Judging Books and Wine

 Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  One of the early lessons we learn as a child is never judge a book by its cover.  There are many stories (some true, some invented) which seem to give credence to this maxim.  I don’t read a ton, but I can tell you that I often decide whether or not I want to pick-up a book by the cover.  There was also a story a year or so back about how wine labels have changed to try to encourage people (especially those of the female persuasion) to buy the bottle without knowing what the wine tastes like.  
    Our Lord seems to be saying that we should judge a book by its cover.  After all, good fruit equals a good tree; bad fruit equals a bad tree.  Doesn’t seem too complicated, and seems to make perfect sense.  And I’m certainly not here to contradict the words of the Son of God.

    Having said that, it’s not quite as simple as: doing bad things makes you a bad person.  Pope St. John Paul II reminded us: “We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures, we are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of His Son, Jesus.”  Which of us hasn’t sinned?  And yet, we do not want to be defined by our sins, but by the love of God.  
    Even St. Paul today in the epistle spoke about the conversion of the Romans, how they had been slaves to sin, but they were now slaves of God.  If St. Paul would have defined the Romans by how they had acted before their conversion, he would have simply written them off as damned.  But instead he called them to new life in Christ.  So how do we understand the words that we heard in the Gospel?  
    Part of it, I believe, has to do with a reading of the other parables of our Lord, rather than this one.  In another place, Jesus talks about the weeds sown among the wheat.  He says to let the weeds go until harvest time, when they can be sorted from the wheat.  That sorting would only take place when the “fruit” of the stalk of wheat had come to fruition, when the harvest was ready.  But, at that point, you would be able to tell the good fruit from the bad fruit, the weeds from the wheat.  And perhaps this is what our Lord means when He talks about He says that we can judge a tree by its fruit: it is only at the end that it becomes apparent what the fruit is.
    Think about it in terms of your own life.  Unless you are the Blessed Mother, you have, like me, had moments in life of which you are not proud, where you wandered away from the love of God and His law.  At that moment, you and I were not bearing good fruit.  So, perhaps we should be cut down and thrown into the fire.  And yet, God did not do that.  God was patient with us, like the farmer in the Gospel parable who sees the fig tree not bearing fruit, but waits one more year to see if it bears fruit.  God is patient with us so that we can stop being slaves of the flesh, slaves of immorality, and start being not only slaves, but friends of God.  
    Does this mean that we rest on our laurels, and just coast until the end of life?  It is interesting that, no matter what times weekday Masses are celebrated, it does tend to be older people who attend.  There is a certain sobriety that comes when you realize that you have more years behind you than you have in front of you.  But that seriousness, that wisdom of being a senior, can be had by us now, and not just about going to Mass.  The danger with putting off true and deep conversion until the end is that we never know when our particular end will be.  I could die any day, and Jesus could return any day.  If I am in the habit of delaying my conversion, the change of my heart for our Lord, then I could be caught unawares, and the judgment may come to me like a thief in the night.  
    Each day we are invited to, as St. Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.”  We do battle and put the old man to death, while trying to be receptive to the grace of God which makes us new men and women in Christ.  Inasmuch as we do this, we are, likely bearing good fruit, which is a good sign.  Inasmuch as I strive for holiness by the grace of God, I am pointing towards heaven.  And, making a regular habit of confession, and perhaps knowing a very short but good act of contrition in case of extreme danger, God knows that I am doing my best to stop being a slave of sin.
    But even in our attempts to follow Jesus, that sin of apathy, or we might say sloth, can creep in.  ‘I am doing what I can, and I may not be perfect, but at least I’ll get to Purgatory,’ we might say to ourselves.  As one professor in seminary told me, humans often have a way of not getting their target, so aim for heaven, in case you fall a bit short.  Don’t aim for Purgatory, because if you miss, well, you get the picture.  
    Further, our Lord reminds us that lip service is not enough.  Words are cheap, and actions speak louder than words.  Even the demons know the truth, but they reject it.  We can know the truth, but do we embrace it?  Do we strive to go by the grace of God on the narrow way to salvation, or do we figure that, because we are in the Church that Jesus founded and have received the sacraments, we don’t have to worry or respond to the gift of salvation each day?  
    “The wages of sin is death,” St. Paul tells us (in grammar that only works in Greek).  If we embrace the death of sin in this life, we know what will await us in the next.  Our fruit, at the harvest of our particular judgement, will be bad.  But if we embrace the life of our Lord each day, our fruit, at the harvest of our particular judgement, will be good, and we will enjoy eternal happiness in the kingdom of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Sweet, Juicy Fruit

