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. 

Maybe I Got it Wrong?

 Second Sunday of Advent

St. John the Baptist

     

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  It is generally a bad idea to try to get into the head of a saint and analyze his intentions, unless one is a saint oneself.  The saints operate with the will of God at the first and foremost of their minds, and for those who don’t operate that way, what they do can seem crazy or other worldly.  
    Having said that, and with the very real knowledge that I am not a saint, I was wondering what St. John the Baptist was thinking in the Gospel passage we heard today.  You have John, the cousin of our Lord, who pointed Him out as the Lamb of God, and who saw the dove descend upon Him at His Baptism, as the voice of the Father was heard, “This is my beloved Son.”  John says that he has found the bridegroom, and so rejoices.  It seems like John knows exactly who our Lord is.
    And yet, today’s Gospel, some time after the baptism having passed, it seems like John starts to question what had happened earlier.  “‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?’” John says.  And, at least from an earthly point of view, John’s confusion seems very rational.  After all, John is in prison, and little does he know, he’s about to lose his head.  This is probably not what John had in mind when he thought of the Messiah coming.  
    What did John think would happen?  Biblical scholars say that there were four expectations that Jews had about the Messiah: he would gather the tribes of Israel; he would cleanse the temple; he would destroy Israel’s enemies; and he would reign as king of the Gentiles.  So far, none of that seems to have happened from what John knows.  So John questions (we can say that because the evangelist says it) if maybe Jesus was a special person, but not the Messiah.  
    Of course, we know that our Lord is the Messiah.  We hear in the Gospels how Jesus not only cleanses the temple, but raises up a new temple, His Sacred Body, in the Resurrection.  In His Death, He destroys sin and death, the great enemy of God’s people, forever.  He gathers the Twelve as the new patriarchs of the tribes of the new Israel, the Church; and, as St. Paul talks about in our epistle, the Gentiles are gathered together under the reign of Christ the King.  
    But I’m willing to bet that we have had times where we can sympathize with John the Baptist.  We have recognized Christ as the Lord; we have felt His presence in our life; perhaps we have even seen miracles that He has worked for us or for friends and family.  But then something goes wrong; and then another something; and then life doesn’t happen exactly the way that we expect it to go.  And all the sudden, those experiences we have with the Lord get questioned, perhaps even doubted, and we’re wondering if we bet on the wrong horse.  
    To these questions, we can look to our Lord for the answer.  How does our Lord respond to John’s disciples?  Look to what He has done.  The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised, and the poor have the Good News proclaimed to them.  God gives us clues that He is who He says He is, and it’s in what He accomplishes day by day.  We have only to be attentive to what is happening.
    God is not detached from our life.  It is very easy to fall into the deist view of God, that God is like a grand watch-maker, who put everything together and wound everything up, but then just lets it all go.  But God still interacts in the life of His People.  He does not simply watch from afar, but changes individuals lives.  In the house explosion that happened just six houses down from St. Pius X on the Monday before Thanksgiving, there is a story about a woman and her boyfriend who lived next-door to the house that exploded.  The boyfriend wanted to go out and do something fun, but the woman didn’t want to go out.  After her boyfriend kept asking her, she relented and they went out and about, only to find out minutes later, that the house next to theirs had exploded, and their home was destroyed.  The woman noted in her recounting that she just had this little voice telling her to go out, so she did.  And it changed her life.
    Sometimes we get so busy that we fail to hear that voice, or we hear it and act on it, but then forget that our conscience is the voice of God in our hearts.  We fail to recognize the works of God that are happening everyday.  Sometimes they get mentioned on the news, like with the woman who left her home shortly before it burned up, but more often than not they are not famous stories or publicized, but are in the daily moments of our life.  Advent is a perfect time for quiet reflection on those ways that God intervenes in our life in ways that can only be seen and heard for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
    During this Advent season, we should be making time for God in silence.  It could be in our Monday times of Adoration, or simply in a prayer corner in your home.  But wherever it is, we need silence, even just a couple of minutes, to be able to hear the voice of God and see how He operates in our life.  That may seem especially difficult with kids, but even kids need to nap, and that can be a perfect time to catch some quick time with God.  God knows you’re busy; He knows that you have family and work responsibilities.  But He asks for even just a few moments so that He can share His love with you, and help you to see what He is doing in your life.
    We all can have moments where we wonder what God is doing.  We don’t understand why something is happening in our life.  Do we pay attention to what God has done for us in the past, and what He promises for us in our future, beyond the present struggles?  Do we still trust in what has been revealed by God the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit?