Entering the Paschal Mystery (Precept #1)

 Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Part of my hope is that, as you listen to the Scriptures being proclaimed over these weeks where I’m preaching on the Precepts of the Church, you’re trying to guess, as you hear the different readings, which precept I’m going to talk about, or how I’m going to talk about a precept based upon these readings.
    This week is precept number one: You shall attend Mass on Sundays and on holy days of obligation and rest from servile labor.  I especially want to focus on why the Church would tell us that we need to attend Mass.  

    What is the Mass?  We often think of the Mass as the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, presented for us in an unbloody manner (and that is certainly true).  But it is not only Good Friday that is made present for us each time the Mass is celebrated.  When we participate in the Mass, we are participating in the entire Paschal Mystery, that is to say, the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ.  And that is what St. Paul proclaimed in the epistle today: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; …he was buried; …he was raised on the third day…”. What St. Paul proclaims to us is precisely that in which we participate.
    Notice that it’s not simply a memorial, either.  I didn’t say that we remember the Paschal Mystery; we participate in it.  It’s not a bad thing to remember.  We have lots of memories that connect us to the past, whether our own, our families, or even the members of our Church.  But we do more than remember: we enter into the very mysteries that we also recall.  Sundays are our days as Christians because it is the day that our Lord rose from the dead.  So on those days we enter into all that proceeded the Resurrection (the Passion and Death), and the consummation of the Resurrection (the Ascension into heaven) as our primordial day of celebration, the day that we assemble as a community of faith to give thanks to God for what He did for us, saving us from sin and death and allowing us to be able to enter into heaven.  On the holy days, we honor other special parts of our Lord’s life, or parts of our Lady’s life, or All Saints.  
    And while we can remember the Paschal Mystery, or we can remember our Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, or All Saints from the comfort of our living room couch, or by a lake, or another outdoor setting, we cannot enter into that Paschal Mystery in any of those places without the Mass because the Mass connects us to an historical and eternal event, which is something we cannot do on our own, but must be gifted us from God.  Going to Mass is not so much that we go to God (though it’s important that we do), but that God comes to us and allows us to participate, even in a limited way, in His eternity, and in the eternal offering of our Lord to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.  That is why not even watching Mass on TV or on the Internet is the same as going to Mass (though it could be a good second option if we are sick or otherwise unable to attend Mass through no fault of our own).  
    In the Mass, we also have a chance to be healed in a way that doesn’t happen anywhere else.  In our Gospel, we heard about Christ healing the man who was deaf and mute.  Other than the Sacrament of Penance (which should be a regular part of our life as Catholics anyway), the Mass is the ordinary place where our venial sins are forgiven.  Our lack of hearing the Gospel (like deafness) or our failure to proclaim the Gospel by word and deed (like the speech impediment) can be forgiven and we can be restored to the fullness of the relationship that God wants for us.  When we receive the Eucharist, our venial sins are forgiven (as long as we don’t have any mortal sins), as the culmination of those times of asking for the Lord’s mercy.  At the very beginning of Mass, I, as well as the servers, who represent you, confess that we have sinned through our own fault, and ask God to be merciful to us sinners.  And throughout the Mass we continue to approach God, recognizing that we are sinners, even right before the reception of Holy Communion, we we acknowledged, “Domine, non sum dignus,” “Lord, I am not worthy…”. But God makes us worthy and unites us to Himself through the Eucharist.
    Again, this aspect of forgiveness is not something that we can receive sitting by ourselves, no matter how comfortable or how beautiful it may be.  Only when we come together, as God’s holy people, and receive the Bread of Life, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Son of God, do we have that level of access to the mercy of God.  Yes, God can forgive our sins outside of Mass, or even outside of the Sacrament of Penance.  But He certainly forgives our venial sins in the Mass, and all our sins in the Sacrament of Penance.  

