20 May 2019

Easier Said Than Done

Fifth Sunday of Easter
Easier said than done.”  We’ve probably heard and/or used that phrase countless times.  But it sure applies to today’s Gospel.  Jesus says, “‘I give you a new commandment: love one another.  As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.’”  It’s certainly easy to say that we should love others as God loves us.  But when it comes to actually doing it, that’s a different story.

Loving others can be difficult in two ways: knowing what love is, and then actually following through on loving others.  One of the greatest errors of modern society is with the definition of love.  Some say love is never having to say you’re sorry.  For others love is a feeling of delight in another person.  We use the word so often for different situations: love of food, love of a significant other, love of family, love of country, love of God.  We use the same word love for things that are very different from each other, or, at least, should be.  
For Catholics, love, true love, is willing the good of the other.  To love another person we have to want what is good for them and work for it.  Sometimes love means having to apologize for when we have done wrong, or forgiving someone else when they have wronged us.  Sometimes love doesn’t come with any good feelings.  Graduates, your teachers loved you when they gave you homework, and made you take exams.  In at least some cases, I bet that didn’t feel so good (or at least it would have felt better if you didn’t have homework or exams).  Graduates, your parents loved you when they kept you away from danger, when they gave you a spanking to help you know right from wrong, and when they dragged you to church every Sunday (maybe when they dragged you to church today).  You may not have appreciated that love, but they truly were acting for your good.  They wanted what is good for you and did their best to share it with you.
We often, as a society, divorce the truth from love.  We act as if they have nothing to do with each other.  But when love is separated from truth, it becomes mere infatuation or sentimentality, a feeling for something.  Think of a friend whom you know was being cheated on by a boyfriend or girlfriend.  What was the most loving thing to do?  Let them live in ignorant bliss for a while, oblivious to the infidelity?  Or tell your friend that the person with whom they were infatuated did not really love them?  Knowing the truth, which is intimately connected with goodness, helps us to love one another.
But besides knowing what love truly is, loving is hard because we actually have to follow through on willing the good of the other.  It is much easier to ignore other people, or to pretend that we don’t have any responsibility towards them than to love them.  In some ways our society also has made the act of loving more difficult.  People are now glued to their smart phones, their faces in a glaze at the screen even as they walk and drive.  We constantly see pictures of people who end up in danger because they’re trying to help someone who looks like they need a helping hand.  And if something goes wrong when trying to help someone, the person who tried to follow Jesus’ command to love might get sued.  All of those things and more can reinforce the mentality to mind our own business.  Plus, sometimes the people who need love do not run in our social circles, and we don’t want to be embarrassed by friends when we help them.  Throughout your schooling, dear graduates, I’m sure there were times where you felt the Holy Spirit in your conscience, encouraging you to help a classmate who was being teased or ostracized, or maybe even to stop antagonizing them yourselves.  How hard it was at those times to actually love that person because of peer pressure.  Here’s also a sad fact: peer pressure does not stop with middle or high school; it will continue for the rest of your life in different forms.
But in the midst of those difficulties, all of us, but especially you, dear graduates, need to be witnesses of true love, of willing the good of the other.  I remember well the excitement of graduating from high school, the anticipation of college, the joy of being away from my parents (though I did love them).  I had so much energy to change the world for the better, to learn the things that would help me transform the world.  And that energy is a blessing that will help you to love.  But in order to keep up that enthusiasm, you need the Holy Spirit to keep that love of others going.  You will need the Holy Spirit, Whom you received in a new, fresh outpouring when you were confirmed, to help you to know the truth more and more, and to love others in that truth.  

The world can be transformed by your witness.  The world needs to be transformed by your love.  As St. John says in his first letter, “let us love one another, not in word or speech, but in deed and truth.”

