Properly Dressed

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  One of my first funerals as a priest was for a man named Marshall Reid, who was the founder and co-owner of the men’s clothing store, Holden-Reid.  As I often do in my homilies, I try to relate something spiritual to something common, which in this case talking about the phrase, “clothes make the man.”  As the funeral liturgy so often draws us back to baptism, I was able to talk about the baptismal garment and how baptism makes us who we are.
    Today in the Gospel we hear about a man who came to a wedding but without the proper clothes.  The servants cast him out from the wedding, to which all were invited, because the man didn’t come prepared for a wedding with proper vesture.  The master welcomes all to his banquet, and yet there are still expectations.  It reminds me of what the late-Francis Cardinal George said about the horrible hymn, “All Are Welcome,”: all are welcome, but on Christ’s terms, not their own.
    At each Mass we come to the wedding banquet of the Lamb, to use terminology from the Book of Revelation.  The Mass is a sacrifice, first and foremost, but is also a meal that celebrates the full union and reconciliation of God and man.  But we have to wear the proper clothes.

    I’ll begin with me.  You’ll notice I don’t wear street clothes to celebrate Mass.  I don’t even wear an academic robe to show that I have the qualifications to preach.  In addition to my priestly cassock, I put on all sorts of vestments, each with a different meaning: the amice, the helmet of salvation; the alb, a reminder of our white baptismal garment; the maniple, a reminder of the labor in the mission field of the world; the stole, the sign of my authority as a priest; and the chasuble, which represents love, a love that covers all other vestments.  Some churches, not our Latin church, but others even give those who serve in the sanctuary special shoes, so that they are entirely covered with symbolic vestments to make clear that Christ is present, not just the minister.
    What should you wear?  Our severs also have special vestments–a cassock and surplice–which remind us of poverty (the black cassock) and the baptismal gown (the surplice).  But what about the laity in the pews?  I think we owe God our best, or at least better than what we give our daily life.  I think less of a specific dress code, and more of an external way to show that we are giving God more than we give our work or our recreation.  And that varies for every person.  For the poor person it may mean simply trying to have clean clothes for Sunday Mass.  For a college student it may mean jeans or slacks, rather than sweatpants, shorts, or pajama pants, and a nicer shirt our blouse.  For others it may mean a button up shirt and tie, along with dress pants.  For others it may mean a full suit.  But I think the point is that God wants, and deserves from us, that we would give Him our first fruits, our best, not just our leftovers.
    But Christ also reminds us that the externals have to match the internals, otherwise we’re just like the hypocritical pharisees who washed in the outside of their cup but were filled with filth on the inside.  God wants our baptismal garments to be clean, not just in what we wear but at the level of our soul.  Many of you try to go to confession regularly, and oftentimes will try to have it on Saturday before Sunday Mass.  We also offer a short time of around 45 minutes after the 8 am Mass until 9:30, when I start getting ready for the 10 a.m. Mass.  Others will come after Mass, which is also good to do.  Regular confession helps us stay “dressed” properly for the wedding banquet of the Lamb.
    I would also challenge us to see how we welcome people to Mass each Sunday.  No, I’m not going to have us start greeting our neighbor before Mass.  The Mass is not about us and or pretending that we gave God the gift of our presence.  But how do we make others, who may be strangers to St. Matthew, or even strangers to this beautiful form of the Mass, feel like they belong?  Recently we welcomed a number of families from Lapeer who no longer have access to the Extraordinary Form at Immaculate Conception.  Have you made them feel welcome and a part of our parish community?  Do you keep your eyes out for people who don’t look familiar, not as threats, but as opportunities to help them to understand how we pray in this form?  I studied the Mass and its history in seminary and in post-graduate work, so I didn’t find this form of the Mass too strange or complex.  But others, even Catholics who attend the Ordinary Form each week, can sometimes feel lost.  Do we give them a hand missal, or maybe even sit next to them so they can follow along with us and know when to kneel, sit, stand, and what prayers to say?  People are much more likely to stay at this form of the Mass if they know how to join in the prayer, rather than seeming like a stranger in a Mass which is part of their patrimony as Catholics.
    God wants us to dress properly for the wedding banquet of His Son.  That applies to me as a priest with my vestments, and to you as far as giving God your best.  But it doesn’t only mean externally.  God wants our entire person, body and soul, to be dressed appropriately to join in His great celebration of sacrifice and love.  May we not be thrown out of the banquet, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth, but dress our lives in a way that shows that we are grateful for our invitation and attendance at the wedding banquet of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen.  

