Doing All Things Well

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  As a perfectionist, I would likely love to hear people say about me: “He has done all things well.”  Generally speaking, I think I try to do all things well.  
    Of course, as far as I know, I haven’t been able to make the deaf hear and the mute speak, which is why the crowds praised the Lord.  But did the Lord doing things well because of the physical miracle that He worked?  Or could we see something deeper in the reality that He did things well?
    At the end of the day, what the Lord did well entailed following God’s will.  Yes, this happened in the macro scale, of proclaiming the Gospel and going towards the offering of His life for our salvation.  St. Paul references this in the epistle as he gives the heart of the kerygma.  The Apostle reminds us that Christ died for our sins, was buried, rose on the third day, and then appeared to the Apostles and many disciples, and lastly to St. Paul himself.
    But it also happened in the day-to-day moments, like the one in the Gospel today with the healing.  The first thing to note is that Christ was not in Jewish territory.  He was in the Decapolis, which was pagan territory.  Yes, He was passing through, but the will of God led Him to foreign lands, not just Jewish territory.  And this pagan land the crowds brought Him the deaf and mute man, no doubt having heard about some of the wonders that Christ had done.
    Following God’s will also included being very earthy.  It wasn’t as if the Savior simply said, as He did other times, “I do will it,” and then heal the malady.  In accord with the will of God Christ puts His fingers into the man’s ears, spits, touches the man’s tongue, groans, and says “Ephpheta,” which means “be opened.”  If you had to go me putting my fingers in your ears, spitting, and touching your tongue for Extreme Unction, it probably would be even rarer than it is used today.  But that’s what God wanted our Lord to do (and, to be clear, I don’t do that for Extreme Unction).  Beyond the actual touch, it concerned the day-to-day aspects of life, not a sanitized ideal of life that doesn’t connect to the world in which we live.
    So for us, doing all things well means simply following God’s will, not just in the overarching themes of our lives, but in the day-to-day realities of our lives.  On the one hand, we should be seeking God’s will for our major decisions.  Does God want me to be a priest, a religious sister, or married?  Does God want me to study for this diocese or that, or should I join this religious order or the other one, or should I marry this person or that one?  How do I make a gift of my life to the Lord who has given me everything?
    On the other hand, God’s will often manifests itself in quotidian ways.  Does God want me to stay up late the night before Mass and spend that time with friends?  How will that affect my ability to pray and concentrate during Mass?  Which way do I take for my drive to work?  How do I greet the first co-worker I see?  When my child asks to play after I get home from work and am exhausted, can I give what little I have left, or would it be better to take a little break so that I don’t snap out of fatigue?  

    Those are all ways that we can open ourselves to God’s will and do things well.  And that’s the way we become a saint.  I think we can often feel like being a saint happen simply by choosing the right vocation, or by doing something great for God.  But what did St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, teach us?  What makes a difference is not so much doing great things, but doing little things with great love.  When we make even our small choices based upon a great love for doing what God wants, we do things well, and allow God to perfect us by His grace.  Certainly, we still need to make sure that we are seeking God’s will through prayer and counsel as we discern to what vocation God calls us.  But it can be so easy to write God off in those smaller moments of the day, and He wants to be involved in our life in those ways, too.
    So this week, think of ways that you can open yourself to the will of God.  Do you pray each day that God make His will clear to you?  When you pray the Our Father, perhaps really slow down at the phrase, “Thy will be done.”  We can, like Christ, do things well when we allow God to work through us, even when it doesn’t come naturally to us or we’re put in situations that seem a bit foreign.  May others see the grace of God at work in our lives, and observe that we have done all things well.  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.   

Fix You

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Songs have a way of touching us when mere words don’t suffice.  Sometimes they increase our joy; sometimes they commiserate with us in sorrow.  One such song for when a person feels down and out is “Fix You” by the band Coldplay.  Towards the beginning of the song the listener hears, “And the tears come streaming down your face / When you lose something you can’t replace / When you love someone, but it goes to waste / Could it be worse? //  Lights will guide you home / And ignite your bones / And I will try to fix you.”  Nothing like a mopey song to get your Sunday going, eh?
    But in all seriousness, our God did come to fix us.  We hear it in all our readings.  Jesus’ very name means “God saves.”  The word for savior in Greek is 𝜎𝜔𝜏𝜂𝜌, which, in ancient times, could also mean healer, in addition to savior.  Isaiah outlined ways that God would heal His people, and Mark shows the profound healing of a deaf and mute man.  Even St. James in his epistle demonstrates how that healing goes beyond just our physical realities, and includes the healing of our prejudices that can affect how we live the Gospel.
    But all of this presumes that we know we need healing and saving.  And to admit that we need healing and saving includes the admission that we are ill and lost.  And that can be hard to admit.  It seems much easier to live with the veneer that everything is going great, that we have everything under control.  We learn to live with our illness and brokenness, and think that our infirmity and disfunction are normal.  We put up walls and barriers to the grace of God, because in order to let that grace and healing in, we have to admit that we are not as we should be, and that might make us hurt as we acknowledge things that our mind prefers to ignore but our heart knows all too well.
    Acknowledging the salvation of God also means that we don’t treat Jesus as our preferential guru.  If we treat Jesus as simply the teacher who works best for us, while others have other teachers who help them be the best they can be, we miss the point of what Jesus taught and did.  Teachers or gurus teach a way of life, but they don’t save.  Only saviors teach a way of life, and heal, and save.  Moses cannot save; Buddha cannot save; Mohammed cannot save; Confucius cannot save.  Any teacher or guru that you name might help us in some ways, but they cannot bridge the chasm that sin created.  They cannot heal at the root the sickness that infects our hearts and souls.  Only Christ can do that.
    Admitting that we need a savior goes against what our culture wants to affirm.  In these days, we affirm however you feel you are, whether or not that is good for you, whether or not it leads you to excellence.  Society says I feel I love this person, so you have to accept my understanding of romantic love, even if it flies in the face of what God has revealed romantic love truly is.  Society says I may be morbidly obese due to bad died and lack of exercise, but you can’t tell me to lose weight because that would be shaming my body.  Society says I don’t feel comfortable in the body God gave me, so you have to refer to me in whatever way I choose, regardless of my biological sex, and you even have to provide me with procedures that either involve mutilation or hormone blocking drugs so that the way I feel can be affirmed.  All of these examples, and many more less significant ones, base themselves in a reality that I pretend I can mold to my own emotions, so that I don’t have to acknowledge the deep pain of brokenness in my life.  Because acknowledging that brokenness will make me feel sad or make me feel pain, and that’s the last thing I want to feel.  So I ignore it and try to live in a fantasy world where I live my own truth which fits standards which don’t call me higher and to a fuller form of life.

    Instead, Christ came to heal our brokenness, which might be painful at first, but brings true wholeness and holiness in the end.  Christ helps you to know that your sexual desires do not define you as a person, and can be properly ordered according to how He made the world.  Christ brings you healing from those unhealthy patterns of self-medication so that you don’t have to use food or laziness to feel better.  Christ comes to help you love yourself and how God made you, just as much as God loves you.  Christ wants to help you deal with whatever broken reality you are living now, to save you from your false realities, so that you’re prepared for the final judgement, where reality will not bend to your will, but will impose itself, whether you want it to or not.  
    Jesus did not come to make us feel better about our fallen selves.  Jesus came to heal what was broken in us; to save what was fallen in us.  Jesus did not come to help us usher in a world according to our own design, but to live in the world that He made, to start restoring us to a place even better than the Garden of Eden, where all creation lived in harmony with God and each other.  Let the Light of Christ guide you home.  Let the Holy Spirit ignite you with His love.  God has come to fix you.

Walking through Pagan Lands

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  By now we’re probably all aware of the debacle that was the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics.  I didn’t watch it (I’m honestly not that big of an Olympics fan).  And I’m sure there were some nice parts to it.  However, the story quickly became how the opening ceremonies mocked Christianity by mimicking da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” with drag queens, transitioning to a mostly-naked man depicting Dionysius, the pagan god of revelry and debauchery.

    Bishop Barron had some good commentary on the whole thing, including the so-called apology after the fact.  And bishops from across the United States and the world have condemned this unnecessary antagonism towards Christianity, some noting that no such thing would have every been done concerning Mohammed or the Buddha.  I’ll let those commentaries speak for themselves.
    What struck me is how we really do live in pagan times.  I’m sure I knew this subconsciously, but the opening ceremonies certainly cemented it in my mind.  None of us lived during the first few centuries of Catholicism, before the Emperor Constantine legalized it in the early fourth century, but I doubt it was much different from what we saw on our screens (there’s just an easier way to share the depravity now with television and social media).
    So what do we do?  How do we live our lives in a post-christendom age?  I would suggest our Gospel gives us a clue.  The pagan world is like the man who was deaf and mute.  It is a world that is alive, but is not as it is supposed to be.  It lacks the ability to live up to its fullest potential.  The Decapolis was a group of ten city-states not far from the Sea of Galilee that had some Jewish population, but was mostly pagan.  The Lord, though his primary mission was to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, walked through a thoroughly pagan territory (this is one example; the other famous is His journey where He encountered the Gerasene demoniac).  So Christ then, like us today, walked through pagan lands.
    What did Christ do?  He opened the deaf and mute man’s ears and loosened his tongue.  In this way, the man could then hear the Gospel and share it.  Now, at this point, I do have to address the admonition that Christ gave the man who He healed to tell no one.  Mark’s Gospel is full of these warnings not to speak about what the Redeemer had done.  Why?  Part of St. Mark’s point, I believe, is that the Lord wants belief through faith.  The miracles He works demonstrates who He is, but they cannot take the place of faith.  And so He wants to draw the people to true and abiding faith in Himself as the Son of God, not just amazement and the miracles.  
    But back to the man, who, in some sense, represents paganism.  He needs someone to open his ears and to allow him to speak.  And not just speak anything, but speak the truth.  Paganism, a rejection of the true God, struggles to hear what is true and speak what is true.  It has some truth (think of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, for example), but that truth is muddled in with so much error.  Only when Christ come can the truth that the pagan world recognized be purified so that it doesn’t lead others astray (think of the Christianization of Plato and Aristotle by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, respectively, for example).  
    So, our role, as little christs, little anointed ones, sealed with the Holy Spirit to proclaim the Gospel, is to go to paganism and open their ears to the truth so that their lips can proclaim the Gospels.  Our mission is to take the water of baptism and apply it to paganism as we cry out to God and say Ephpheta, that is, be opened.  This is done, not by force, but by the witness of a life lived in fidelity to what Christ has taught, and sharing the reason for our hope.  That is how the Christians of the first few centuries secretly and very successfully converted much of Roman society, which was itself marked by polarization between the rich and poor, the increased stretching of the Roman military apparatus across the known world, and the licentiousness of those who had power and money (sound familiar?).  
    The early Catholics were known for not discriminating between Jew and non-Jew (Gentile was the word used, also sometimes Greek).  They didn’t practice enslavement.  They didn’t consider women and children property, but equal sharers in the new life that Christ won by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  This is what St. Paul meant when he wrote to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  He wasn’t talking about gender identity or power struggles.  He was talking about how everyone was welcome to follow Christ, on Christ’s terms, and that the most important identity was that of a disciple.  In our invitations to others, we should have the same approach–invite everyone, regardless of race, religion, gender, socio-economic status, etc.–to follow Christ as He instructs us.
    Early Catholics drew people in by the way that they were happier because they didn’t worry about the power struggles, and the never-ending pursuit of riches.  An ancient Christian apologetic letter called The Epistle of Diognetus, showing how Catholics were not subversive but followed a higher law, wrote that Catholics “share their food by not their wives.”  They care for the poor, they exercise hospitality, but they do not share the perverse Roman sexual mores.  We, too, can live in such a way that we care for the poor, we show kindness to others, and exercise chastity and modesty in our relationships with others.  
    This was the way that pagan Rome became Christendom (albeit over centuries).  This was the way that the Church moved from being a bunch of small communities of maybe 30-50 people to metropolises of Catholic life and culture.  It worked then, and I believe it will work now.  We may not have the power we used to; we may not be able to keep public debauchery and indecency at bay anymore; but we can witness to Christ and the freedom and joy that come from living the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, live and reign for ever and ever.  Amen.

Entering the Paschal Mystery (Precept #1)

 Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Part of my hope is that, as you listen to the Scriptures being proclaimed over these weeks where I’m preaching on the Precepts of the Church, you’re trying to guess, as you hear the different readings, which precept I’m going to talk about, or how I’m going to talk about a precept based upon these readings.
    This week is precept number one: You shall attend Mass on Sundays and on holy days of obligation and rest from servile labor.  I especially want to focus on why the Church would tell us that we need to attend Mass.  

    What is the Mass?  We often think of the Mass as the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, presented for us in an unbloody manner (and that is certainly true).  But it is not only Good Friday that is made present for us each time the Mass is celebrated.  When we participate in the Mass, we are participating in the entire Paschal Mystery, that is to say, the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ.  And that is what St. Paul proclaimed in the epistle today: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; …he was buried; …he was raised on the third day…”. What St. Paul proclaims to us is precisely that in which we participate.
    Notice that it’s not simply a memorial, either.  I didn’t say that we remember the Paschal Mystery; we participate in it.  It’s not a bad thing to remember.  We have lots of memories that connect us to the past, whether our own, our families, or even the members of our Church.  But we do more than remember: we enter into the very mysteries that we also recall.  Sundays are our days as Christians because it is the day that our Lord rose from the dead.  So on those days we enter into all that proceeded the Resurrection (the Passion and Death), and the consummation of the Resurrection (the Ascension into heaven) as our primordial day of celebration, the day that we assemble as a community of faith to give thanks to God for what He did for us, saving us from sin and death and allowing us to be able to enter into heaven.  On the holy days, we honor other special parts of our Lord’s life, or parts of our Lady’s life, or All Saints.  
    And while we can remember the Paschal Mystery, or we can remember our Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, or All Saints from the comfort of our living room couch, or by a lake, or another outdoor setting, we cannot enter into that Paschal Mystery in any of those places without the Mass because the Mass connects us to an historical and eternal event, which is something we cannot do on our own, but must be gifted us from God.  Going to Mass is not so much that we go to God (though it’s important that we do), but that God comes to us and allows us to participate, even in a limited way, in His eternity, and in the eternal offering of our Lord to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.  That is why not even watching Mass on TV or on the Internet is the same as going to Mass (though it could be a good second option if we are sick or otherwise unable to attend Mass through no fault of our own).  
    In the Mass, we also have a chance to be healed in a way that doesn’t happen anywhere else.  In our Gospel, we heard about Christ healing the man who was deaf and mute.  Other than the Sacrament of Penance (which should be a regular part of our life as Catholics anyway), the Mass is the ordinary place where our venial sins are forgiven.  Our lack of hearing the Gospel (like deafness) or our failure to proclaim the Gospel by word and deed (like the speech impediment) can be forgiven and we can be restored to the fullness of the relationship that God wants for us.  When we receive the Eucharist, our venial sins are forgiven (as long as we don’t have any mortal sins), as the culmination of those times of asking for the Lord’s mercy.  At the very beginning of Mass, I, as well as the servers, who represent you, confess that we have sinned through our own fault, and ask God to be merciful to us sinners.  And throughout the Mass we continue to approach God, recognizing that we are sinners, even right before the reception of Holy Communion, we we acknowledged, “Domine, non sum dignus,” “Lord, I am not worthy…”. But God makes us worthy and unites us to Himself through the Eucharist.
    Again, this aspect of forgiveness is not something that we can receive sitting by ourselves, no matter how comfortable or how beautiful it may be.  Only when we come together, as God’s holy people, and receive the Bread of Life, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Son of God, do we have that level of access to the mercy of God.  Yes, God can forgive our sins outside of Mass, or even outside of the Sacrament of Penance.  But He certainly forgives our venial sins in the Mass, and all our sins in the Sacrament of Penance.  