    God wants His grace in us to be effective, and so He gives us a sure way that we can approach Him, be strengthened by Him, and enter into the very realities–the mysteries we call them–that save us.  What a beautiful gift to us, a gift that we should want to have access to each and every week.  But, for those times where we need a little extra encouragement, Holy Mother Church reminds us in the first precept, that we are to attend Mass each Sunday and holy day, so that we can participate in the Paschal Mystery, and be healed from our deafness and muted voice.  May God help us always to hear His voice, and proclaim what God has done for us: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Gollum

 Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gollum (aka Smeagol)

    Many of you know how much I love the “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy.  And in the Trilogy there is an intriguing character named Gollum (also called Smeagol).  When he was younger he went by the name Smeagol, and he was one of the river folk, not unlike a hobbit.  But then he killed his brother, who had found the Ring of Power (an evil talisman), and then was banished to live on his own.  During this exile, he used the name Gollum, reflecting his change from a good-hearted lad to a man closed in on his desire for the Ring.  Eventually Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, takes the ring from him, which he later gives to his nephew, Frodo.  Gollum, still closed in on his desire for the Ring, which he treasures above all things, seeks out Frodo to take the Ring back.
    J.R.R. Tolkien, the author, was a man throughly surrounded by his Catholic faith.  And so you see signs of the Catholicism throughout his work, and the screen adaptations that followed much later.  The Ring, as something evil, can be seen as a cross, as Frodo, who is one Christ-figure, carries it to Mount Doom.  Gollum can easily be understood as what happens when one closes oneself in on evil desires and on oneself.  
    I bring this up because in our Gospel today, Jesus cures a deaf man with a speech impediment.  Imagine being deaf and mute during the time of Jesus: it was a life in many ways, closed in on oneself, not because of sin, but because of the lack of ability to communicate in any great way with the outside world.  Indeed, it is the man’s friends who bring him to Jesus.  And Jesus, to heal him, says to the man, “‘Be opened!’”  Jesus opens this man up to new life, especially physically, as his ears are opened and his speech impediment removed, but even interiorly, to the life of grace.  
    God wants us to be open to His grace and His life which He desires would flow through us like a spring of water.  The life of grace irrigates the desert of life that is ours when we are closed in on ourselves and our desire for sin.  Grace makes us more alive, and allows us to interact with the world in new and spectacular ways.
    Tolkien depicts this in the person of Gollum.  As Gollum tries to steal the Ring, Frodo catches him, and slowly wins Gollum’s trust, even calling him by his old name, Smeagol.  As this happens, Smeagol is re-created, and becomes not a wretched, hacking despicable creature, but a joyful, fun, and even serving individual.  Even Frodo’s choice of a new name, really the original name, is a return to Smeagol’s original youth and innocence, before he was corrupted by the evil Ring and turned in on himself.  Frodo, again, a Christ-figure, is the one who frees Smeagol from his past darkness and restores him to the light.
    Sin turns us toward ourselves and away from God.  While we have a specific sin of selfishness, every sin is selfish.  Love is selfless, and so as we serve God we become less concerned about ourselves and more concerned about others.  Sin, which is opposed to God, is therefore opposed to love of others and cares only for the self, which makes one a shadow of how God created us, and exiles us from God, from others, and even from our true self.  Think about any sin, and you can see the effects of selfishness in it.  Greed is fairly obvious, and we care more for money than God; pride is where we care more for ourselves than for God and others; hatred is where we are more concerned with our injuries caused by others and getting back at them (thus, making us feel good because we got our revenge), rather than being concerned about forgiving the others; lust seeks to use the other person for our own sexual desires and pleasure, whether that person physically close to us or on a screen.  Even smaller sins like gossip are about making sure that we are in control of a narrative, or even that we attempt to make ourselves look better by putting others down.  In all those sins and more, we are closed in on ourselves rather than being open, first and foremost to God, and then also to the people He loves, our fellow human beings.
    Jesus wants to open us up.  He desires a fuller life for us than we can provide when we only concentrate on ourselves.  But the choice to accept God’s grace to open rests with us.  God’s grace always does the first and most important work, but our response is also part of the process.  We have to come to God, or our friends need to bring us to Him.  
    But Smeagol also serves as a good warning, that this process of being opened to God is not a once-for-all event; the choice to allow God to open us is a choice we need to make every day.  Smeagol, who later (wrongly) feels betrayed by Frodo, reverts to his old self.  He turns back in on himself and on his desire for the evil Ring consumes him again, eventually leading to his demise.  So for us, each day we have the choice to open ourselves to God or not; to be a desert and burning sands, or a stream and spring of water.  Ephphatha!  Be opened!

