What We Make Time For

 Second Sunday after Pentecost

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  One of the areas that I have been blessed to be able to participate in throughout my past 5 years in Flint has been extra-curricular activities for Powers Catholic High School.  I love football Friday nights, I played and still love soccer, and I was active in drama and band when I was in high school, so part of attending is just having fun.
    But part of what I’m doing is more than enjoying a good game or a beautiful performance.  I decided early on as a priest that, as I can, it’s important for me to be involved in the lives of young people in their hobbies and extra-curricular, and to show up as much as I can.  Not infrequently, other parish responsibilities will lessen my availability, but when I can, it’s nice to be able to support the young men and women.
    It’s also sending a message that I, and, by extension, God, care about what they do in life.  So often, people only see a priest at confession or Mass, and it can lead to this skewed vision that the priest only cares when I’m repenting of my sins or going to Mass.  By meeting them at their joys, the activities that make them feel alive, I’m showing them that God loves not just their religious practices, but their entire life, and wants to be a part of it.
    We make time for what we love.  We show, by our attendance, what is important to us.  Part of the struggle in the Catholic Church right now is Mass attendance, and not simply because of COVID (but certainly exacerbated by it).  Young people, present couple excluded, do not attend Mass regularly, even monthly.  Why not?  Among other reasons, because their parents didn’t go, and/or didn’t make them go.  And kids are very quick to pick-up that if something is important, you will be there.  In my own life, going to Mass was never a question of “if,” it was always a question of “when.”  Even if I had a Boy Scout lock-in Saturday night, which meant that I was up until about 2 or 3 a.m., we were going to be at Mass, and I can remember where I still had to be ready for 9 a.m. Mass on Sunday morning (I may have slept through the homily).
    In the parable our Lord gives us today, we are presented with a great feast, for which no one has time.  The excuses aren’t all that bad, either.  If you had just bought a farm and needed to see what needed to be planted, what weeds need to be cleared, a feast might not sound like something important.  Or if you just got married, you probably want to spend time with your wife.  In fact, in the Old Testament, one could be released from military service if a marriage had just occurred.  Maybe inspecting the five oxen wasn’t such a good excuse, but they would have been worth a precious sum.  And yet, the man giving the feast is angered because no one will come!  
    The man considers the great banquet the most important thing, which no one should miss.  He values it above property, above livestock, even above marriage.  But no one values it as much as he.  So the man throwing the feast tells his servants to gather all those whom society has rejected–the poor, feeble, blind, and lame–and invite them in.  And there is still room, so the servants are sent to beat the bushes to drum up more people so that the house is filled for the feast.  
    It’s easy to tell the face-value message of this parable.  Jesus is letting the Pharisees know that they have been invited to His great feast, but they are finding excuses for not attending.  They are showing their lack of love for God by rejecting the one He has sent.  So others are being invited in whom the Pharisees would’ve rejected.  But how easy it is to notice the splinter in the Pharisees’ eyes, but not notice the plank in our own.  Isn’t it the sign of a troubled conscience that we so quickly try to put the spotlight away from our own souls and on to another.
    Now, obviously, you are here for the Mass, the wedding feast of the Lamb.  But what about in your daily life?  Are there times when the Lord is inviting us to spend time with Him in private prayer, in works of charity, in simply silence, and we find excuses and things that we would rather do?  St. John tells us in the epistle that we are called not to love in word or speech, “but in deed and truth.”  
    How do we spend our time?  How do we betray what we truly love by the time and attention that we give to it?  What witness are we providing about what is most important in our life?  The world may mock us, as St. John also reminds us, for putting our Lord, our Church, our family first.  But we are still called to give witness to the importance of those first things.  
    And as our best example, we have Jesus, who showed His love for us in laying down His life for us.  That’s how we know the love of God.  God not only showed up, but gave His all for our eternal salvation.  May we make time for God, not only here at Mass, but also in our daily lives, so that the world and God may see the importance we place on our relationship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

We All Scream for Ice Cream!

Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

            On a warm, fall day, as today will be, there’s nothing quite like getting a little ice cream to cool down; to walk into a parlor and then choose a flavor that will explode in your mouth at the same time that it cools you down.  But then, there’s the real dilemma: what flavor is best?  What flavor do you want today?  Luckily, many places give you a little spoon with a small helping of the different flavors to figure out which one you want.  They give you a little taste.

