Catholic Identity

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

A parishioner was recently asking me about my work with the Michigan State Police.  In the midst of the conversation, I started to talk about how, for law enforcement officers in general, their work is their life.  That’s not to say they don’t have hobbies outside of work, but simply that their work changes who they are, how they see people, and how they act.  One example: if a cop goes out to eat, even off duty, he or she almost always will sit facing the entrance, if at all possible, to see what’s going on, who’s coming in, etc.  The same could be said for being a mother: it changes how you see things, and you’re always a mom, even if the child doesn’t necessarily belong to you.  And I’m sure there are others whose identity changes how they relate to the world they encounter each day.

I bring this up because the same should be able to be said about us as Catholics, as followers of Jesus.  Being Catholic is not a matter of belonging to an ancient club, with dues, with old rituals, with hierarchy, that provides certain privileges.  Being Catholic is not only about coming to Mass one day each week.  Being Catholic is, as St. Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, having the same attitude as Christ.  And when we have that same attitude, it changes everything we do.

A statue of King David
from Jerusalem

Even before Jesus, we can see what that looks like in our first reading.  David had been anointed by the Prophet Samuel to take over for King Saul after Saul was dead.  David’s fame and power kept growing, while King Saul’s fame and power was waning (remember that he had disobeyed the Lord, which is why the Lord’s favor left him).  Because of this, King Saul wanted to kill David, to get rid of his rival.  So David had to flee.  But King Saul pursued David.  And that’s where our first reading comes in today.  David is hiding from King Saul, but finds him asleep, along with all of his men.  David could have killed King Saul (Saul’s spear was in the ground next to King Saul’s head), but didn’t.  David’s advisor, Abishai, told David to kill King Saul, so that he could be king instead.  But David rejected that advice, and did no harm to the king that the Lord had anointed.  

That course of action makes no sense outside of faith in God.  If you come upon a man who is hunting you, who is bent on your destruction, and you have the chance to take him out, that is the best thing to do.  David could have become king and ruled over all Israel.  But it was not God’s will, so David did not do it, even though, from the wisdom of the world, it would have ensured success.

Jesus, the Son of David, tells us in the Gospel: 

“love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.  […] Give to everyone who asks of you….Do to others as you would have them do to you….Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful….Stop judging…[s]top condemning…[f]orgive.”

That’s not the way to make it in a cutthroat world, the world in which Jesus lived, the world in which we live.  That’s not the smartest plan for someone who wants to be powerful, in control, determining his own destiny.  But that’s the attitude of Christ.

Being Catholic is about living in our daily circumstances like Jesus would live.  It means loving enemies, praying for those who hurt us, being generous with our material goods, being merciful.  Those actions, and everything that Jesus teaches us, is meant to become a part of us, so that, again paraphrasing St. Paul, it is not longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us.  Being Catholic is about becoming like Jesus, not so that we can earn God’s love, but as a result of God’s love.  Being Catholic should be in us as a part of who we are, which changes who we are, how we see people, how we act.   

When we approach people, we should try to see a person created in the image and likeness of God, and love them.  When we are struggling with a co-worker or a family member, our first instinct should be to pray for that person.  When we’re at the grocery or department store, or dealing with customer service, we should treat them as we would want to be treated.  When someone wrongs us, we should try to extend mercy to them, just as our heavenly Father extends mercy to us.  All of those things should flow from us because we are followers of Jesus, because we are Catholic.  Even more to the core of who we are than a job; even more to the core of who we are as a mother or father, we are followers of Jesus, and that should impact the way we live.  

Imagine for a second that our actions flowed from our identity as sons and daughters in the Son of God.  Imagine how different our world would be if we stopped acting out of a worldly mindset where we are in competition with each other for every last scrap, and where if we don’t take someone else down, that they could take us down.  Imagine if we had the same attitude as Christ.

Duc In Altum

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

One of my favorite saints has always been St. Peter.  No, I don’t want to be pope (being a pastor is enough responsibility for me!), but I like St. Peter.  He’s one of the great apostles of Jesus, who always has great things to say, unless he’s putting his foot in his mouth (as he also often does).  He is, we might say, very relatable.  I’d like to believe that I have had great moments of faith and trust in God (even if great is a sliding scale), but I also know that I have had my own outbreaks of foot-in-mouth disease.