 Fifth Sunday of Easter
    When I was young I had a bad encounter with chocolate (I ate too much), and so I tend not to eat very much chocolate candy.  I’ll do the occasional Snickers bar, but when it comes to Hershey’s chocolate bars or kisses, or other types of pure chocolate candies, I tend not to eat them.  What I do love is fruit.  Especially berries, but also grapes, apples, oranges, pears, kiwi, pineapple, mangoes, etc., I tend to satisfy my sweet tooth with fruit.

    So when Jesus starts talk about grapes today, He has my attention!  We’ve heard this Gospel numerous times before, and Deacon Dave even mentioned it last weekend when he mentioned Jesus saying to us, “‘I am the vine, you are the branches.’”  Often times we focus on remaining connected to Jesus, and that is certainly important.  As Jesus reminds us, we cannot do anything good without Him.  
    How do we stay connected?  We read the Word of God, the Bible; we pray daily; we go to confession regularly and worship God at Mass at least each Sunday and Holyday; we serve Jesus in our service of the poor.  Think about how much time we devote to all sorts of other things, but how much time do we devote to Jesus?  
    But, rather than talking about remaining connected to Jesus, today I want to focus on the result of staying close to Jesus.  What happens when the branches stay connected to the vine?  You get grapes!  Sweet, delicious grapes!  The grapes are the fruit that are produced by staying connected.  So Jesus promises us that if we remain in him, then we will bear much fruit.  If we don’t bear fruit, then we will be thrown into the fire, like a brach that no longer produces grapes.  
    How do we bear fruit?  So the word “Catholic” is thrown around as is being baptized means that a person doesn’t need to do anything else  Sometimes in my mind I start wondering if I ever saw the person at Mass, if the person read the Bible regularly and prayed daily.  I wonder how much the person cared for the poor and the marginalized.  It is easy, as St. John reminded us in the second reading, to love “in word or speech,” but bearing fruit means loving “in deed and truth.”  
    It some ways it used to be easier to be Catholic.  We had external markers that at least gave an appearance of our faith.  When Betty Baptist invited Charlie Catholic over for dinner on Friday night, Charlie made sure to say that he couldn’t have meat.  Many families spent part of Saturday morning not on the soccer field, but in the confessional.  And, to the extent possible, many Catholics avoided any sort of menial work on Sundays.
    Those externals don’t necessarily mean that you’re bearing fruit.  You can abstain from meat and not love Jesus; you can go to confession but not be truly sorry; you can avoid work on Sundays but not do it to grow closer to God.  But bearing fruit does mean that our life is different.  
    I know we don’t like to be different.  But being Catholic means being different, just as Jesus was different.  It means being patient with the person who cut in right before the construction zone starts.  It means not participating in the office gossip about the employee who doesn’t seem to get along or get the job done.  It means treating all people, regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual-orientation with respect and dignity because all of us are created in the image and likeness of God.
    But being different also means that we avoid taking God’s Name in vain.  It means being here, at Mass, every Sunday, whether we feel like it or not, or whether we think we’re getting anything out of it or not, because our time during Mass is about worshipping God well more than it is about us “getting” something.  Being different means that we help women to choose life rather than abortion; that we conceive a child according to God’s plan rather than through artificial means like in vitro fertilization or surrogacy.  It means we give time, talent, and treasure to taking care of those who cannot care for themselves.  Those are all ways that we bear fruit, though there are, of course, more.
    Do we do it perfectly?  I know I don’t!  I try to be, but realize that I am not always a paragon of discipleship.  But when I fail, I turn back to the Lord, asking for His mercy in the Sacrament of Penance, and with true sorrow and a desire to sin no more with God’s help, I start again, to stay connected to Jesus and bear fruit.
    It’s easy to say, “I’m Catholic.”  You can say that without doing much of anything else.  But in order to bear fruit, as Jesus asks us to, we have to respond to the graces God gives us by remaining with Him on the vine.  And Catholics bearing fruit is exactly how this, and any parish, can grow, so that we, like the "church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria” that we heard about in our first reading, can be “built up and [walk] in the fear of the Lord, and…[grow] in numbers.” 

