation arises in our life, it’s just theory.  When life throws a situation at us where we need to react, we find out if our planning or our daydreaming was just wishful thinking, or if we really could respond in a heroic way to a life-changing event.
    The same is true in our faith life.  In order to find out our true physical strength, we have to test our muscles and put them under pressure.  In order to find out our true spiritual strength, and what virtues we have, by the grace of God, cultivated in our life, we have to be in situations where we can choose virtue or we can choose vice.  It doesn’t matter if we think we are a saint and we would never choose evil.  Only when we are in a situation when we can choose either to do good or to do evil do we really learn how much we value following God’s way rather than our own, or the way of the world.  
    Take, for example, being put into a situation where we have done something wrong, maybe even something small, but someone notices and asks us if we are responsible.  Maybe we even have friends around us to add to the situation with some peer pressure.  When asked if we did something wrong, would we tell the truth, or would we lie?  The lie may seem easier, and may, whether for a short or even a long time, keep us out of trouble.  But we know that lying is wrong, a sin against God who is truth.  So what do we do?  It is so easy to fold under the pressure, and give in to what we think will be easier and cause less punishment for us.  Maybe we even convince ourselves that it’s not that bad, or that we can do so much more good if we are allowed to lie in just this one case.  But, of course, if we start to lie now, we are more likely to lie later.  And a basic principle of morality is that you cannot do evil to achieve a good: it makes the whole scenario evil.
    In the upcoming forty days of Lent, we will test our spiritual muscles out again.  Our acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving (or the lack thereof) will tell us exactly what kind of fruit our life of grace has borne thus far.  When faced with a spiritual struggle, our true mettle comes out, what we are made of, and we learn where we need to grow in following Christ.  God reveals to us our shortcomings, not to beat us up with them, but to help us to know the ways in which we need to open ourselves to His grace to be better followers of Christ.  God gives us this special time to turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel so that we can rejoice even more in the new life that Christ won by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, and live that new life ourselves.
    Our catechumens who will be sent today by us to the Rite of Election, will also be tested in these weeks of Lent.  In the scrutinies, the Church will ask them to review their own life and put behind them all that does not conform to Christ.  They will reflect on how much their thirst for the new life Christ gives; on the areas of their life in which they are blind to sin; on the death that sin has caused in their lives.  But it won’t end there, just as Good Friday is not the end of the story.
    Because God wants to help us through these trials.  We cannot grow in holiness on our own.  Without God’s grace, we have no chance to live a holy life.  So as we grow in awareness through our trials, don’t be afraid to call upon God and ask for the help that we each need to live the new life of Christ.
    Until we are tested, we don’t really know how we would react.  May these upcoming Lenten days test us, show us our shortcomings, and open us to the grace and mercy of God who strengthens us to follow Christ on his pilgrimage through the desert.  May we allow God’s grace to make us bear good fruit as we remove the splinters of sin from our lives.