Stopping the Cycle

Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time/Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  Most Sundays I preach on the word of God in the Scriptures or a particular season or feast day.  But last week, during the 10 a.m. Mass, our country experienced yet another act of violence.  But this time it hit closer to home, as this mass shooting occurred in Grand Blanc, where many of you live.  I will admit that, before this past Sunday, it was always somewhere else, some other State, some other community.  
    Perhaps we can identify with the Prophet Habakkuk, who wrote, “How long, O LORD?  I cry for help but you do not listen!  I cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not intervene.  Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery?  Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and clamorous discord.”  In the wake of these tragedies, we seek to understand how this could happen, and what we could do to bring these tragedies to an end.  
    I’m not going to suggest any political solutions today.  And that’s not because political solutions cannot do anything.  We need to examine causes and do whatever we can to stop the natural causes of these acts of violence and terrorism.  

    But it’s all too easy to get stuck on arguing about external causes and political solutions to problems which go deeper than what we see on the outside and what government can do to solve our problems, though government certainly does have a role in preventing these evils in some ways.  Whenever these evils manifest, we seem to go through the same cycle every time: sympathy for those who died or were injured; moral outrage that this should happen; divergent views on how to prevent these acts of terror from happening in the future, be it gun control, mental health funding, violent video game restrictions, or other solutions upon which we divide into two major camps: liberal and conservative.  Then, because there is no consensus between liberals and conservatives, we do almost nothing, and basically wait for the next act of terrorism, where we go through the same steps again, and achieve nothing.
    Again, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do anything in the political arena.  Government’s first responsibility is to protect life.  But government cannot solve the problem, because the problem is not, at its heart, political.  The problem is not liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans.  The problem is here, in our hearts, in our souls.  The problem that we don’t want to admit is that evil exists, and we are all too comfortable with evil, only to be surprised when it reaches its natural conclusion in horrible acts of violence.
    To be clear, I composed this homily before I learned much of anything about the shooter, whose name I will not share, and who has now stood before the just and merciful judgement of God.  So I can’t and won’t talk in any cogent matter about this particular person and what could have motivated him to cooperate in grave evil.
    But the reason what we continue to go through this cycle of violence is because our society has rejected God, at least at a wholesale level.  We are unwilling to acknowledge our sins, both as individuals and as a society.  We cooperate with evil, and then act surprised when evil does what it always does, seek destruction and chaos, whereas God is the source of creation and order.
    It doesn’t start with horrible evil, of course,  It starts when we say that something else is more important than God; when parents decide that the traveling sports team is more important than Sunday Mass; when a man or a woman decides that lust on a screen seems more enjoyable than following God’s plan for our ability to create new life; when prayer is too much of a burden each day; when we try to pretend that a loving father and loving mother are not key to stable and mentally healthy children; when we treat life only as valuable as it can serve some purpose for us and our utilitarian ends; when we accept the lie that our life has no relationship to God and how he has created us; when we live in an ungodly way; when we turn away from God and exalt our will and our egos; when we do these and other smaller acts of evil, we decide that we want these evils to continue again and again, until it strikes closer to home than we wanted or ever thought possible.  
    God has plans for us to thrive.  God can bring  this cycle of violence to an end, if we follow Him.  But we have to follow Him.  External policies can help, but they cannot solve the problem, any more than a band-aid can heal a severed artery.  The solution to our national problem with violence requires us to live Godly lives.  It is that simple and that complicated.  We have to love the Lord our God with all of who we are, and love our neighbor as ourselves, even when they are difficult to love.  Men and women need to truly love each other and commit to marriage before they have children.  We have to stop demonizing those who disagree with us, but rather use logic and God’s revelation to form them to understand the truth, not simply an opinion that seems easier to follow.  We need to go to Mass each Sunday and Holyday and recognize our dependence on God, rather than pretending that we are gods and the masters of the universe.  Until this happens, there will be more examples of Columbine; Sandy Hook; Nashville; Oxford; Minneapolis; Grand Blanc.  Until this happens, we’re just spending more money on better security, which others will try to beat with better guns and weapons and tactics, which will lead to more money being spent on security, in a vicious cycle.  
    If we want this unending violence to come to an end, then we need to submit ourselves to God and His law.  It may seem like this won’t do much.  But God promises: “For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint; if it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late.”  If we wish to live in a safe society, then do not join the diabolical forces that seek to exult the self over God and do whatever we want and whatever feels good.  God’s vision, subjection to Him and His rule, will not disappoint.  It will transform it into the world that we want at our deepest core, the desire that God has put into our hearts for order and peace, a desire that comes only when we conform our wills to His[: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen].     

