Hope that Doesn't Disappoint

Third Sunday of Lent–First Scrutiny
    St. Paul says today in the second reading: “we boast in hope of the glory of God.  And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”  We probably associate hope more with Advent.  Or maybe when we think of hope we think of campaign slogans.  But Lent helps us to focus on hope, the theological virtue that draws us to have confidence in our salvation.
    Most of the time we use hope merely to denote a wish: I hope I win the lottery; I hope that cop didn’t see me speeding; I hope the Lions win a Super Bowl before I die.  None of those will likely happen.  But hope is more than just wishful (or maybe even delusional) thinking.  Hope draws us to God and enables us to trust that what He said would happen will happen.
    The Chosen People in the first reading today demonstrated the opposite of hope: despair.  God had promised the Chosen People that they would gain their freedom from slavery in Egypt, and that He would return them to the land He promised Abraham.  To put today’s reading in context, it comes after the Ten Plagues, including the death of the firstborn Egyptians; after the Jews had left Egypt; after they had gone through the Red Sea and the Egyptian army had been drowned.  And still, because they are thirsty, they cry out, “‘Why did you ever make us leave Egypt?’”  Even though God had proved He was trustworthy, they doubted God to do what He said He would do.  But even then, God further proved that they could trust Him, and provided them with water in a miraculous way.

    The Samaritan woman, too, was a woman bereft of hope.  We probably missed the short sentence that St. John gave as a clue of her hopelessness: “It was about noon.”  We’re used to driving to Meijer’s or Costco to pick up whatever we need at almost any time of the day or night.  But in the time of Christ, to draw water during the hottest part of the day meant that you did not want to be around others, or maybe that they didn’t want you to be around them.  She’s living with a man who is not her husband, and her five previous husbands have left her.  She likely relied on the generosity of others to survive, or possibly worked in an unsavory occupation just to feed herself.  To the Samaritan woman, God seemed far away, and probably not worthy of trust.  But God comes to her, in the Person of Jesus, to give her hope, living water that gives eternal life.  
    As we sit here on this third Sunday of Lent, do we hope in God?  Do we trust that He will fulfill His promise?  God has promised that if we follow Him daily, eternal life is the consequence.  We cannot see eternal life right now, beyond slight glimpses.  But as we choose what God has revealed is good for us, do we do so with the confidence that as our actions show that we want God more, He will not leave us hanging and dash our hopes against a rock, like the Lions always seem to do?  
    Especially during Lent, when we focus on the price of our salvation–the death of Christ, we might struggle with despair a bit.  We might wonder if the abstaining from meat on Fridays, the fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and our daily Lenten penances make any difference.  Or we might think about just what pain Christ suffered for us, and think that we are not worth it.  But God comes to us, like He came to the Samaritan woman, to tell us we are worth the price He paid, and that the little ways that we turn aside from our own will in order to focus on doing God’s will can prepare us for heaven, even if it’s happening a little at a time or even if we struggle to do our penitential practices.  Through our penitential practices, we are meant to allow the grace of God to open up our hearts even more so that they can receive more of the love of God the Father through the Holy Spirit whom God gave us at Holy Baptism.
    And you, our elect, chosen for the Easter sacraments: as we celebrate this first scrutiny, God comes to you to strengthen your hope and help you to persevere.  Christ came to you when you needed Him, and gave you the desire for the living waters which give eternal life, the saving waters of baptism.  He didn’t avoid you because of your past sins, whatever they may have been.  He came to you who did not have the hope of eternal life, which God ordinarily grants through baptism, and gave you hope to live forever with Him if you follow Him for the rest of your life and grow in love of Him.  Maybe you, like the Chosen People, have doubted if God will really do what He has promised.  At Easter, as you pass through your own Red Sea as the water is poured on your head, and as the paschal candle, the pillar of fire, leads you from darkness into light, you will see that God does fulfill His promises, and will give you new life.  You need only hold on to that hope that He inspired in you.
    Hope does not consist in mere wishing.  Theological hope holds on to the promise that God will give us eternal life if we are baptized and follow Him to the best of our ability after baptism.  That hope does not disappoint, because it is grounded in the one who loved us so much that He gave us His only Son, who suffered and died for us because He did not want us to live in despair, but wanted us to have eternal life with Him in heaven.  Allow the Holy Spirit to continue to pour hope into your hearts so that you can reach the true Promised Land, eternal happiness with God in heaven.  