    God wants His grace in us to be effective, and so He gives us a sure way that we can approach Him, be strengthened by Him, and enter into the very realities–the mysteries we call them–that save us.  What a beautiful gift to us, a gift that we should want to have access to each and every week.  But, for those times where we need a little extra encouragement, Holy Mother Church reminds us in the first precept, that we are to attend Mass each Sunday and holy day, so that we can participate in the Paschal Mystery, and be healed from our deafness and muted voice.  May God help us always to hear His voice, and proclaim what God has done for us: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Gollum

 Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gollum (aka Smeagol)

    Many of you know how much I love the “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy.  And in the Trilogy there is an intriguing character named Gollum (also called Smeagol).  When he was younger he went by the name Smeagol, and he was one of the river folk, not unlike a hobbit.  But then he killed his brother, who had found the Ring of Power (an evil talisman), and then was banished to live on his own.  During this exile, he used the name Gollum, reflecting his change from a good-hearted lad to a man closed in on his desire for the Ring.  Eventually Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, takes the ring from him, which he later gives to his nephew, Frodo.  Gollum, still closed in on his desire for the Ring, which he treasures above all things, seeks out Frodo to take the Ring back.
    J.R.R. Tolkien, the author, was a man throughly surrounded by his Catholic faith.  And so you see signs of the Catholicism throughout his work, and the screen adaptations that followed much later.  The Ring, as something evil, can be seen as a cross, as Frodo, who is one Christ-figure, carries it to Mount Doom.  Gollum can easily be understood as what happens when one closes oneself in on evil desires and on oneself.  
    I bring this up because in our Gospel today, Jesus cures a deaf man with a speech impediment.  Imagine being deaf and mute during the time of Jesus: it was a life in many ways, closed in on oneself, not because of sin, but because of the lack of ability to communicate in any great way with the outside world.  Indeed, it is the man’s friends who bring him to Jesus.  And Jesus, to heal him, says to the man, “‘Be opened!’”  Jesus opens this man up to new life, especially physically, as his ears are opened and his speech impediment removed, but even interiorly, to the life of grace.  
    God wants us to be open to His grace and His life which He desires would flow through us like a spring of water.  The life of grace irrigates the desert of life that is ours when we are closed in on ourselves and our desire for sin.  Grace makes us more alive, and allows us to interact with the world in new and spectacular ways.
    Tolkien depicts this in the person of Gollum.  As Gollum tries to steal the Ring, Frodo catches him, and slowly wins Gollum’s trust, even calling him by his old name, Smeagol.  As this happens, Smeagol is re-created, and becomes not a wretched, hacking despicable creature, but a joyful, fun, and even serving individual.  Even Frodo’s choice of a new name, really the original name, is a return to Smeagol’s original youth and innocence, before he was corrupted by the evil Ring and turned in on himself.  Frodo, again, a Christ-figure, is the one who frees Smeagol from his past darkness and restores him to the light.
    Sin turns us toward ourselves and away from God.  While we have a specific sin of selfishness, every sin is selfish.  Love is selfless, and so as we serve God we become less concerned about ourselves and more concerned about others.  Sin, which is opposed to God, is therefore opposed to love of others and cares only for the self, which makes one a shadow of how God created us, and exiles us from God, from others, and even from our true self.  Think about any sin, and you can see the effects of selfishness in it.  Greed is fairly obvious, and we care more for money than God; pride is where we care more for ourselves than for God and others; hatred is where we are more concerned with our injuries caused by others and getting back at them (thus, making us feel good because we got our revenge), rather than being concerned about forgiving the others; lust seeks to use the other person for our own sexual desires and pleasure, whether that person physically close to us or on a screen.  Even smaller sins like gossip are about making sure that we are in control of a narrative, or even that we attempt to make ourselves look better by putting others down.  In all those sins and more, we are closed in on ourselves rather than being open, first and foremost to God, and then also to the people He loves, our fellow human beings.
    Jesus wants to open us up.  He desires a fuller life for us than we can provide when we only concentrate on ourselves.  But the choice to accept God’s grace to open rests with us.  God’s grace always does the first and most important work, but our response is also part of the process.  We have to come to God, or our friends need to bring us to Him.  
    But Smeagol also serves as a good warning, that this process of being opened to God is not a once-for-all event; the choice to allow God to open us is a choice we need to make every day.  Smeagol, who later (wrongly) feels betrayed by Frodo, reverts to his old self.  He turns back in on himself and on his desire for the evil Ring consumes him again, eventually leading to his demise.  So for us, each day we have the choice to open ourselves to God or not; to be a desert and burning sands, or a stream and spring of water.  Ephphatha!  Be opened!

How God Heals Us

 Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Catholicism is a sense-experience religion.  When you come to Mass you can see beauty, especially in this church.  You hear different prayers throughout the Mass.  You smell the incense burning in the thurible.  You taste the Eucharist on your tongue.  You sit, stand, and kneel at different parts of the Mass.  Ours is not a quietist religion where you simply sit and think of God.  Worship of God and the practice of the faith in our day-to-day life involves the entire person, body and soul.

    We involve the body and soul because that’s what our Savior did.  We heard it in the Gospel today: there was a man who was deaf and mute.  Jesus takes him aside, and rather than simply willing the healing, He puts His fingers into his ears, spits, and touches the man’s tongue.  He then groans, looks up to heaven, and says, “Ephphatha!  Be opened!”  I don’t know what exactly the deaf and mute man was expecting, but I’m not sure that I would have expected that!
    It’s important to see that our Lord comes to heal.  One of the early Greek titles of our Lord was 𝛴𝜔𝜏𝜂𝜌, which means “savior,” but also has a context of healing.  We tend to think of salvation in merely spiritual terms, saving our souls, but Christ knows that we are a union of soul and body, and so healing one has an impact on the other.  How many people in the Gospels came to Christ with a physical malady, but ended up healed in body and soul, with their sins forgiven as well as their illness healed?
    That ministry of healing did not end when our Lord ascended into heaven.  He continues to heal us.  Again, we tend to think of the healing that our souls need, but sometimes our bodies need healing, and the Lord does that as well.  One of my classmates, Fr. Mathias Thelen, has a charism of healing, which, as he always says, is God healing through him.  There are a great number of people whom God has cured, healed of infirmities, or eased the pain.  We also require these types of miracles through the intercession of one who has a cause of sainthood.  And those stories not only involve healing the body of that person, but also bolster our faith in how God works in our everyday world.
    But it’s good not to put God in a box, and put limits on how He can heal us.  At least from time to time, God heals us in an unexpected way, or maybe even a way with which we’re not that comfortable.  Again, think about the man in the Gospel.  Imagine yourself being taken aside by our Lord, and you have a confidence that He is going to heal you.  You’re looking forward to being able to hear and speak.  You will not longer be stuck mostly in your head.  And then you see Jesus take his fingers, and put them into your ears.  Okay…a little awkward, but maybe some touching of the ears was expected to cure the deafness.  But then, He spits and touches your tongue!  Now we’ve gone into the realm of the unexpected.  I can’t remember a time where I let someone touch my tongue, though, granted, I’m not mute.  Still, I think it’s at least plausible that this healing was not in the manner that the man expected.  But the man was healed, and was so grateful that he couldn’t keep his mouth shut (it had been, after all, shut for so long before that!).  
    How is the Lord trying to heal you?  Sometimes it can come in unexpected ways.  Maybe we’re not having people put fingers in ears, spitting, and touching our tongues.  But are we open to how God wants to heal and save us?  Our eternal salvation was won in a very unexpected way: by the death of our Lord on the cross.  It was so unexpected, almost none of His followers bothered to be with Him in His last hours.  And the disciples are doubly astounded when He shows up alive, after they knew He had been crucified.  
    But our healing that comes to us in our everyday life from God can also be unexpected.  Some couples take a little while to find their spouse, and it can often come after serious heartbreak.  But that heartbreak with the wrong person sometimes leads to the right person, the spouse God wants for you.  To use sports as an analogy, sometimes you have to go through serious pain to become a better athlete.  Sometimes a parent needs to discipline a child, perhaps even with a spanking, to help the child understand what not to do (which will help the child be a better person and disciple).  Sometimes a friend needs to speak a harsh word, or take drastic actions, in order to truly help the friend move on from a bad habit.  
    Those are all negative, but healing can happen in positive unexpected ways, too.  No matter how we experience the unexpected, it can often be in those ways that our Lord heals us and helps us to grow.  God continued to help His Church grow through St. Paul, who had previously persecuted the Church of God, hence St. Paul’s acknowledgement that he is the least of the Apostles.  But God’s grace, which took a persecutor and turned him into a martyr, did the work; it was not in vain.  
    Do not be afraid to ask for healing from God.  Have faith that God can heal whatever ails you, whether it’s physical or spiritual malady.  Healing may not come how you expect it, or maybe not even when you expect it, but it will come, as a gift of God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Be Opened!

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Imagine never hearing your favorite song again; never hearing the sound of your spouse or your children or loved ones say: I love you.  The sense of hearing is so important in our everyday life, and most of us probably take it for granted.

It is hard to imagine what life would be like being deaf.  A person’s world would be totally different.  We can imagine the shock, then, of the man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, after Jesus healed him.  That man’s life was totally different from that point on!  It’s no wonder that the people who were there responded with astonishment.  Perhaps they realized that Jesus was fulfilling the prophecy from Isaiah that we heard in our first reading: “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared; then will the lame leap like a stag, then the tongue of the mute will sing.”  Perhaps they were wondering to themselves if Jesus could be the Messiah.

The way that Jesus healed the man was interesting, too.  Mark writes, “[Jesus] put his finger into the man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue; then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him, ‘Ephphatha!’–that is, ‘Be opened!’”  In our American culture that doesn’t like touching too much, that may sound very uncomfortable!

The Church retains a ritual with a similar name in the Baptismal Rite for children.  After baptizing the child, anointing her with the Sacred Chrism, clothing her with the white garment, and giving the godparents and parents the baptismal candle lit from the Paschal Candle, the priest or deacon “touches the ears and mouth of the child with his thumb, saying: The Lord Jesus made the deaf hear and the dumb speak.  May he soon touch your ears to receive his word, and your mouth to proclaim his faith, to the praise and glory of God the Father.”  The Church continues to open ears and mouths when people are baptized, but not just of children who are deaf or who cannot speak.  She allows this rite for all children.  Why?

Holy Mother Church is very realistic.  She knows that we need ritual symbols to remind us about who we are called to be, and what we are called to do.  By our baptism, we are called to open our ears and speak, not just to hear sounds and speak words, but to listen for Christ and to speak His Word.  Let’s be honest, there are times where we would rather be deaf to God and not talk about Him.  We need Jesus to open our ears and mouth.

Do we hear Jesus speaking authoritatively through the Church?  Do we treat the Church when She speaks about faith and morals as just one more opinion, or do we treat it as God continuing to communicate in the world, even when it goes against what we think is best or right?  Do we hear the cry of the poor, or have we closed our ears to them because we cannot be bothered with their struggles?  Do we hear people screaming for the love and truth of Christ, or do we just figure that they can find their own way to God?

Do we speak about Jesus?  This past week I was feeling a little lazy, so I decided to go to Hooligans for dinner.  I was one of three people in the restaurant at the time.  The waiter recognized me as a priest (I was in my clerical attire), and mentioned how he tries to go to church every Sunday, but he certainly prays every day.  I felt a tugging to say something about why Sunday is important, but decided just to be quiet.  He served me my meal, and did a very good job.  At the end of the meal, as I was signing the receipt, I couldn’t help, pushed as I was by the Spirit, to say, “Do you know why Sundays are important to Christians?”  He told me it was about fellowship.  But I pressed him even further and said, “Yes, but why Sundays?”  He said he didn’t know, and that started a conversation about how Sunday is the day of the Resurrection, which sets us apart as Christians, and which is a reason to rejoice because of the new life we are offered in Christ.  From there I found out that he is a fallen away Catholic, and we talked about his issues with Catholicism.  I don’t know if he’ll come back to the Church, though I did invite him.  But I know I was docile enough (after a bit of prodding) to the Holy Spirit to talk to Him about Jesus and His Church.  That’s nothing to brag about; that’s my vocation, and I’m more embarrassed that it took me so long than I am proud that I did it.  But Christ encountered one of His sheep through me, and maybe that sheep will return to the Catholic fold.  He might have through someone else, but maybe not.  Maybe I was the only one who could've talked to him in the way I did.  Maybe you’re that person with someone else.  

Christ tells us today: “‘Ephphata!’”–that is, “‘Be opened!’”  “May he soon touch your ears to receive his word, and your mouth to proclaim his faith, to the praise and glory of God the Father.”  Amen.

You Can't Cheat God

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sometimes it is made very clear to me what I should preach.  This past Monday, when I looked over the readings, I was immediately drawn to the Gospel where Jesus talks about how the practice of washing hands is not about what happens outside the person, but what happens inside the person.  It struck me that the Pharisees went through the ritual motions of religious life, without letting those actions take root in their soul.  As Jesus says, it is not what is outside the makes one unclean (that is, unfit for worship in the Temple) but what comes from the heart: all our passions that we give in to.

But, as I sat down to write my homily out on Thursday, I found myself drawn to a similar topic, but going in a different direction (how symbols are supposed to be sensible things that communicate an invisible reality).  I had my hook.  I was going to talk about how we misunderstand words, like when English speakers make the mistake of thinking that the word for embarrassed in Spanish, embarazado is a cognate–a similar sounding word–when it really means pregnant, leading to numerous embarrassing moments when a man says, Yo soy embarazado.  I had my main point, how symbols are meant to communicate the invisible through what we can receive through our senses, and how what we do in religious symbols should reflect what is truly going on inside our hearts and souls.  And I managed to talk about all of this and expand on the main topic in the usual Fr. Anthony homily duration (I’ve been told I preach a bit longer than our deacons).

But then Friday I stopped by the Adrian Police Department.  Some of you know that I have been doing ride-alongs with the Police and I have offered to provide any help to the officers that I can.  I went to talk to Clay, who often works the front desk.  I stopped by at about 4:10, and he wasn’t there, but when I asked I was told he was just getting ready to leave.  I waited a little, and then Clay came out and we had a nice little talk.  In the midst of that talk, he said that he didn’t understand two things about Catholics (he’s not Catholic, but is Christian).  The first difficulty we spoke about were the saints and praying to them.  That might be a homily for a different day.

The second thing we talked about took me back to what I first thought I was going to preach on, and caused me to totally rewrite my homily on Saturday morning, between altar server training and confessions.  He asked me about the experience he’s had of Catholics who say they can do whatever sinful thing they want Monday through Friday, then they go to confession on Saturday and Mass on Sunday with a clean slate, and then get back to serious sinning on the weekdays; rinse and repeat.  Clay said that it makes no sense.

Clay is right.  And I explained to him that we can’t cheat God.  Yes, we have the Sacrament of Penance to cleanse us of sin, the Sacrament established by Jesus in Matthew 16 and John 20 when He gave the Apostles the authority to forgive sins.  But I also told Clay that the Church teaches that, for the Sacrament of Penance to be valid, the penitent (the confessee, as it were), has to be truly sorry for his sins and has to make a firm amendment to not commit those sins in the future.  Certainly we sometimes fall into the same sins week after week that we don’t want to.  But if we’re not truly sorry for what we did Monday through Friday, and we fully plan on doing the same thing again the next Monday through Friday, then our sins are not forgiven.  We can’t cheat God. 

And that’s precisely what our Gospel is about.  Jesus did not condemn ritual purification and ritual actions.  But He taught us that the ritual is meant to have an effect in our lives, not to be a meaningless gesture.  Washing hands without washing souls means little in our relationship with God.  And sometimes doing the rituals without the meaning behind it becomes a scandal, an obstacle to other people believing in the Catholic faith.  I’m sure Clay is not the only Christian who thinks that the way some Catholics treat the Sacrament of Penance betrays the fact that these Catholics think that the Sacraments are magic.  They’re not magic.  They are meant to convert us, to change us, to become more like God.  If we’re not open to having God change us, God will not force His grace–His life, His love, His peace–on us.  We can go through the motions, but we won’t receive the effects that those actions are meant to have in our souls. 

Jesus gave us the Good News to help us draw closer to God.  The Good News He teaches us today is that while we can struggle with the same sins each week and be truly sorry, if we are trying to treat the religious rituals like a get out of Hell free card, we’re in for a not-so-pleasant surprise.  This is Good News because it gives us a chance to truly have a change of heart, a metanoia, a conversion, and ask God to purify us from the things that really make us unfit for the Temple.  God wants to truly cleanse us of those things and wash, not our hands, but our hearts.  Will we allow God to wash our souls with His cleansing grace?

Human Freedom by Bishop Boyea

        Moses is pretty clear with the people about what they are to do--they are to observe all the commands which he will give them from God; he adds “you shall not add to what I command you nor subtract from it.  Observe them carefully.”  This is exactly what the Pharisees were doing in the gospel reading from St. Mark.  They were observing the commandments of the Lord very carefully and thus they asked Jesus why his own disciples did not wash their hands before eating, something required in the law.  

Jesus then teaches a new form of morality.  It is not the following of a set of rules and regulations, but rather it is conversion of heart.  What comes out of a person is what constitutes goodness or impurity.  Jesus notes that evil comes not from washing or not washing the hands, but from an evil heart.  Jesus is telling us that what really matters is what is within us.

