What Do You Want Me to Do For You?

 Quinquagesima Sunday
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  “What do you want me to do for you?”  What a question!  Besides asking the blind man in the Gospel, our Lord asks us the same question today: what do you want me to do for you?  
    It would be easy to treat this offer like Aladdin, rubbing the lamp and having the genie come out, offering us three wishes.  It’s interesting that, when it comes to genies, most stories involve some level of greed.  What is desired is personal gain, whether it be money, power, notoriety, or some other fleeting good.  Of course, then there’s the other reality with a genie, that you have to be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it and get it literally, or in a way you never intended.  

    But our Lord doesn’t operate that way.  He promises neither to give us fleeting goods which are really the idols of the world (power, pleasure, money), nor to trick us with what we ask.  He sincerely asks us what we want to receive from Him.  And notice that the blind man does not ignore his physical reality.  He doesn’t deny the trouble that being blind gives him, or pretend that all he wants is eternal life.  He asks for his eyes to be healed.  We don’t know how old this man was.  Maybe he was young; maybe he was old.  But his eyes would eventually fail him again as he continued to age.  Still, God gave him that gift.  
    So what do you want from God?  What do you want God to do for you?  When you’re thinking about it, make sure that it’s something that is actually good.  I used to, when I had some extra cash, buy

MegaMillions or PowerBall tickets.  I would tell God that if I one, I would give 10% to the church, so it would really be a good thing if I won.  I haven’t won, for the record, and I am convinced that God hasn’t wanted me to.  I hear so many stories about people who came into quick and easy money, and how horrible their lives became.  So maybe God was saving me from that pain (some of you may be thinking, ‘I’ll take my chances, God; let me understand what it is to have that kind of problem!’).  But what do you want God to do for you?  Solomon didn’t ask for riches or victory over his enemies, but wisdom.  That would be a great gift to get from God.  Or maybe you want God to increase your faith or your hope.  Those are also good.  Or maybe you desire healing from God, like the blind man.  God also grants those prayers if it’s for that person’s good.  What do you want from God?
    Have confidence that God can do it for you.  In another story of healing, a man asks our Lord to heal his son who is possessed.  The man says, “If you can,” and Christ replies that all things are possible for the one who has faith.  Do we have confidence that God can do great things?  Does He do every great thing that we desire?  No.  Does that mean that He can’t.  No.  It means it wasn’t His will.  But if you look at almost every healing in the Gospels, they come as a result of faith.  When we have faith in what God can do, it opens up for possibilities that we never imagined were possible.  As the Lord asks us, “What do you want me to do for you?”, do we really think He can do something for us?
    That question, “What do you want me to do for you?”, takes on a special meaning for us as we approach Lent.  Perhaps the Lord is asking you and I today: “What do you want me to do for you this Lent?”  What do we expect to get out of this upcoming Lenten season?  Are our sacrifices something that we do because we’ve always given up this, or done this extra thing?  Or will they truly help us to grow in holiness?  Will our Lenten practices help us to be ready for Easter, to celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord from the dead?  
    If we ask the Lord for something this Lent, He will give it to us if it is for our good.  Do we have a particular sin that we want to fight more and eliminate from our life?  Do we have a family member or friend with whom we need to reconcile?  Do we have an enemy that we need to forgive?  Lent is the perfect time to open ourselves up even more to God’s grace to allow us to live the divine life.  Lent is the time of metanoia, a change of heart and mind, a time to put on the mind of Christ, as the Apostle says.  Do we want that from God?  Do we want to change, or are we happy in our set ways of operating or the spiritual plateau on which we may find ourselves?  
    Do we need to grow in love?  Not the romantic love that we so often associate with the word love, but the agape love that St. Paul describes in our epistle.  Do we need to become more patient and more kind?  Do we struggle with envying what others have, or do we seek to elevate ourselves above others?  Does our love for others depend on our emotions or how the day is going?  If we wish to grow more like Christ, it necessary entails growing in love, both for the God we cannot see and the brother and sister that we can see.
    God is not a genie.  We are not limited to three wishes.  God truly desires our good, and wants to know what we feel we need.  He is our loving Father, and wants to give us every good gift.  As we go through this week, and as we prepare for Lent, may we hear the Lord asking us, “What do you want me to do for you?”, and prayerfully consider what it is that we desire from the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

"Do You Trust Me?"

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but the Disney version of “Aladdin” came out 25 years ago!  Robin Williams is the voice of the Genie, and it has the famous song, “A Whole New World.”  That song takes place on Aladdin’s magic carpet, and it begins right after Aladdin, pretending to be Prince Ali Abawa, asks Princess Jasmine, whom he likes, “Do you trust me?”  Those are the exact same words that Aladdin asks Princess Jasmine when she is pretending to be a commoner and she is running away from trouble in the marketplace: “Do you trust me?”