Same Event, Different Experience

Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

    It was fun last Sunday to see the Detroit Lions dominate the game offensively.  No matter what Washington did, they could not seem to stop Detroit’s offense, with the worst results for most of the drives of the game being a field goal and only three points rather than the usual seven points for a touchdown and extra point.  After some rough games this season, it was good to see a strong Lions team again.
    But imagine for a second that you were cheering for the Commanders.  Sunday was not a day you really wanted to remember.  The things that made it so great for the Lions made it pretty horrible for the Commanders.  In any contest, what is good news for one is bad news for the other.
    In this penultimate Sunday in Ordinary Time before we begin Advent, our readings focus us on the end of time.  And the Prophet Malachi, in particular, presents us with this idea that the same event, the day of the Lord, will be bad for some, but great for others.  For some it will be a day of pain and suffering, with the proud and the evildoers burning up like stubble in a field.  For those who fear the name of the Lord, the sun (s-u-n) of justice will heal with its rays.  As Catholics we know that Christ is the true Sun of Justice because He is the Son (s-o-n) of God and Son of Man.  We look for the same event, Christ’s return in glory, but it will not seem the same for everyone.  For some it will appear as a day of joy, for others a day of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
    When we come to this time of year, the Church traditionally puts before us, as she did at every funeral in the old rite, the hymn Dies Irae.  The title means “Day of Wrath.”  And the first verses focus on what the return of Christ will be like for evildoers:
 

Day of watch and doom impending!
David’s word with Sibyl’s blending,
Heaven and earth in ashes ending!

Oh, what fear man’s bosom renders,
When from heaven the Judge descendeth,
On whose sentence all dependeth.

That certainly gives us a wake-up call for what the end could be like if we do not give our hearts over to God and open ourselves to His grace which transforms us.  
    But, it continues:

Faint and weary, Thou hast sought me,
On the Cross of suffering bought me.
Shall such grace be vainly brought me?…

Guilty, now I pour my moaning,
All my shame with anguish owning;
Spare, O God, Thy suppliant groaning!

Through the sinful woman shriven,
Through the dying thief forgiven,
Thou to me a hope hast given.

With Thy sheep a place provide me,
From the goats afar divide me,
To Thy right hand do Thou guide me….

Lord, all-pitying, Jesus blest,
Grant them Thine eternal rest.
Amen.

While not pretending to be blameless, the return of Christ for those who love the Lord means a time of salvation and the rectification of all that evil has ruined, so that the souls of the just can have eternal rest.
    The key, then, is what team we are on?  Not Team Edward or Team Jacob (you’re welcome, “Twilight” fans), but Dies irae-Day of wrath or spem dedisti–a hope given.  Because the end will mean suffering.  Our Lord outlines the things that will precede the end: wars, insurrections, powerful earthquakes, famines, plagues, and persecution of the followers of Christ.  Those who work against Christ will think that they have won.  They will try to get Christ’s faithful to abandon their virtue, to abandon Christ, and will offer apparent ways out of the tribulations that may even mean less or even no suffering in the short terms.  But for those who remain faithful to Christ, who persevere, the time of sorrow and suffering will lead to a day of hope and victory in Christ, who will reward those who remained true even when turning away seemed easier and more enjoyable.  
    [Ava & Wade: you are choosing to follow Christ today, and Christ receives you as His catechumen.  This means that Christ already recognizes you as a follower, even if you have not yet become part of Him through Holy Baptism.  You are abandoning the logic of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and striving to live according to the logic of the Logos, the Divine Word, who helps us understand how God has truly created the world.  You are choosing hope in place of wrath, and for that we give thanks to God and promise you our prayers.]
    The end comes, seemingly ever faster.  We find ourselves closer to the return of Christ in glory today than we were yesterday.  This time of year reminds us to take stock of our choices, which do not only have consequences in time, but have consequences into eternity.  Christ will return in glory, and how we view that day will depend on how we lived each day before that: for or against Christ.  May the words of Dies Irae apply to us as the just so that, “When the wicked are confounded, / Doomed to flames of woe unbounded, / Call me with Thy saints surrounded.”

Job and Detroit Lions Fans

 Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    I am convinced that at some point in the future, the Lions will make it to the Super Bowl.  It will be the fourth quarter, and the Lions will be losing by 1 point.  They’ll be on the opponent’s 20 yard line, ready to kick the game-winning field goal, with 1 second left on the clock.  The kicker will kick the ball, and it will go straight, ready to pass through the uprights, and just as it’s about to pass through, and the refs are about to raise their hands, Jesus Christ will return in glory, and the Lions will forever be the team that never won a Super Bowl.
    As Lions fans we are used to disappointment.  There are other bad teams, but only the Lions seem to find new and exciting ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  So perhaps we can sympathize with Job from our first reading and say “I have been assigned months of misery, and troubled nights have been allotted to me.”  In case you’re unfamiliar with Job, it’s a beautiful book of the Bible.  It may be more of a parable than a literal story, but it tells the story of a man who is faithful to God, but then undergoes great trials.  His first trial is that his oxen and donkeys were grazing, and were stolen by Sabeans, who killed all the herdsmen, save one.  Lightening struck all his sheep and shepherds and killed all but one shepherd.  Chaldeans came and stole all of Job’s camels, and killed all their caretakers, save one.  His seven sons and three daughters were all killed when their house collapsed during a party, and only one servant survived.  To this Job says: “‘The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’”  Quite the ordeal!
 

   But then, Job is struck by severe boils “from the soles of his feet to the crown of the head.”  Life is so bad that his wife, obviously a loving and caring woman, tells Job, “‘Curse God and die.’”  The Book of Job makes clear that Job has done nothing wrong, and yet he suffers greatly.  This story of Job is an attempt to understand why bad things happen to good people.  I encourage you to read the rest of the book (we only hear a part of chapter 7 today) to see how it ends.
    Suffering is a part of life, not just for Lions’ fans.  There are moral evils that we have to suffer with (crimes, betrayals, loneliness from others’ rejection of us); there are also natural evils that make us suffer (natural disasters, illnesses, pandemics).  People of all faiths and none struggle with this question, sometimes called Theodicy, of why bad things happen to good people, and why there is evil in the world.  In case you’re wondering, there is no easy answer.
    Jesus, as He so often does, turns the question on its head.  What does He do?  He heals; He grants wholeness; He saves.  Our Gospel today relates healings that Jesus did, exorcisms, and preaching.  Jesus shows us that He enters into our evils, some of our own making, some that we have no control over, and He brings healing.  The very word for savior in Latin, Salvator, is connected to another word, salus, meaning health.  The Salvator is the one who brings salus.  
    But Jesus, our Savior, doesn’t do so extrinsically, outside of all our sufferings.  He doesn’t watch from afar and offer us health while social distancing.  He enters into our pain, our suffering, our illness, and brings us delight, wholeness, and health.  And that’s part of the beautiful message of the Gospel: Jesus defeats sin and death through His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension; but we still see it happening, until Jesus returns and ushers in the fullness of His Kingdom.  Until then, Jesus suffers with and in us; He does not abandon us.  And while suffering is not good, it always helps to know that we are not alone, that our suffering has not separated us from the One who loves us above all, as suffering often does make us feel segregated.
    I think this is so clear from our pandemic.  I’m not here to argue against science and taking necessary precautions to protect one’s health.  But one of the greatest evils in this pandemic, whether physically necessary or not, is that we are being disconnected from each other.  Whether we have symptoms, are asymptomatic, or are virus-free, COVID has sought to divide us from each other.  The age-old wounds of sin and division, that were always just below the surface, have come to the top and are festering.  And because we lack a physical unity with each other, that spiritual and emotional unity has also been stretched, or even torn.  
    In the midst of that division, Jesus continues to heal and make whole.  There are stories of heroic Catholics–priests, deacons, and lay faithful–who have refused to let people die alone, even if they had COVID.  The Church has continued to feed the poor, shelter the homeless, educate adults and children, because that is Jesus’ work, and that work does not stop just because there’s a pandemic.  My mind is drawn, by way of an earlier example, to St. Damian of Molokai, whose Belgian blood I share, who gave up his own life to bring Jesus and His healing, especially spiritual healing, to the leper colony in the Hawaiian islands.  
    But even today, through the Sacrament of Penance (confession) and the Eucharist, Jesus continues to heal, and continues to walk with us through our suffering.  He has defeated it, and suffering will end when Christ is all in all.  But until then, Jesus does not leave us orphans; He does not leave us to suffer alone, but suffers with and in us, so that we can bear our burden with Him.
    In the times when you feel most alone, most abandoned, most bereft of human interaction, turn to Jesus in prayer.  Come to the church and spend time in front of the Blessed Sacrament.  Look to the crucifix, and lay all your trials on that cross.  If you do, life, victory, and wholeness will be yours in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

Is Heaven a Place on Earth?

Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

            In this month of November, when we remember the dead in a special way, our minds easily turn towards heaven.  We began the month by praying for All Saints: all those who are in heaven, not just the ones the Church knows about and has canonized, but even those who are known only to God.  As we write the names of our family members and friends who have died in the Book of the Dead, we pray and we hope that they are in heaven. 

            Secular music has thought about heaven a fair amount, too.  As I thought about songs with heaven in them, three came right to mind: Belinda Carlisle singing, “Oh, heaven is a place on earth”; Eric Clapton singing, “Would you know my name, if I saw you in heaven?”; and, a little more recently, Los Lonely Boys singing, “how far is heaven?”  You can probably think of more (but do it after Mass so you’re not distracted). 

            Heaven is our goal.  It is the hope we have.  I’ve never known a person who didn’t want to go to heaven.  It was the hope for the seven brothers and their mother as they were offered the choice to eat pork, that is, to break the Mosaic Law, or to die.  We get a few of their stories today, and their perseverance in the face of physical torture is inspiring.  Why do they remain faithful to God rather than make a small concession?  Because they believe that God will reward them for their fidelity.  We have countless martyrs, many from the last century in the Spanish Civil War, during World War II, and in from Communist countries, who died rather than deny their faith.  From the very beginning with St. Stephen, the first martyr, the hope of heaven has been what has consoled the multitude of men and women as they underwent excruciating pain for Jesus.

            Heaven is our hope amid the sighs, mournings, and weepings in this vale of tears, as we pray in the Hail, Holy Queen prayer.  And we intuitively want heaven to be worth the price of what we go through on earth: all the little sacrifices we make, all the big sacrifices we make.  We want to know that heaven is worth it.  In a way, we’re weighing the cost of discipleship against the cost of the world.  For this reason, it’s no surprise that when I visit our parish school classroom, or when I visit our parish high school, Lansing Catholic, I frequently get asked what heaven will be like.

            The students often want to know: will heaven have a TV?  If not, how can I be happy if I can’t make sure I’ve seen all the episodes of my favorite shows?  Will heaven have an X-box?  If not, how can I truly be happy if I’m not killing zombies?  Will heaven have my iPhone?  If not, how am I ever going to finish all the levels of Candy Crush?  Perhaps we adults like to think that we’re a little bit more sophisticated: will my favorite food and drink (maybe adult beverage) be there?  Will it be the perfect temperature?  Will the Lions finally win the Super Bowl?  Our view of heaven is very much based upon what we know, and that is what is earthly, and then making it a perfected earthly existence.

            But it strikes me that in our Gospel today, Jesus challenges the Sadducees, and us, to not get caught up in making heaven simply a better version of earth.  The Sadducees are trying to trap Jesus into making the resurrection seem silly if the Law of Moses is true, because all seven men will claim to be this woman’s husband in heaven.  But Jesus sidesteps the trap by teaching them that heaven is not simply earth perfected.  Heaven involves a change of mind, a change of attitude because it’s not happiness from our fallen point of view, but is happiness from God’s point of view.  God, who made us, and who knows what will make us perfectly happy, gives us true happiness, not just what our minds can conceive as true happiness.  Even our bodies, which we know we will receive back at the end of time in the resurrection of the body, are different, and we see that in Jesus.  It’s still His body; He still has the marks from the nails and the spear, but it’s different; it’s glorified.  And it’s different enough that Mary Magdalene at the tomb does not at first recognize Him; the disciples on the road to Emmaus don’t even recognize Him.  But it’s similar enough that the apostles in the Upper Room do know it’s Jesus. 

            What we know by Scripture and the teaching of the Church is that heaven is perfect happiness, and it involves the worship of God in a time of Sabbath rest.  It is being with God, who made us to be with Himself, and the fulfillment of what it means to be human.  Maybe some of our creature comforts will be there; maybe not.  Maybe the Lions will actually win a Super Bowl; maybe not.  But we do have faith and confidence that whatever heaven is like, we will be perfectly happy because we will be with God and lack for nothing that we truly need.  May we all be found worthy, by the way we live our lives, to accept that gift of eternal blessedness that God wants to give us, so we can experience for ourselves, with all the saints, canonized and known only to God, the joy of entering into the eternal rest of our Lord.