Fruit, Not Chocolate, Please

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Many people are surprised to hear that I’m not the biggest fan of chocolate.  I’ll eat the occasional Snickers bar, but for the most part I stay away from almost anything chocolate.  It all stems from a time in 3rd grade where I ate way too much chocolate in one sitting and almost got sick.  My last pastor. Fr. Mark Inglot, who said Mass here in November, would tell me from time to time that he would tell people that I loved to receive chocolate for Christmas and Easter, just so he could eat whatever the parishioners would give me.  Instead, I love fruit.  Berries and cherries are my favorite, but I’ll eat almost any kind of fruit, with the exception of papaya: yuck!!

What we eat effects us in many different ways.  Runners tend to eat a lot of carbs before they run long distances.  Apparently it helps give the body what it needs before a run.  Cross country teams often have pasta parties the night before a meet.  Some people don’t eat meat, others only certain kinds of meat for health reasons or other reasons.  But food changes us in one way or another. 

In our first reading, the angel tells Elijah that he has to eat the bread, “‘else the journey will be too long for you!’”  Elijah needs the energy that the bread is going to give him to continue his prophetic mission from God.  That bread gave him the strength to walk forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb, also know as Mt. Sinai.  

Whenever we hear bread in the Old Testament, we, as Catholics, should be reminded of the Eucharist, the bread that is not bread.  And Jesus speaks about that today in the Gospel.  He teaches the Jews that He is the bread of life, and that while the Jews in the desert ate manna and died, whoever eats the bread of life, that is, whoever eats Jesus’ Flesh, will not die, but will live forever.   

That is why the Church teaches, in fidelity to what Jesus taught, that the Eucharist is not merely a symbol of the Body and Blood of Christ, but truly is the Body and Blood of Christ.  We are not merely reminded about Jesus when we celebrate the Eucharist, but Jesus’ glorified Body and Blood becomes present in our midst under the appearance of bread and wine.  But substantially, what makes a thing what it is, we are not eating bread and drinking wine; we are eating the Body of Jesus and drinking the Blood of Jesus.  And this is the way that we can have eternal life.

The Body and Blood of Jesus, as supernatural food, is supposed to change us and change the way we live our lives because it conforms us to Christ.  St. Paul reminds us in the second reading that, for us who have received Jesus into our very bodies, there should be no more “bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling,” and that we are to be “kind to one another, compassionate, [and] forgiving one another as God has forgiven [us] in Christ.”  The Body and Blood of Jesus are meant to change us to become more like Him.  

We fast for 1 hour before Holy Communion from all food and drink except medicine and water because we don’t want to confuse the earthly food–which becomes part of us–with the heavenly food, which makes us part of Jesus.  We are called by St. Paul to discern the Body of Christ and whether we are in a state of grace–that is to say, unaware of any grave or mortal sins–so that we are not joining our grave or mortal sins, where we radically say no to God, with the Body and Blood of Jesus, which is always about making us more like God.  We need to go to confession first if we have grave or mortal sins before receiving the Eucharist so we don’t join our “no” to God with Jesus’ “yes” to God.  If we do receive the Eucharist in an unworthy state, not only do we not become more like Jesus, but we add the sin of sacrilege to whatever other grave or mortal sins we have committed by receiving Jesus unworthily.

That might not seem very welcoming to tell people they can’t come to Holy Communion.  And Pope Francis has reminded us how we are to welcome others.  Yet, we welcoming others is always at the service of giving people the opportunity to encounter Jesus.  To encounter Jesus means that we change for Him, not that He changes for us.  