The Good Work in You

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Sometimes a particular phrase has a way of taking our minds back to a specific point of time.  For example, whenever I hear or read the phrase we heard from the epistle–“May God who has begun the good work in you bring it to fulfillment”–I am taken back to the day of my ordination, when Bishop Boyea said those exact words to me after I made my promises to be the priest the Church calls me to be.  
    In many ways I looked at my ordination as an ending.  And after eight years of seminary formation, that’s probably not surprising.  It had seemed like forever since I started at St. John Vianney College Seminary immediately after high school in 2002, and it even seemed like a relatively long time since I had started Sacred Heart Major Seminary in 2006.  And while the first and most important goal of seminary is proper discernment of God’s call (or not), the farther along you get, the more you look forward to ordination to the priesthood.  That last year, as a transitional deacon, you’re looking at chalices, vestments, and trying to plan for the ordination reception, so ordination especially seems like the goal.
    But the words that are said before the man is ordained treat it, not as an ending, but as a beginning.  God has begun the good work, and we pray it finds its way to completion, on the day of Christ Jesus.  And, in retrospect and with the blessing of age and hopefully the acquisition of a bit more wisdom, ordination really is a beginning, more so than an ending.  And the years that follow really demonstrate how that good work is moving closer to or farther from completion.
    But the same is true for the other sacramental vocation, the vocation to Holy Matrimony.  Instead of eight years it’s around eight months or proximate preparation (sometimes more, sometimes less, based upon the date of engagement).  But there’s still all that planning and excitement for the “big day.”  Still, the big day is not the ending (though, and I’m sure the father’s of the bride are especially happy for this, it does end all the spending for the day of celebration).  The wedding day begins a lifelong commitment to the other, a good work, that finds its completion on the day when the bond of marriage is broken by death, by meeting the Lord.  That’s why we do marriage prep: to help the couple prepare, not so much for the wedding, but for married life and all the days that follow the wedding.
    But this is also true for all of Christ’s faithful.  When the priest baptizes us, a “good work” is begun, that will not find its completion until we meet the Lord, either at our death or at the end of time on the last day.  Either the parents or the one being baptized makes promises, just like a man makes promises on his ordination day, and a couple makes promises on their wedding day.  And every day that follows, God gives us all we need so that our “charity may more and more abound in knowledge and in all understanding.”  Our growth in holiness is really a growth in love of God and love of neighbor, as we understand better and better how God has made us for Himself, and how we can show that love to Him directly, as well as to our neighbor, with whom God identifies, especially the poor and outcast.  
    But so often we want to act like we should be a finished product.  We figure that, if we were truly holy, we would be done.  But the saints show us, time and time again, that we are never done growing in holiness.  Bishop Mengeling, who turns 94 on Tuesday, says frequently, “I’m not done yet!”  And he doesn’t just mean that he’s still alive.  He readily admits that he is still growing in holiness, and while continue growing for the rest of his life.  

    So don’t get too discouraged if you’re not there yet, if you’re not the saint that you want to be, and that God wants you to be.  Certainly, don’t give up or grow lazy and complacent.  But the work of your sanctification is a lifelong work.  It’s not something that you get to retire from once you reach a certain age, or have accomplished a certain number of achievements.  Even for me, if I make it to the age of seventy when I can become a senior priest, it’s not like I can stop living as a priest and give up my vocation.  No, I’ll continue it until death.  And for married couples, they can’t give up because their children have all grown, or when they’re retired from their jobs.  Marriage keeps going “until death do [you] part.”  
    The call of holiness is to daily give God what is His due, that is, everything.  Even while God gives us some authority over our actions, all things are from God and belong to Him.  Each day God calls us to render to Him everything that we have: our life, our family, our work, our leisure, everything.  Just because we offer it to Him doesn’t mean that He will take it from us.  Sometimes it’s simply that we are willing to offer what is most precious to God, like Abraham did with Isaac.  But it is a good work that continues throughout our life, until, like Christ, we offer our last breath to God as we commend our spirit into His hands.  May God, who has begun the good work in us, bring it to fulfillment on the day of Christ Jesus, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.  