“Trust,” we so often say, “is earned, not given.”  Or we might say, “Trust, but verify.”  But in our Gospel, St. Peter takes neither of those approaches.  Jesus has done some amazing things for Peter (helps him catch fish even though they had been fishing all night; changes water into wine), but it’s not clear that Peter knows exactly who Jesus is.  It’s not for another chapter in Matthew’s Gospel that we hear Peter confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God.  And it’s clear that most of the apostles think that the vision of Jesus is a ghost, not the real thing.  Peter had no way to verify if it truly was Jesus.  In fact, in Peter’s act of faith (which, admittedly, falters), Peter walking on water was the way he was going to verify it was Jesus.

But Peter must have trusted that it was truly Jesus, and that if Jesus told him to walk on water, then walk on water was what Peter would do.  Think of all the temptations that Peter had before he even got out of the boat: they were being tossed about by waves, it was the middle of the night, and the apostles were all terrified.  And yet Peter stepped out onto the water because Jesus, or something that Peter thinks might be Jesus, tells him to do so.  

But as soon as Peter stops trusting Jesus, as soon as the realities around Peter become the focus and not Jesus, Peter starts to sink.  But even then, Jesus verifies and earns Peter’s trust, by reaching out to save Peter when he cries out in fear.

Do we trust Jesus?  Or do we feel Jesus hasn’t earned our trust, or we need to verify before we can trust Jesus?  Would we be willing to step out on water (and not the frozen kind) to walk to Jesus, or would the fear of drowning keep us from even putting one foot over the side of the boat?

Trusting God can seem hard.  It doesn’t mean life always goes well.  Jesus had to entrust Himself to God the Father even on the cross.  Temptation eats at Jesus, as we hear Him say, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”  But even though tempted, Jesus doesn’t give in to His fears, and will also say, “Into your hands I commend [or entrust] my spirit.”  Even as He is dying, Jesus shows us how to trust God in horrible circumstances.  

What makes it especially difficult to trust is when we feel that we have been let down.  We all have that one person, maybe a former friend, who has let us down, betrayed us, and not been there when we needed him or her.  Maybe that friend was even a spouse.  And now we find it hard to trust again.  That fear of betrayal, of abandonment, can easily bleed into our relationship with God.  We show up, but it’s on our terms, not God’s.  We have expectations about how things should be, and if they’re not fulfilled, then we’ll cut bait and run.  

For many of us, we trust God with certain things: secrets, hopes, fears, etc.  But maybe there’s an area of our life where we don’t trust God.  Maybe we don’t trust God when it comes to money.  Maybe we don’t trust God to guide our relationship.  Maybe we don’t trust God when it comes to conceiving a child or how many kids we should have.  Maybe we don’t trust God to truly forgive us.  All of those are very common ways that we think we know better than God, or we don’t want to involve God in those parts of our lives.  But to that fear, Jesus invites us to trust in Him and walk on water.

Maybe we don’t trust that God will be enough for us, or we don’t trust that we can be alone with God.  In our first reading, Elijah heard God not in the dramatic aspects of life–the strong and heavy wind, the crushing of rocks, the earthquake, the fire–but in a tiny whispering sound.  The only way to hear that tiny whisper is to keep silence.  If we really want to know if we trust God, try being silent with Him.  Silence can be the scariest thing in the world, because we might actually hear God, and maybe we don’t trust that what He says to us will be for our good.  It’s so much easier to play with our phones, to listen to music, to distract ourselves, than to be silent with God.  

After the music stops and while I’m still purifying the sacred vessels (or as some say, cleaning the dishes), can you simply kneel or sit in silence and wait to hear God, whom you have just received in the Eucharist?  It would be comical if it weren’t so sad, how many times someone feels like they have to break the silence by a “cough” or another noise (and I’m talking about adults, not kids).  But it is in the silence where we can so often hear God speaking to us, inviting us to trust Him in every aspect of our lives, not just the ones we want.

Take time in your life for silent prayer with God, a time, maybe just 5 minutes, to entrust yourself to God.  For some of us it may be as scary as stepping out onto the water like St. Peter did.  But remember that God will not let us drown.

Today at the end of Mass, we will also, along with every other parish in the Diocese of Lansing, entrust our parish and all who belong to it, to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in an act of consecration.  In a formal way we give ourselves over to God for His glory, rather than our own plans.  We do so on the 100th Anniversary of the apparition of our Blessed Mother to the shepherd children at Fatima.  We entrust our lives to her and ask her to help us to say yes to God, just as she did at every moment of her life.  There is more information in the narthex if you are interested.  May we truly trust in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, and His Immaculate Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary.