On Pilgrimage with our Lord

First Sunday of Lent

Mount of Temptations

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  One of my hopes during this Jubilee Year was to lead a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  There is nothing quite like traveling to the land which our Lord made holy through the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery.  I have been there three times before, but the sites help one go even more deeply into the Gospels by seeing the places where our salvation happened.  As we hear this Gospel for the first Sunday of Lent, I can see in my mind’s eye the Mount of Temptation, which stands near Jericho, the traditional place in the desert where Satan tempted our Lord.  Or, as we get closer to Holy Week, to walk the Way of the Cross through the streets of Jerusalem, or stand at Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and especially to see the empty tomb in that same church.  
    But most people, whether in the past or in the present, could or cannot physically travel to the Holy Land.  In the past it was expensive and dangerous.  Today the expense is more the issue than anything (the holy sites are generally very safe, even right now with the animosity and fighting between Israel and Hamas).  But St. Francis of Assisi developed the Stations of the Cross, originally just for Franciscan churches, to help people draw closer to the saving events of our Lord’s life from a local church.  And even beyond the Stations of the Cross, we are invited to, even if only spiritually, travel with our Lord in these forty days of Lent.
    During Lent we are meant to be on our own pilgrimage with the Lord for forty days.  We spend forty days in the desert, evoking the forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert between their exodus from slavery in Egypt to their entrance into the Promised Land, as well as the forty days our Lord spent in the desert after His baptism, leading up to His temptation by Satan.
    The desert of Lent is meant to test us, to see of what we are made, and to discover the areas in which we still need to grow.  If we think back to the Chosen People wandering in the desert, at first they were ecstatic about their freedom.  The Egyptians had given their riches to the Israelites, so the liberated slaves had precious materials for their new home to which they traveled.  But fairly early on, they started to regret leaving Egypt, even though they were slaves there, and wanted to go back because, even with as bad as it was, they were familiar and comfortable with the bad, which seemed better than the unfamiliarity with a future, unknown, good.  They cried to God for water and food, and even created a false god after Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai.  The Promised Land was their home, a land God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but a land they had left some four hundred years earlier, a land they had forgotten.  While the journey to Canaan was not an exceptionally long distance, because of their lack of faith, just as they were at the door of the Promised Land, they had to wander in the desert even longer than originally intended.
    Instead of lacking faith, our Lord’s forty days in the desert demonstrates what Lent is supposed to be: still difficult, still a test, but a test that we can pass because He did.  Our Lord hungered; our Lord thirsted.  But He did not doubt God’s care for Him, and He did not give in to the temptations of the devil.
    If we are honest, we are more like the Israelites than like our Lord.  Our baptism sets us free from Satan and sin, and God gives us the treasure of His grace, His life, to help us on our way home to heaven, our true Promised Land.  But along the way we doubt God.  We do not trust Him to provide all that we need.  We create false gods whom we feel will lead us better.  We forget that we are made for heaven and union with God, and in our selective amnesia, we make our path to God even longer and more difficult than it needs to be.
    So this Lent, our goal as we travel on pilgrimage with Christ is to be more like Him, and less like the Israelites.  As we fast and abstain, as our stomachs growl, we should remember that we do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.  As we pray, we do so not to put God to the test, but to bring the desires of our heart to God so that they can be purified and answered according to His will, not to our own insecurities and drive to be in charge.  As we give alms, we recognize that true power does not come from money and possessions, the false gods that we create, but from worshipping God alone and allowing Him to exult us.  
    While the desert is difficult, and tests us to trust more in God and less in ourselves, the desert is not forever.  God does not abandon us to wander around for eternity.  Christ has opened heaven by His Death and Resurrection, and wants us to end up there if we will follow His path through the desert.  The pilgrimage to heaven may be difficult at times, and we may want to turn back to what comforts we think that slavery to sin gives us, or look to other gods of our own making that we think we can control.  But if we follow Christ this Lent, and truly seek to allow Him to put to death in us anything which is not of Him, we will find the Promised Land where angels will minister to us as we worship in perfect happiness our true God: [Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen]

An Ordinary Epiphany

Second Sunday after Epiphany
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  If you were to ponder or ask which Gospels are the most radical, would this passage come to our mind?  I’m guessing not.  We might think of the cleansing of the temple; or maybe the denunciation of the Pharisees and scribes as a brood of vipers; or maybe even the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, or the raising of Lazarus from the dead; certainly the crucifixion.  But the miracle at the wedding at Cana? 
    There is something radical, or rooted, in this Gospel passage that we probably most often fail to see.  And it’s connected to Christmas and the Epiphany (the Epiphany, remember, historically celebrates the visit of the Magi, the Baptism of the Lord, and the wedding at Cana: the three manifestations of Christ).  At Christmas, the God of all creation, whom the heavens and the earth cannot contain, we saw in a tiny baby.  The God who created time allowed Himself to be subject to time.  God manifested Himself in a very ordinary way.

Church at Cana in Galilee

   And at the wedding at Cana, our Lord manifested Himself in a very ordinary way.  He helped out a couple who had run out of wine by changing water into wine.  You can imagine someone who didn’t know Christ sitting down to talk to Him, listening to the Gospel, and the circling back to say something like, “So you have the power to make blind people see?”  “Yes.”  “And you can heal leprosy?”  “Yes.”  “And you can multiple five loaves of bread and two fish so that it’s enough to feed five thousand people and have leftovers?”  “Yes.”  “And you can raise people from the dead?”  “Yes.”  “And you chose, as your first miracle, as the first thing you would do to show your divinity, that you would change water into wine?”  “Yes.” 
    That is pretty incredible.  With all that Christ could do, His first revealing action was to take care of a basic party foul.  He created light from nothing; He separated day from night; He separated land from the seas; He created vegetation, fish, and animals; He created man from the earth and woman from the side of man; He created the universe out of nothing.  And He changes water into wine.  That is incredible! 
    But our God so often works in the ordinary, in the mundane, in the unexceptional.  Look at Abraham.  Yes, he was fairly wealthy with all his flocks, but he and Sarah had no children (at least at first).  Yet God chose Abraham to become the father of many nations.  The Israelites were literal slaves, and yet God chose them as His People, peculiarly His own, as Deuteronomy says.  David was a shepherd, yet he was chosen to be king of God’s People.  The Blessed Virgin Mary, a young, unknown girl, but became the Mother of God.  Bethlehem, least of the cities of Judah, became the birth place of the Messiah.  The twelve apostles were generally uneducated or unappreciated men, yet became the foundation of the Church.  So if we really understood God, the miracle at Cana wouldn’t actually be that shocking.
    And it also shouldn’t shock us that God continues to operate this way.  God so often operates in the everyday realities.  He still so often chooses the least powerful to demonstrate His glory.  Yes, there are times, like Mount Tabor and the Resurrection, where His glory and His power shine forth.  But those were two times in His three-year public ministry.  The rest were among the poor, the outcast, and the simple.
    Do we have eyes to see how God is working in our life?  Or are we looking for the wrong thing?  Are we looking for a Mount Tabor when we should be looking for a blind man on whose eyes our Lord puts mud made from his saliva?  Are we looking for glory on a mountain when our Lord is walking next to us through a field?  If we only seek God in the grandiose moments, then we’re missing the ways that He manifests Himself in everyday life.  In the embrace of a loved one; in the smile of a baby; in the unexpected good news; in the delight of a good glass of wine. 
    When we notice God in the ordinary, we tend to live more grateful lives, conscious of how God is working, rather than wondering why God never does anything for us.  Even something as simple as living becomes a moment to give thanks, because without God willing each of us, individually, to be alive, we would cease to exist.  He who keeps our solar system aligned just so, also feels that it’s important that you exist.  So often we can think of God setting things in motion and then letting them go their way.  But perhaps a more accurate view is that, at each nanosecond, God is willing each and every thing, animate and inanimate, into existence out of the joy of having something that He created continue in being.  That certainly would help us live that gift of the spirit of wonder and awe in the presence of God.  I can barely chew gum and walk at the same time.  God at each moment wills every thing in existence and ensures the functioning of its properties according to His divine will.  And He does so out of love and with joy, not begrudgingly, as we so often do when we have a task at work to which we don’t look forward. 
    The miracle at the wedding of Cana manifests God.  We have an epiphany of the divinity of Christ.  And yet, we also have an epiphany of how God so often works: not only in the big moments of power and grandeur, but even the daily humdrum needs and desires of life.  Perhaps recognizing all that God does for us at each fraction of a moment can help us be obedient to the command of Mary, “Do whatever he tells you”: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Weaknesses

 Sexagesima Sunday
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Especially for guys, weakness is not a trait that is desired.  No one is impressed by the 98-pound-weakling.  We are impressed by muscle mass, by big biceps, and the ability to do great feats of strength.  And yet, St. Paul today relates to us a weakness of his.  He tells us about a thorn in his flesh that he asked the Lord three times to remove.  But God told him that His power was made manifest in weakness.

St. Paul

    Isn’t this the whole history of salvation?  When God chose a people, the Jews, He did not choose the strongest nation on earth, or the wisest, as God tells Moses in Deuteronomy.  God chose the weakest.  But, because of that, no one could argue that the success of the Jews was because of their own strength or cunning.  No, it was because the true God was their God and supported them.
    So, too, through the times of the Judges.  When the Israelites relied on God and turned back to Him and away from their foreign gods, God would give them victory over their enemies, even though their enemies were stronger than they.  Think of the Book of Judith.  God chooses a woman, who would have been considered a weak sex from a weak nation, to conquer the great Holofernes.  Or consider King David: he was not the son of Jesse even Samuel thought would be king.  And yet, this small, shepherd boy dispatches the great giant Goliath.  And during the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah, even though Sennacherib and the great Assyrian army was at his doorstep, after Sennacherib had destroyed the Kingdom of Israel, and mocked the soldiers in their own language, God grants the victory, as Isaiah the prophet had foretold, thanks to Hezekiah’s continuing trust in God.
    But, of course, the example of God choosing weakness par excellence is our Lord Himself, who came, not in the power that was and is His, but as a defenseless baby.  He conquered the dominion of the devil not by strength of arms and force, but by His weakness of taking upon Himself human flesh.  
    And the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, is no different.  The princes that Christ chooses to be the new leaders of His Church are generally uneducated men who do not have much to them.  If anyone could boast about being a theologian and a religious man it was Paul, who came to the Church after first persecuting it.  But none of the twelve was anyone to talk about when it came to being a natural leader or vision of spiritual strength.  Even Peter, the great rock chosen by Christ as our first pope, was, after being named pope, called Satan by our Lord and rebuked for his lack of trust in God’s plan of the crucifixion and death.  Weakness is how God works.
    And it is how God works in us.  The more that we trust in ourselves, the less God can work through us.  This is not to say that God lacks any power, but to say that God loves us, and so does not force Himself on us.  He could, but He doesn’t.  But, when we decrease, we allow the Lord to increase, as St. John the Baptist said.  
    So how do we decrease?  How to we remain weak so that the Lord may be strong in us?  One easy way is to consider how we make decisions, especially big ones, but even the daily decisions of life.  Do we trust in our own reasoning, our own intelligence, or do we take our decisions to God in prayer?  Asking God to guide our decisions means acknowledging that another is wiser than we, and may have a better plan.  When it comes to a job to take or leave, a path of business to pursue, the choice of a car, the decision of whether or not to try to have another child, how to educate our children, etc., we should place it first at the feet of our Lord, and ask for His guidance.  He may have some wisdom to impart to us, which may even seem counterintuitive sometimes.  St. Maximilian Kolbe is a beautiful example of relying on the Lord’s wisdom, rather than our own.  When founding a monastery in Japan, St. Maximilian decided to build his monastery on the opposite side of the mountain from that which seemed the best.  The name of the town outside which St. Maximilian built his monastery was Nagasaki, and because St. Maximilian had built it on the opposite side of the mountain, it was not destroyed by the atomic bomb that was dropped in 1945.  
    Sometimes, after placing the decision at God’s feet, God does allow us to use our reason to arrive at a prudent decision.  God sometimes gives us signs of how we are to proceed, but sometimes He trusts our judgements.  But He always loves being consulted so that we might know His will first.  We see this even in human relations, where we may think we know what is best, but we ask our spouse or our friend first to get their opinion.  Of course, God doesn’t deal in opinions, He deals in truth, but still it is good to have access to the source of truth when we make decisions that affect our present and future.  
    Paul was not afraid of his weakness, and neither should we be.  In fact, the Apostle recognized that, without God, he had nothing.  But with God, he had everything, even in the midst of his sufferings for spreading the Gospel.  So should we recognize that, without God, we are nothing; we have nothing.  And recognizing our poverty without God, we can cry out to God to give us what we need, and to supply for us in our weakness.  And we can have confidence that we will receive what we need from our Loving Father, who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.  Amen. 