In essence then, Jesus is appealing to our human freedom.  Because we are free we are responsible for our actions.  We are responsible to shape our lives so that they attain truth and goodness, that is, so that they attain God.  The trouble is, as Jesus was well aware, all too often we do not choose to do the good, but rather we choose to do evil.  That was certainly the case with our first parents, Adam and Eve, but it is also true of each of us.  We are, in a sense, slaves to sinfulness because we keep choosing sinfulness.  

Because we are free, it is clear that we are responsible for this condition.  We need more training in how to choose good rather than sinfulness.  Our actions are good when two conditions are met: the thing we choose to do itself must be good; and, secondly, our intention or reason for doing it must also be good.  Thus something is not good unless both these conditions are met.  If we do the wrong thing (and somethings are wrong in themselves) for the right reason it is still the wrong thing to do (thus the end never justifies the means); if we do the right thing for the wrong reason it is not a good action we are performing, there may actually be a good which results, but that goodness is not credited to us since we have done it for a bad reason.

Jesus also wants us trained to do good, to be good and thus offers us a way out of our choosing sinfulness.  He offers us the true freedom to choose to be God’s children rather than the false freedom to choose to stay in sin.  It is when our hearts rest in Jesus that we are most open to his grace and the true exercise of our freedom.

This openness on our part is what is called our conscience.  This is not just some intellectual thing, for it is also something of the heart.  In our heart can be found our passions or our feelings.  These can help us to do the good.  If we have the most fundamental passion, love, then we are drawn to the good and we take joy in the presence of the good and then we do the good. This same feeling of love will mean that we hate evil and seek to avoid it and we feel sad in the presence of evil.  In a sense we learn to hate what God hates—sin.  Thus what fills our heart will have a direct bearing on what we decide to do, how we exercise our freedom, and thus these passions are part of our conscience.

But conscience is also an act of judgment; it is when we spend enough time to recognize with our intelligence that something is good.  We need to take time to look into ourselves in order to hear this voice.  This voice helps us to see the truth and to apply that truth in specific circumstances.  It is what allows us to be responsible for our behavior.  In order for this reasoning part of our conscience to work correctly it needs to be formed, to be instructed.  This takes a lifetime.  The Gospel and Christ’s cross must be our teachers from our earliest days.  We are helped in this when our passions or our feelings push us in the right direction; we are also helped by the light of the Holy Spirit; and we are helped by the guidance of the Church.  Sometimes our conscience is faced with difficult choices; then we need the help of all three of these.

So, if we, my sisters and brothers, are to follow a moral life as Jesus wishes us to, not merely by following a list of laws, then we must have a change of heart.  We need to do two things: we need to open our feelings or our passions to the Lord so that he can fill us with his divine love; secondly, we need to educate our decision making process so that we will choose the good at all times, even in difficult circumstances.  Jesus listed a lot of evils that come from within us; if he looks deep inside me, what does he see?  A well of love which will lead to good, or an abyss of confusion which will lead to evil?

GOD BLESS YOU ALL

Catechism, #1730-1802

The Divine Physician

Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

            The Word of God is often challenging.  It calls us to deeper conversion as we turn our lives away from sin and towards Jesus, trying to live our life in conformity with the love that Jesus showed us by what we say and do.  As a spiritual father, it is not uncommon for me to have to deliver a tough message, a message which calls us to rethink the way we’re living, to re-examine our priorities, and to change our habits of sin to habits of grace and virtue.  Just like a biological father or mother who must, from time to time, correct children to ensure that they will succeed in the world, not only as citizens of earth but also as citizens of the New Jerusalem in heaven, sometimes I have to correct the sheep of the Lord’s flock.  But today is not one of those days. 

            Today, the message the Lord speaks to us is one of His healing love.  Both in our Gospel and in our first reading, we hear about the tender love of our God which wants to heal us.  The Lord says to us today, as He spoke through Isaiah then, “Be strong, fear not!  Here is your God…he comes to save you.”  We hear that he will open the eyes of the blind, and clear the ears of the deaf.  He will make the lame leap like stags, and loose the tongues of the mute.  He will turn the desert into a watered garden.  And in our Gospel, Jesus fulfills that prophecy by healing the man who was deaf and had a speech impediment.  Jesus, as the very revelation of God the Father, makes present for us the healing love that God has for His people.

So, the question is, will we accept that healing touch of God?  Will we welcome the Divine Physician into our hearts to cure us from what ails us?  To those of you who have frightened hearts: of what are you afraid?  What causes you anxiety?  Whatever it is, open your hearts up to the Lord, and hear Him say to you as He said to the frightened disciples in the boat as the waves were crashing about it, and as He said to St. Peter as He bade Peter walk across the water, “Be not afraid!”  Those were the words that opened the pontificate of Bl. John Paul II in 1978, and we still need to hear those words: “Be not afraid!”  Because, as St. Paul says, “If God is for who, who can be against us?”  The waves of the world may crash all around us, but Jesus is in our boat, and He who separated the dry land from the water at the creation of the world will not let us capsize in the waters of chaos. 

Where do we not see the Lord?  Where do we think that He is absent from our lives?  Cry out like the blind man in Jericho, “‘Lord, that I may see!’”  Feel the warm, callused, but tender hand of our Lord over your eyes so that you may recognize Him: in the poor, the downtrodden, the infant in the womb, the elderly, the homebound, even in your enemy.  Let the Lord bring the light of the Gospel truth to the darkness of sin which blinds us to the presence of God in the world.