13 May 2019

Revelation: Consolation & Worship

Fourth Sunday of Easter
When a lot of people think about the Book of Revelation, they think about scary stuff about the end of time.  They think about 666, the number of the beast, and the trials and tribulations of the end of the world.  And those things are in there, to be sure.  But the overarching theme of Revelation is not what we probably think.
If you’re looking for a good book on how to read the Book of Revelation, you can pick up Scott Hahn’s book, The Lamb’s Supper.  As a Church, we have been listening to the Book of Revelation for the past few Sundays of Easter.  But we haven’t heard too much about beasts and tribulations, dragons with seven horns, or the like.  And that’s because the overarching theme of Revelation is that God is going to take this fallen world, put an end to the fallenness, and then fully bring about a new heaven and a new earth, which He began through the Resurrection of His Son, Jesus.  Yes, evil will be punished, and justice will be established in fullness.  And then we will begin to enjoy the eternal reign of Jesus Christ that will last forever (no, it’s not just 1,000 years; that’s a symbolic number to signify eternity).  
Revelation is meant to be a book of hope for those who were suffering for the faith.  Those who were suffering during “the time of great distress,” those who gave their lives for Jesus, either by martyrdom of blood or the martyrdom of the witness of their lives, will be rewarded.  And it will not be limited to one group of people.  There will be those “from every nation, race, people, and tongue” in heaven.  And what will they do?
Revelation does not describe heaven as a sunny day of golf (golf wasn’t invented yet).  Revelation doesn’t describe heaven as a Caribbean paradise (as nice as that sounds).  Revelation describes heaven as filled with those who have remained faithful to Christ standing “before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.”  The white robes should remind us of the white garments that those who are baptized wear.  It is also the basis for the alb that I and some of our servers wear, or the white surplice that our servers in cassocks where.  The white robes are the clothing of those who are worshipping God.  The palm branches should also remind us of Palm Sunday, when the people, and we in imitation of them, praised Jesus as the Messiah as He entered Jerusalem.  

Our second reading continues that those in heaven, “stand before God’s throne and worship him day and night in his temple.”  Heaven is eternal worship of God.  Heaven is a Mass that lasts forever, but without the symbols and signs that we have in the Mass, because God is all in all, and there is no need for things to remind us of God because He is fully present.
Coming to Mass each Sunday and Holyday is practice for heaven.  In heaven we join with the angels in adoring God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in an eternal act of praise and adoration.  When God spoke to Moses in the Book of Exodus, God gave Moses a pattern by which Moses was to make the ark of the covenant, the meeting tent (where the ark was, and where God dwelt).  The Temple of Solomon was built to represent the universe as it should be, with waves of the sea, oxen, and fruit, all symbolizing paradise and the Garden of Eden, with the ark of the covenant in the middle, and incense offerings and bread offerings before the presence of God.  Our churches, though some do this better than others, are meant to be patterns of heaven, drawing our hearts to the things that are above, as St. Paul says, not the things of earth.  Earth is fallen; heaven is perfection.  But all of these are patterns for heaven, with Christ at the high point in the sanctuary, especially represented by the altar, as well as His real presence in the tabernacle.  And our angels and saints are meant to remind us that we do not worship alone.  
Revelation teaches us that heaven is a place of reward for those who have followed Christ, where there is no more sorrow or tears, no extremes of weather, no need for any earthly food or drink.  We worship God and He satisfies all our needs.  Coming to Mass each Sunday and Holyday is not about being forced, or making us feel good about ourselves, or getting anything (though God does provide for us to hear His Word and receive the Body and Blood of His Son).  Coming to Mass is about preparing ourselves for eternity.

There may be lots of other things that sound more enticing, that sound more enjoyable than heaven.  There are many shepherds that want to lead us to their goals of happiness.  But, as the sheep of the Good Shepherd, the only truly Good Shepherd, Jesus, we are called to follow Him to eternal life.  If we are honest, we have all listened to other shepherds, who sounded like what they were offering us was what we wanted.  But only the Good Shepherd leads us to heaven.  We cannot get there by any other guide.  Only Jesus welcomes us into the verdant pastures of eternal life.  Only Jesus leads us to heaven, which the Book of Revelation describes as perfect happiness and justice, where sin has been fully defeated, and death and sorrow are no more, where we join with the angels in worshipping God forever in an eternal act of adoration, in the place where God provides perfectly for all our needs.  May we listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd so that we can follow where He leads His sheep.  