            What we are engaged in right now is a small plastic spoon of the good things to come.  No, we’re not providing ice cream for you today after Mass.  But our readings all talk about a great feast that is to come.  Isaiah talks about the mountain of the Lord where there will be “a feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.”  Our Responsorial Psalm mentions how the Lord will “spread the table before me.”  And in our Gospel passage we hear Jesus talking about how God is preparing a wedding feast and inviting people to that feast.  These images of the feast all refer to heaven, the goal for which hopefully we’re all striving.  If we are faithful disciples and live according to God’s law of love of Him above all else and our neighbor as ourselves, than we can look forward to enjoying heaven, as one enjoys a sumptuous feast or a nice, cold, ice cream cold on a hot day.

            But, getting back to what I said earlier, we don’t have to wait until heaven to start to experience this feast.  We get a foretaste of the feast of heaven in the Mass.  Our Mass is that little taste of ice cream that you get to make sure you know what you want.

            Think about the first reading again.  Isaiah first talks about the mountain of the Lord.  A mountain is a high place that is visible for all in the surrounding area to see.  Our churches are usually built at an elevated level, or with high steeples to stand, like a mountain, in the midst of the world.  And even if the exterior structure is not built up for all around to see, as we enter into the Church space, the nave, our eyes should immediately go to a raised area, the sanctuary, which stands in a particular way as the mountain of the Lord, a reminder of the mount of Calvary, where the one perfect sacrifice took place, that same sacrifice which is re-presented for you today.  It is that sacrifice on that mountain, made present once more for us now, that destroys the veil that veils all people and destroys death forever.  This sanctuary is the mountain of the Lord, where God reveals Himself, just as He did on Mount Sinai, as the people gather at its base to worship Him.

            This is also where the Eucharistic Table, the Altar, is prepared.  This is where the best food, the choicest wine, the Eucharist, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, of Jesus Christ is prepared under the appearances of bread and wine.  Christ Himself, through me, His minister, prepares the feast for the People He has won by His Blood and made His own.  He sets the table before us, even though, by our sins, we have made ourselves enemies of God.  Christ receives the bread and wine we offer, simple gifts, really, and changes them so that they are no longer bread and wine, but are substantially changed into His Body and Blood, and not just for this liturgy, but afterwards as well.  This is the feast on the mountain of the Lord.  This is the wedding feast to which we are invited.  In late November, when we start using the spoken words of the new translation, we’ll have the opportunity to see this more clearly.  Because while the priest currently says, “Happy are those who are called to his Supper” as the Body and Blood of Christ are shown to the people, in Advent of this year the priest will say, “Blessed are those who are called to the supper of the Lamb,” an allusion to Revelation 19:9, referring to the wedding feast that the Bridegroom, our Bridegroom, Jesus, has prepared for us, His Church, His Bride.

            Here, in this feast of faith, this Mass, we come together, those of us in humble circumstances, those of us in abundance; those of us are well fed, and those of us who are hungry; and we unite in our worship of God.  We receive the grace to do all things in Christ, who strengthens us, as God supplies our deepest need for His love and His presence among us.

            But, we need to come properly dressed.  And while I do think we can always examine if we’re giving our best to God in terms of what we wear, I’m not talking about exterior clothing.  In baptism, we all heard, even if we don’t remember it, “you have become a new creation, and have clothed yourself in Christ.  See in this white garment the outward sign of your Christian dignity.  With your family and friends to help you by word and example, bring that dignity unstained into the everlasting life of heaven.”  How are we doing at keeping that interior baptismal garment pure white?  Are we helping our family and friends to keep it that way?  Are they helping us to keep it unstained?  That is the proper wedding garment of the elect, those chosen by God.  Just as we wouldn’t show up for a wedding celebration in sweatpants, hair all disheveled, dirt on our face, so we should approach this feast with the interior wedding garment a pure white, a sign of our response to the grace of God and the avoidance of sin.  And if we get a few spots on that garment from sin, we have the great sacrament of reconciliation to wash that garment clean once more in the blood of Christ and to reunite ourselves to His grace.  Between our two sites here, we offer 6 different opportunities for reconciliation, and we priests will gladly set up a different time if none of those times work.

            We have been invited to the mountain of the Lord, to the feast of heaven in this Mass.  May we keep our baptismal garments clean for the wedding feast of the Lamb, so that we might be invited in.  Blessed are those who are called to the supper of the Lamb.