And since I like St. Peter so much, today’s Gospel is one of my favorites.  It’s St. Luke talking about how St. Peter was called by Jesus.  St. Peter (still going by Simon at this point) is fishing all night and catching nothing (side note: have you ever noticed that St. Peter is never able to catch fish on his own?!?).  Then Jesus, who, from all outside views, knows nothing about fishing, tells him to go out again, and put into deep waters.  St. Peter begrudgingly does this, and then catches so many fish that he has to call his partners, James and John (who also became apostles), to help him drag it in.  St. Peter realizes that he is in the presence of someone special, someone great, and makes a confession of his own sinfulness.  Jesus tells him not to be afraid, because he will be catching men from now on.

When others hear this story, they sometimes ask me how I came to follow Jesus as a priest.  And certainly, all of our readings focus on calls: on the call of Isaiah to be a prophet; the call of St. Paul to preach the Gospel as the last apostle; and, as I mentioned, the call of St. Peter to follow Jesus as one, and the chief, of His apostles.  

Some priests I know have amazing stories like St. Peter of Jesus doing something great and spectacular in their lives.  But for me, that’s not the case.  As an eighth grader, I started thinking about what I wanted to do as an adult (so that I could concentrate on the right classes in high school, get into a good college in a field in which I wanted, and then get a good job).  If it were up to me, I wanted to be a lawyer, and then maybe go into politics.  I wanted to be married, have a few kids, a couple of dogs, and have lots of money.  But I knew that if I were going to be happy, I had to do what God wanted me to do.  So I started praying to God each night, asking Him to let me know.  And I heard nothing.  

So I started to go to daily Mass a few times at Lansing Catholic High School, and it was there that a stranger asked me if I were going to be a priest.  And other classmates and teachers started to do the same thing.  And before long, I started to realize that maybe God was asking me to consider a vocation to the priesthood.  I started to learn more about Catholicism, and fell in love with the Church, as one falls in love with his girlfriend.  And I decided that I wanted to give my life to serve her, just as a man decides (and hopefully the woman agrees) that he wants to give his life to serve the woman he wants to be his wife.  I applied to the seminary in my senior year through the Diocese of Lansing, and was accepted for my freshman year of college.  Each year I asked God to make it painfully clear if He didn’t want me to continue on.  And each year, I was asked to come back and continue studying to become a priest.  It wasn’t always easy; there were times where I thought (with the assistance of a rather attractive female lab partner) that maybe the priesthood wasn’t for me; but God did and has sustained me in my vocation.  God’s providential care for me has been more in the day-to-day events of life, not so much in the spectacular, like St. Peter.

But God knows what we need in responding to His call.  Some people don’t need the dramatic moments.  Some people do.  The key is that we are listening for the call of Jesus, and we respond with courage to the call of Jesus.  Because Jesus says to anyone who wants to follow Him, “Put out into deep water.”  In Latin that phrase is Duc in altum, and it was used by Pope St. John Paul II as he began his Apostolic Letter on the new millennium in 2001.  It was also a favorite of Bishop Mengeling, who told us seminarians not to dangle our toes in the water, but to put out into deep water.

Any vocational call–ordained ministry, marriage, consecrated life–and even while discerning God’s call, takes courage.  It takes faith in God, and confidence that He will show you the way.  As a priest it takes courage to serve when a very small percentage have tainted the good name of the priesthood, and it takes courage to say yes to never having a wife and a biological family of your own.  As a consecrated man or woman it takes courage to promise to not have any personal bank accounts and to be obedient to the religious congregation’s superiors.  As a married man or woman, it takes courage to commit to only being with one person in the special friendship of marriage for your entire life, to only be physically intimate with that person as long as that person lives.  Any vocation, and, again, even when trying to find out what God wants us to do, takes the courage to put out into deep waters and trust that God will not abandon us in those waters.

Many of you already have discerned your vocation here.  But some of you have not.  Be courageous in answering the Lord’s call, whatever it is, in your life.  Some of you may have spectacular calls like St. Peter.  Some of you will have more quotidian or ordinary calls like me.  But don’t be afraid to answer it.  Duc in altum!