New Life in God's Time

Fifth Sunday of Lent

Sometimes we have heard these stories in the Gospel so often, that we miss the parts that would have shocked the first listeners, or would shock anyone who is unfamiliar with the story.  The part that should have made us at least scratch our heads in today’s Gospel was, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.  So when he heard that he was ill, he remained for two days in the place where he was.”  If you really love someone, why wouldn’t you go immediately to see them, hopefully getting to them before they die?!?  It’s not like they had stellar hospitals at the time of Jesus who could keep someone alive for a few more days in order for friends or family to visit.

Two things are clear from Scripture: the Lord desires life for His people; and sometimes the Lord delays (from our point of view) in giving that new life to His people.  

Our first reading, second reading, and Gospel all make clear that God desires life for His people.  Ezekiel prophesies that God will open the graves of His people and have them rise.  He will put His spirit in them so that they may have life, and settle them in their land.  This will be the proof that God is the Lord.  And St. Paul reminds us that, while the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is alive.  If we have the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, the one who raised Jesus from death to new life, then God will also give our mortal bodies new life, through the power of the Holy Spirit.  And our Gospel is, we can say, the fulfillment of Ezekiel, as Jesus proves He is God by raising Lazarus from the dead.  God, in the Person of Jesus, opens the grave of Lazarus, one of the People of God, and has him rise.  

The raising of Lazarus
From the Church of Sts. Martha, Mary, & Lazarus in Bethany

But those same readings, if we delve more deeply in them, also give us a less exciting piece of news: God sometimes waits to give new life to His people.  The prophet Ezekiel is writing to a people totally devoid of hope.  Because of their infidelity to the Lord, He has exiled them to Babylon, destroyed their temple, and they don’t know if they will ever return.  They are the living dead, zombies, we might say, as they live but without the love of their life: their land and their temple.  But Ezekiel reminds them that they will go back, and, after some years, they do, and they, metaphorically speaking, rise from their graves by returning to the land of Israel.  But they had to wait.

As St. Paul talks about the Holy Spirit raising us to life, he speaks about it in the present, as the Spirit gives us a new way of life in Christ, putting to death the works of the flesh.  But St. Paul also talks about how the Holy Spirit will raise up our mortal bodies.  This only happens after death, and not simply when we die, but at the end of time.  What the Church calls the general resurrection of the dead, will only come at the end of time (except for Mary, whose body was already raised up by a singular grace).  We have to wait.  

And in our Gospel, that odd paradox of Jesus hearing about one of His best friends being ill, one Jesus knows will be dead (though He uses the term “asleep,”), but Jesus waits two days.  And when Jesus arrives, Lazarus has already been dead four days.  As it turns out, even if Jesus would have left immediately, Lazarus would still have died two days before Jesus arrived.  But Jesus waits, though not without cause.  In fact, Jesus waits in order to prove beyond a doubt that He is God, and to work His greatest miracle during His earthly ministry.

Those two points are certainly true for us.  Jesus desires new life for us.  I am convinced that God has good things planned for St. Pius X, and I am happy to be a part of them, and to hopefully shepherd you as we find new life in Flint.  But, at least in some ways (and in those ways it goes without saying), we’re not there yet.  In some ways, we’re still in our graves, still in the tomb.  That’s a tough place to be.  But we cannot give ourselves life.  New life can only come from Christ, and on Christ’s terms and schedule.

Think about the Israelites.  They were so excited to leave Egypt!  No more slavery, no more Pharaoh!  But as soon as the first difficulty comes, they want to go back to Egypt.  At the Red Sea, as the Egyptians get closer and closer, they cry that they want to go back, until Moses splits the Red Sea and they pass to safety.  In the desert, the people start to complain that they don’t have meat or bread; they lack trust that God will provide; they don’t like waiting for new life in the Promised Land.  So they tell Moses it was better in Egypt, and that they’d rather go back.  They prefer the grave to new life, because they’re not convinced the new life is on the way.

God desires new life for us.  Of that I am sure.  But we’re not there yet.  We’re still in the desert, on our way to the Promised Land, on our way to new life.  The Lord invites us to have faith in Him, as Martha did, that we will rise.  To quote Jesus, “‘Do you believe this?’”