Unity and Diversity

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  A buzzword these days is “diversity.”  And while people can associate the socio-political term with some level of mistrust, when it comes to diversity in the Catholic sense, we need not fear.  We don’t fear diversity, because it is also bound up with unity.  And this connection between diversity and unity bases itself in the Most Holy Trinity, who is both One God and Three Divine Persons.
    While not directly pointing to the Trinity, it intrigued me that St. Paul, in the epistle we heard today, kept going back to threes: “One Lord, one faith, one baptism,” and “Who is above all, and through all, and in all.”  Again, this is not to equate the word “Lord” with the Father, “faith” with the Son, and “baptism” with the Holy Spirit, nor any individual Person with being above, through, or in all.  But there is something providential as God inspired St. Paul to write in a way that points to the oneness and threeness of God.
    Beginning with God’s oneness, His unity, we even get a glimpse of this in the Gospel.  When asked about the greatest commandment, our Lord replies with the second half of the shema, one of the great credal expressions of Judaism: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one.  Therefore you shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.”  The unity of God forms the foundation of the commandment to love God.

   The diversity, if you will, of God, started to reveal itself most clearly in the Incarnation.  We can look to the Baptism of the Lord, when the voice of the Father spoke as St. John baptized our Lord, and the Holy Spirit hovered over our Lord in the form of a dove.  Time and time again, our Lord claims authority which only God could have, especially seen in the power of forgiving sins.  And in the Gospel of John, the people almost stone Christ, which makes him ask, “‘For which of these [good works] are you trying to stone me?’”  The people reply, “‘We are not stoning you for a good work but for blasphemy.  You, a man, are making yourself God.’”  And at the great commission at the end of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Christ commands that his disciples to baptize “‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’”  
    Certainly, this believe in our Triune God developed over the centuries after the Ascension and sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Indeed, the word Trinitas, Trinity, was only first coined by Tertullian, who died in the year AD 200.  Creeds would follow from Nicea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon that would clarify how we understood our one God as well as the Trinity of Persons.  But the kernel of the truth of our belief in who God is was present from the beginning.
    So, when it comes to the Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ, we see both unity and diversity operating, just as unity and diversity are attributes of God.  There is one God, but the Father is not the Son, nor the Son the Holy Spirit, nor the Holy Spirit the Father.  There is one Church established by Christ, but that one Church has different expressions across the world with different gifts and charisms.  The temptation is to overemphasize unity or overemphasize diversity.  But that would be like excluding either the Three Persons in favor of one God, or excluding the oneness of God in favor of the Three Divine Persons.  But the truth is not expressed fully when one or the other is excluded.
    So for us, God calls us to profess, though one baptism, one faith in the one God.  To reflect the unity of God we hold fast to what God has truly revealed as necessary for salvation, including those statements codified by Ecumenical Councils and Popes, as well as the teaching the Magisterium.  To vary in professions of the divinity of the Son or the Holy Spirit tears away from the unity that God desires for His Church.
    On the other hand, there are diversities in practices of how we live that faith out that vary place by place.  St. Monica struggled with the fact that Romans fasted on Saturdays, while the Milanese did not.  St. Ambrose, then bishop of Milan, said that when he was in Rome he fasted on Saturdays, but when in Milan, he did not.  Liturgically, from the beginning, there rose up legitimate differences in how the followers of Christ, united in one Church, worshiped.  While most of the Roman world spoke Greek, and so Greek was likely used in many of the earliest liturgies, Latin was introduced not too long after Christianity ceased to be a persecuted religion.  Maronites, the Catholic Rite (R-I-T-E) based in Lebanon, still uses Aramaic, as it has from the beginning, the language our Lord spoke, in at least part of its liturgy.  And as the Gospel spread, the Mass came to be celebrated in various languages, though each language was often codified and does not always match the current way that same language is used (e.g., Slavonic versus Church Slavonic).
    But this variety of languages and rites resembles Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit gave the Apostles and disciples the ability to speak in different tongues so that those who had gathered in Jerusalem for the feast could understand the preaching of the Gospel.  Still, while the languages were many, the faith they professed was one.
    So, as Catholics, we can welcome diversity in a Catholic sense, because it is also connected to a unified mission and proclamation, mimicking the way that our one God is also Three Divine Persons.  In the Mystical Body of Christ, we need not all have the same task or vocation, any more than all our body parts need to be the same.  But those diverse body parts do need to work together for the proper functioning of the body, and so the diverse members of the Church need to utilize their gifts and talents in a unified way for the proclamation of the one Gospel in the one Church that our Lord founded.  May we, the diverse members of the Mystical Body of Christ, be held together for common purpose by our Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Rules or Relationship?

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Some people view Catholicism as a set of rules, or maybe even a particular type of morality or ethics.  They hear the Church rightly say that one ought to do this, or ought not to do that.  They sense, whether from reality or from caricatures in popular culture, that being Catholic is all about going to Mass each Sunday, going to confession, saying the rosary, listening to the pope, not eating meat on Fridays, getting married in a church, not having sex outside of marriage, not contracepting, etc.  And those are all aspects of the way that a Catholic, every Catholic, should be living his or her life. 

    But, as Pope Benedict XVI said, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”  And the encounter that Pope Benedict mentions is not just a meeting, but really a falling in love.  That is why Jesus teaches us today in the Gospel that the greatest commandment is the two-fold love of God and love of neighbor.
    When we love someone, we love not only that person, but the things that he or she loves.  When we truly love someone, our affections change to better match that person’s.  Our life becomes not about us, but about the other.  We see this start to bloom even in adolescence when a boy starts to care more about the things that his crush likes.  I think I have mentioned this before, but that’s how I started listening to country music: a girl I liked listened to country, and I wanted to have something to talk to her about.  But the love of the other fully blossoms in marriage, where one’s life is not one’s own, but is inseparably joined to the other, intertwined at the deepest levels, and the importance of the other eclipses the importance of the self and one’s own desires. 
    God desires that we each have an encounter of love with Him.  God desires not that we simply know about Him (even the demons can do that), but that we love Him, that we give our heart to Him, that He becomes more important to us than we are to ourselves, and that the things He loves become the things we love, which are really what will make us happy, since God, as our Creator, knows exactly what will fulfill our human nature. 
    “‘The whole law and the prophets,’” says Jesus, “‘depend on these two commandments.’”  The phrase, “the whole law and the prophets” means the entirety of Scripture.  All of what God has revealed depend on love of Him and love of neighbor.  Every genuinely Catholic practice–every law, every precept, every commandment–needs to find its base in this two-fold commandment of love, or else it is built on sand.
    This may not always seem obvious.  What, we might ask, does giving up fish on Fridays have to do with love of God or love of neighbor?  Is it because I’m supporting the fish industry, and those who work in it are my neighbor?  Not entirely, though I suppose it is love of neighbor in that sense.  But much more deeply, God has revealed to us that our desires are not always in accord with His will or with the truth.  We want things we shouldn’t.  And in order to help train our wills and our bodies not to go astray, God tells us that we should give up good things to focus on that which is even better: not fish in se, but on growing closer to God through restraining our human desires, even the good ones, so that we can more easily say no to the desires that take us away from God. 
    Or consider going to Mass every Sunday and Holyday.  Can’t I love go through a screen on the TV or the computer?  Can’t I offer worship to God from my couch?  In a word, no; not in the same way.  Is FaceTiming your spouse the same as sitting with her at the table, holding her hand, smelling her perfume, seeing the radiance of her smile in person?  And God not only gives us His presence.  He enters into us through the Eucharist so that we are even physically united to Him.  You cannot have that watching the Mass on TV or via Live Stream.  Each time we stand, or sit, or kneel it is like we are dancing with God, our bodies moving this way and that based upon how the sacred liturgy is progressing.  And our encounter with God culminates in Christ giving Himself to us, giving us today the same sacrifice of some 2,000 years ago on the cross, though doing it not in an unbloody way.  True love of God wouldn’t want to miss out on that for the world.
    Love of neighbor follows from our love of God, because when we love someone we love the ones they love, and God loves all of His children, even the difficult ones.  As we grow in our love with God, we cannot help but love our neighbor.  And if we are not growing in love of neighbor, then it’s a good chance that we’re not really growing in our love of God.  It is as St. John says in his first epistle: “whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.”  Any authentic growth in holiness means that we are growing in love of our neighbor.
    Yes, Catholicism has a lot of things that we do or don’t do.  Yes, it has its own morality.  But it’s not just dos and don’ts.  It’s not just a moral system.  Catholicism is a love story between the individual and God, and therefore also between the individual and God and those whom God loves.  If you name a teaching or a moral precept of Catholicism, it will find its way back to love of God and love of neighbor.  “‘The whole law and the prophets,’” and the whole exercise of our faith, “‘depend on these two commandments.’” 