How God Heals Us

 Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Catholicism is a sense-experience religion.  When you come to Mass you can see beauty, especially in this church.  You hear different prayers throughout the Mass.  You smell the incense burning in the thurible.  You taste the Eucharist on your tongue.  You sit, stand, and kneel at different parts of the Mass.  Ours is not a quietist religion where you simply sit and think of God.  Worship of God and the practice of the faith in our day-to-day life involves the entire person, body and soul.

    We involve the body and soul because that’s what our Savior did.  We heard it in the Gospel today: there was a man who was deaf and mute.  Jesus takes him aside, and rather than simply willing the healing, He puts His fingers into his ears, spits, and touches the man’s tongue.  He then groans, looks up to heaven, and says, “Ephphatha!  Be opened!”  I don’t know what exactly the deaf and mute man was expecting, but I’m not sure that I would have expected that!
    It’s important to see that our Lord comes to heal.  One of the early Greek titles of our Lord was 𝛴𝜔𝜏𝜂𝜌, which means “savior,” but also has a context of healing.  We tend to think of salvation in merely spiritual terms, saving our souls, but Christ knows that we are a union of soul and body, and so healing one has an impact on the other.  How many people in the Gospels came to Christ with a physical malady, but ended up healed in body and soul, with their sins forgiven as well as their illness healed?
    That ministry of healing did not end when our Lord ascended into heaven.  He continues to heal us.  Again, we tend to think of the healing that our souls need, but sometimes our bodies need healing, and the Lord does that as well.  One of my classmates, Fr. Mathias Thelen, has a charism of healing, which, as he always says, is God healing through him.  There are a great number of people whom God has cured, healed of infirmities, or eased the pain.  We also require these types of miracles through the intercession of one who has a cause of sainthood.  And those stories not only involve healing the body of that person, but also bolster our faith in how God works in our everyday world.
    But it’s good not to put God in a box, and put limits on how He can heal us.  At least from time to time, God heals us in an unexpected way, or maybe even a way with which we’re not that comfortable.  Again, think about the man in the Gospel.  Imagine yourself being taken aside by our Lord, and you have a confidence that He is going to heal you.  You’re looking forward to being able to hear and speak.  You will not longer be stuck mostly in your head.  And then you see Jesus take his fingers, and put them into your ears.  Okay…a little awkward, but maybe some touching of the ears was expected to cure the deafness.  But then, He spits and touches your tongue!  Now we’ve gone into the realm of the unexpected.  I can’t remember a time where I let someone touch my tongue, though, granted, I’m not mute.  Still, I think it’s at least plausible that this healing was not in the manner that the man expected.  But the man was healed, and was so grateful that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut (it had been, after all, shut for so long before that!).  
    How is the Lord trying to heal you?  Sometimes it can come in unexpected ways.  Maybe we’re not having people put fingers in ears, spitting, and touching our tongues.  But are we open to how God wants to heal and save us?  Our eternal salvation was won in a very unexpected way: by the death of our Lord on the cross.  It was so unexpected, almost none of His followers bothered to be with Him in His last hours.  And the disciples are doubly astounded when He shows up alive, after they knew He had been crucified.  
    But our healing that comes to us in our everyday life from God can also be unexpected.  Some couples take a little while to find their spouse, and it can often come after serious heartbreak.  But that heartbreak with the wrong person sometimes leads to the right person, the spouse God wants for you.  To use sports as an analogy, sometimes you have to go through serious pain to become a better athlete.  Sometimes a parent needs to discipline a child, perhaps even with a spanking, to help the child understand what not to do (which will help the child be a better person and disciple).  Sometimes a friend needs to speak a harsh word, or take drastic actions, in order to truly help the friend move on from a bad habit.  
    Those are all negative, but healing can happen in positive unexpected ways, too.  No matter how we experience the unexpected, it can often be in those ways that our Lord heals us and helps us to grow.  God continued to help His Church grow through St. Paul, who had previously persecuted the Church of God, hence St. Paul’s acknowledgement that he is the least of the Apostles.  But God’s grace, which took a persecutor and turned him into a martyr, did the work; it was not in vain.  
    Do not be afraid to ask for healing from God.  Have faith that God can heal whatever ails you, whether it’s physical or spiritual malady.  Healing may not come how you expect it, or maybe not even when you expect it, but it will come, as a gift of God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.