05 May 2019

If You're Happy and you Know It, Tell Your Face

Third Sunday of Easter
About two months ago, the priests of the Diocese of Lansing met to, among other things, talk about how to increase vocation to the priesthood.  There were lots of ideas shared, some big, some small, some more helpful, some less helpful.  But the advice of one of our senior priests really stood out: if you’re happy and you know it, tell your face.  That was his pithy way of saying that happy priests lead others to consider the priesthood.
But besides being good advice for priests trying to encourage vocations to the priesthood, it’s good advice for all Christians, especially during this Easter season.  If you’re happy and you know it, tell your face!  We have been given the gift of new life in Christ, the opportunity to live for ever in heaven with God, the Blessed Mother, and the angels and saints.  That’s good news!  Sin has been defeated, and Christ has given His Church a way to forgive sins in His name and with His authority (remember that Jesus gave the apostles that authority in last week’s Gospel account).  That should lead us to be joyful.  
Joy doesn’t mean that everything is going to go right in our lives.  St. Thomas Aquinas describes joy as a passion which is caused by love of being in the presence of that which is loved, or by the goodness of the thing loved that lasts.  And, of course, spiritual joy, the fruit of the Holy Spirit, is caused by being in the presence of God and by the goodness of God that endures forever.  Therefore, especially when dealing with the goodness of God itself and how much he loves us, joy and sorrow cannot be mixed up.  We should, as St. Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians, “Rejoice in the Lord always.”
But, St. Thomas also admits that we do not always participate in the goodness of God, or recognize God’s presence, and that can cause us sorrow, because we don’t see the love of God active in our neighbor, or even active in ourselves.  And we see that sadness in our Gospel today.  St. Peter forgets that Jesus has risen.  He has seen Jesus, but Jesus has gone elsewhere.  And because St. Peter forgets about the abiding presence of the risen Jesus, St. Peter abandons his responsibility of sustaining the disciples in the faith, and decides to go back to his old life of fishing.  
Now, when St. Peter recognizes Jesus on the shore, that joy returns, and so much so that he jumps out of the boat to swim to shore to see Jesus, rather than waiting for the boat to go ashore.  It is then that Jesus asks St. Peter about his love, the threefold profession of love making up for St. Peter’s threefold denial that he even knew Jesus.  And Jesus entrusts to St. Peter the role of feeding the lambs, tending the sheep, and feeding then sheep.  St. Peter is entrusted with taking care of the flock that belongs to the Good Shepherd.  And the joy of loving Christ is meant to keep St. Peter going.
A statue of Jesus at Peter at the
Sea of Galilee
St. Peter had that joy, maybe not always and not exactly as God wanted St. Peter to, but still, St. Peter had the joy of the Resurrection, and we heard about that in the first reading when St. Peter rejoiced “that they had been found worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name” of Jesus.  Even though they were being persecuted, St. Peter (and the other apostles) had joy because they knew they were in the presence of God and that they were able to suffering for God in imitation of Jesus.
So how about us?  Do our faces show that we have the joy of the Resurrection?  As a priest in seminary once told us, this isn’t the smile of someone who just passed gas and then walked away.  This is the joy that gives us peace through all of life’s circumstances, good and bad.  If we recognize the presence of God in our life, then nothing can take that joy from us.  God’s love is always active in our life and sustains us every day.  Even when there is something sad or even horrendous going on in our life, if we know the love of God, then we can still have the joy that is the fruit of the Holy Spirit.  

The martyrs are the best example of this.  Throughout the centuries there are stories of martyrs who died very painful deaths, but had joy that they were laying down their life in imitation of Jesus.  From the Apostles, to the early Roman martyrs, to the Japanese martyrs in the sixteenth century, to the North American martyrs in the seventeenth century, to saints like Maximilian Kolbe in the twentieth century, they didn’t enjoy being put to death, but they did have joy to suffer for Christ.  And many of their writings testify to that.  So for us, who probably aren’t being covered with tar and lit on fire, having boiling water poured over us to mock baptism, having our fingernails pulled out and our fingers chopped off, being crucified, or being given poison, then hopefully we can recognize the abiding presence of God and live in that joy of Easter.  If you’re happy and you know it, tell your face!