Where do we not hear the Lord?  Are we familiar with how the Lord speaks to us?  Sometimes it is in great moments when the Lord appeared to Moses on Mt. Sinai.  Other times, like with Elijah, it is in the whisper of a soft voice inside our hearts.  Ask the Lord to touch your ears and say, “‘Ephaphtha!’—that is, ‘Be opened!’” so that when you sit in silence, you will hear the clear Word of God in your heart and recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd speaking to you, leading you to green pastures. 

How are our mouths bound so that we do not speak?  How do we mumble the Word of God in our words and our deeds?  Ask the Lord to open you lips so that you proclaim His wonderful works in all that you say and do.  Ask Him to cleanse your speech so that when people hear you speaking, they are truly listening to the voice of God.  Ask Him to allow you to proclaim from the mountaintops that our God has come to save us, and the day of our vindication is at hand! 

But know this, if we do not ask; if we leave this building and act as if nothing has changed, then we will not be healed.  Not because the Lord does not love us, but because God, who did not ask to create us, will not heal and save us without our permission.  God loves us and respects our free will so much, that He will not force us to take His medicine, even if we will die without it.  We must recognize that we need the Lord’s help (which is itself a gift from God) and then ask Him to heal our infirmities, whatever they are, whether of body and/or soul, and He will come to us quicker than any ambulance ever could. 

Brothers and sisters, the Lord’s love for us will renew our youth and irrigate those parts of us that are as dry as deserts so that they are a luscious garden, full of life.  Our Lord comes to heal us so that we may not labor under the sickness of sin, but may have the fullness of life through the power of the Holy Spirit.  “Be strong, fear not!  Here is your God, he comes with vindication; with divine recompense he comes to save you.”  “He has done all things well.”

Doers of the Word

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

            I’m sure this has never happened with anyone here, but imagine a scenario where a parent tells a child to do something while that child is doing something else like watching TV, or playing video games, reading, or texting.  Then imagine that, lo and behold, that child does not, in fact, do what the parent tells the child to do (I know, this must be shocking for you that this actually happens in some families).  The usual response from the parent would be some variation of, “Why didn’t you listen to me?”

            St. James tells us in the second reading, that we are to be “doers of the word and not hearers only.”  We have been blessed with the greatest message of all time.  It started in the Old Testament, with the message that God had chosen a people, and had cared for them and brought them to a land.  And, even after they were enslaved, God freed them and returned them to that land flowing with milk and honey.  He game them laws so that they might be just and upright, and know the good to do and the evil to avoid.  This is what Moses is talking about in the first reading.

            And even “when through disobedience [humanity] had lost [God’s] friendship, He did not abandon [us] to the domain of death…Time and again [God] offered them covenants and through the prophets taught [us] to look forward to salvation.”  And then, “in the fullness of time [God] sent [His] Only Begotten Son to be our Savior.  Made incarnate by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, he shared our human nature in all things but sin…To accomplish [God’s] plan, [Jesus] gave himself up to death, and, rising from the dead, he destroyed death and restored life.”  And the Church was formed, the New Israel, who was called to proclaim this Good News of the death and resurrection of Jesus, which saves us from our sins.  And, in response to this love first shown to us in God, the members of the Body of Christ are to configure themselves to Jesus, by the guidance of the teaching of the Apostles and their successors who continue the teaching of Jesus in new times and new circumstances.

            That is the Good News that we received.  That is the Good News that we are to proclaim.  But are we just hearers of the Word?  Does what Jesus said apply to us, too: “‘Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written: This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;’”?    Week after week we hear the Word of God and we receive the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, our Savior.  But does it change us?  Has the Gospel penetrated our hearts?  In the movie “Godfather III,” the cardinal who hears Michael Corleone’s confession pulls a small rock out from a fountain of water.  It is wet, of course, on the outside.  But he breaks the rock in two, and the inside is dry.  He says that the people are like the rock in the fountain.  They have been surrounded by the water of Christianity for centuries, but Christ, like the water, has not penetrated them.  How many of us are surrounded by Christianity, but Christ has no penetrated us because we are hearers of the word only, and not doers?

            St. James tells us that if we are hearers only, and not doers, then we are deluding ourselves.  If we think that being surrounded by Christianity is enough, then we have truly not heard Jesus, just as the child did not truly hear its parent.  At our baptism, a solemn promise was made for us, if we were infants, or we made it for ourselves, if we were adults: that we would reject sin and Satan, that we would believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and that we would raise the child in the faith, and practice it ourselves.  This is the same promise that these families will make today for their children.  We promised to be doers of the word.  God, for His part, promised to assist us in that promise with sacramental grace which would strengthen us to do what we cannot without His help.  Have we lived up to these promises?  Have we, in the ways we are able, changed the world to better reflect the Gospel?  Or have we tried to let the culture change the Gospel to better reflect our world?  Have we been the salt of the earth, preserving our corner of the world in holiness of life, of have we lost our flavor? 

            For months we have been hearing from politicians how they have the right policies that will bring America prosperity.  We will hear how they will do x, y, and z to protect the poor, defend life from natural conception to natural death, to turn the economy around, etc.  And politics certainly has a legitimate role to play in implementing the Gospel.  But, before that can be effective, we ourselves must be converted.  We must be doers of the word, and not hearers only.  Because if we are truly doers of the word then we ourselves will guard against greed and consumerism and will hold others to that as well.  If we are doers of the word then we will assist the poor, truly helping them to use the gifts God has given them for their benefit and the benefit of society.  If we are doers of the word then we will stand up for the rights of the defenseless infant in the womb from the moment of conception and the elderly who are sick, both of whom can easily be exploited because they are the weakest members of our society.  If we are doers of the word then we will stand up for religious freedom so that we can truly practice our faith in peace, and not be compelled to do anything which is against the teaching of Christ and His Church.  “Dearest brothers and sisters:…Be doers of the world and not hearers only.”