Disciples are Made for Greatness, Not Comfort

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

There’s a temptation that can creep into any believer’s life, that if we just do the right things, then everything in our life is going to go well.  Maybe it comes from a desire for justice, for everyone getting what is owed them, but we can easily think that if we follow God, if we live our life according to what the Church teaches, then life should be easy for us.  We should be rewarded for good behavior, just like bad behavior should be punished.  There are even those who claim to preach the Gospel (they are really just perverting it) who say that if we follow God’s laws and if we give 10% to the Church, then God is going to make us rich and give us every earthly pleasure that is holy that we could desire.  We call that the Gospel of Prosperity (note that it’s not the Gospel of Jesus Christ).  

This perhaps also betrays a certain tendency in our human nature to want comfort, which is especially prevalent today among the young.  We want the good life, where we don’t have to struggle, don’t have to put forth effort, but we still get the rewards that would come from struggle and effort.  In one sense, we might say that this is built in to us because we were created for prelapsarian life, the life before the Fall in the Garden of Eden.  But we are living in postlapsarian times, the time after the Fall, where we earn our living by the sweat of our brow.  Furthermore, as Pope Benedict XVI reminded us, “The world promises you comfort, but you were not made for comfort.  You were made for greatness.”  Greatness takes work.  Works means struggle.  Struggle means pain.  And it even applies for those who follow God.

Take Jeremiah in our first reading.  God appointed him a prophet.  In fact, God says that He appointed Jeremiah a prophet even while Jeremiah was in his mother’s womb.  And yet, Jeremiah has a tough life, so much so, that God says, “gird your loins; […] Be not crushed on their account.”  Jeremiah is the prophet who immediately prophesies the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of God’s people to Babylon.  As you might imagine, no one liked hearing this dire message.  But even as God tells Jeremiah that he will undergo a lot, he also promises that he has “made you a fortified city, a pillar of iron, a wall of brass…They will fight against you but not prevail over you, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.”  

But besides the fact that God does not promise that those who follow Him and speak for Him will have it easy, Jesus also reminds us that sometimes those who don’t follow God get blessings.  The widow in Zarephath to whom Elijah was sent was not a Jew, and yet God took care of her.  Naaman the Syrian was a foreign general, a general of an army that was constantly threatening to destroy the Jews, and yet God, through the Prophet Elisha, cured him of leprosy.  Those who don’t follow God can still receive His blessings and healing.

And, if we look at Jesus, the co-eternal Son of God, He was perfect.  He never sinned, never did anything wrong.  He followed God’s will perfectly, and extended healing to many, both Jew and Gentile alike.  And what did Jesus get for perfectly doing the will of God and healing those who were ill?  He was led to the cross do die for our sins.  He suffered the most painful and embarrassing way to die as nails pierced his hands and feet and he hung naked outside the walls of Jerusalem.

But just in case you thought that being a disciple of Jesus means that life is going to be quite painful and horrible, that’s not the truth either.  Yes, our life on earth, in the vale of tears, may have a lot of suffering, but faithfulness to God always leads to eternal life in heaven.  Jesus shows us that in the most perfect way in His Resurrection.  Yes, following God’s will led Jesus to the cross, but the cross led to the Resurrection.  Yes, Jeremiah was treated poorly for speaking a difficult word from God, but he was received into heaven when Christ opened the gates of Paradise.  We long for the ease of Eden, but God promises, after our trials and tribulations on earth, a paradise and a comfort that exceeds anything that earth can offer to an infinite degree.  To tweak Pope Benedict’s words slightly, we were not made for comfort on this earth, but we were made for eternal joy in heaven.  

And what guides us amid the joys and sorrows of life?  Love.  True love, which means the type of love that is patient, kind, not jealous, not pompous, not rude, not quick-tempered, not brooding, rejoicing in the truth.  Love guides us to our eternal joy because perfect love is eternal joy in heaven, where God, who is Love itself, shows us himself face to face.  

It would be nice if everything came to us without effort; if following Jesus did not require sacrifice and struggle.  But because we are fallen, following Jesus does not mean that we will get everything we want and life will not always be easy.  But, if we stay faithful to Christ, especially when it requires sacrifice and struggle, we know that we have a treasure, not made by hands, eternal in heaven, waiting for us, and fulfilling beyond measure the desire we have on earth for true joy.