So when we come to Mass, we should ask ourselves if we are aware of any major ways in which we need to change to conform our life with Jesus’ life and teachings, both in Scripture and through the Church’s teaching office.  If there are major gaps, then we should go to confession, or set up an appointment with me to discuss the situation and what we can do to remedy it, before receiving Jesus in the Eucharist.  I can promise you that I’ll do all that I can to provide God’s healing for whatever ways that are lives are not following Jesus.  That way, having dealt with those obstacles, when we receive the Eucharist, it will truly make us more like Jesus and give us the strength that we need to live as disciples of our Lord.

Picking the Fruit of the Tree of the Cross

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Very few people I know like to get in trouble.  As children (and sometimes as adults) when we have done something that we shouldn’t, something for which we could get in trouble, we tend to run away and hide.  We don’t like to admit that we’ve done something wrong.  If there’s a broken anything in the family house, it was never one of the kids who did it; it was always done by someone named Idont No.  

We probably get this from our first parents, Adam and Eve.  Back in the Garden of Eden, they were tempted to eat the forbidden fruit, to disobey God’s command.  And they both did it.  But then what did they do?  They hid because they were ashamed.  They didn’t want to face God and what the consequences would be.  To admit that they were wrong was to admit that they were naked, totally seen, by God.

We like this first part of the Gospel today, John 3:16.  This passage may be one of the best know passages in all the Bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  We see it at sporting events, especially football games from people in the seats behind the goal posts.  And it is powerful, and needs to be spread more.  It is important for us always to carry this message with us, that Jesus came as the result of God’s love so that we do not have to perish, to die eternally, but so that we can live eternally.  If you read this passage, you’ll notice that it’s not in quotation marks.  This isn’t some that Jesus said (at least according to modern reading of this passage), but is rather John’s commentary on Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus.

But St. John also says something important later in this same passage: “the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil.”  St. John, having spent three years with Jesus in His public ministry, the same disciple who was beloved by Jesus and leaned on his chest during the Last Supper, was keenly aware that people prefer darkness to the light that Jesus brings.  And why?  Because we think in the darkness we can hide our sinfulness and get away with it.  We don’t want to get in trouble.  We don’t want God to see our imperfections.

But St. Paul reminds us in our second reading that response to sin is not to hide in the darkness, but to run to the mercy of God.  He writes to the Ephesians that God wants to, “show the immeasurable riches of his grace.”  God sent Jesus not to condemn us, but to forgive us.  But to be forgiven, we have to come into the light.  We have to come and admit our sins which cause spiritual death so that God, who is rich in mercy, can forgive us and raise us to new life.  God’s mercy and forgiveness are the fruit of the tree of the cross, the fruit that God wants us to pick regularly and consume.  And God encourages us and pushes us there.  But only we can pick that fruit of mercy, just as only we can pick the fruit of disobedience like our first parents.  

We shouldn’t want to sin and to do bad things.  But when we do, God encourages us to come running to Him, rather than running away from Him.  God wants us to come to the light, rather than to hide in the darkness.  And the funny thing is that God already knows what is in the darkness.  He knows the ways that we have distanced ourselves from Him.  But when we bring it into the light we find not condemnation but mercy.  We are only really in trouble if we continue to prefer the darkness to the light and hide from God.  Because when we hide from God we show that we do not really believe in Him and His power to forgive.  And, while St. John says clearly that, “Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,” he also says in the same sentence, “but whoever does not believe has already been condemned.”  

We can all help to promote people coming to the light, especially in our families.  Yes, there will be negative consequences for making bad choices.  That is the nature of bad choices: there are bad things that follow.  But what a beautiful thing it is when a child or a spouse comes forward to admit that he or she has done wrong.  In that moment, even though there is often hurt from the wrong done, especially if it’s wrong done to a person, there is also, or should also be, joy in having the wrong come into the light.  To put it concretely, you may still punish your child for stealing $20 to help them to understand that stealing is wrong.  But at the same time there should be some mitigation for that child coming forward in honesty to admit the wrong he or she has done, because that child had the courage to come into the light so that he or she could receive mercy.  When we come into the light and reveal our sins to God (who knows them already), He is merciful to us.  Hopefully we can also live that way and show God’s love by being merciful when a wrong is brought into the light to us.