What Doesn't Belong to God?

Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    At some point in elementary school I came across a word that looked similar, but was also different.  I couldn’t quite make out if it meant the same thing as the word to which it looked similar, or if it might be a different word altogether.  I asked my teacher how I was supposed to pronounce the word c-o-l-o-u-r, and what its meaning was.  I was sure it was supposed to be pronounced cah-LUHR, but was surprised that both the pronunciation and the meaning was the same as our word color, c-o-l-o-r, and that this was simply a British spelling.  I have always preferred our American spelling as much more obvious and logical.
    When we hear the Gospel, we likely are colored, however you might spell it, by our American experience.  Though the words “separation of Church and State” never appear in Constitution, it has been so ingrained in our minds that we probably hear this Gospel and figure that Jesus was advocating the same some 2,000 years ago.  I will admit that I have probably preached a homily or two on the same point.

Cyrus

    But look at our first reading today.  God speaks through the prophet Isaiah about the Lord’s anointed, Cyrus.  Cyrus was not a king of Israel.  He was not a Jew at all.  He was the king of the Persians, who had recently defeated the Babylonian Empire, which had exiled the two southern tribes of Jews.  But God calls Cyrus his anointed, though he was altogether pagan.  Still, Cyrus would start to provide for the return of the Jews to their homeland, and even for the building up of the temple, which had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem.  God is clearly demonstrating, through Isaiah, that even this pagan ruler was in God’s hands.  There was no separation between God an any reality.
    This idea, that what I do in politics and what I do in religion have no bearing on each other, is an intriguing idea.  But it cannot be called Catholic.  Because for the Catholic (as for the Jew before him), God is God of everything, not just some parts of the world.  Though others may not recognize it, God holds sway over everything in the created world, and we cannot compartmentalize aspects of our life into Church and State, or said differently, religion and politics.  If we really claim to follow God, then God has a say over everything I do, not just what I do within these four walls.  If we owe God everything, then every act of our life belongs to God, even that which belongs to Caesar.
    To be clear, I’m not advocating theocracy.  I’m not advocating that we rush to rebellion to overthrow the government in order to set up our bishops as rulers.  But if what the Church teaches is true, and truth applies to everyone, not just those who profess it in church, then our goal would be that all our laws would reflect the truth of what God has revealed, not just for Catholics, but for everyone.  
    Instead, we are used to the tired trope, “I personally believe X is wrong, but I’m not going to force that belief on others.”  We usually hear it from baptized Catholics who advocate the heretical view that abortion should be legal.  And people get very defensive about the abortion issue and how we seem to be forcing the Catholic Church’s teaching on others.  So let’s apply this logic to other moral teachings, which the Church holds dearly, and if a Catholic supported it, he or she would be in heresy.  Imagine a politician saying, “I personally believe that slavery is wrong, but I’m not going to force that belief on others.”  Would you vote for that politician?  How about, “I personally believe that human trafficking is wrong, but whom I am to judge another person?”  Or, also consistent, “If a person’s conscience tells him that he should break into a house to get more money, that person should follow his conscience.”  I would hope that no one would support such ridiculous propositions.   But it’s precisely the same argument that people use for advocating that abortion should be legal so that those who think it’s ok can get one.  
    We do live in a pluralistic society, with many different religions.  And there is some good in not having a particular religion being forced down our throats.  Imagine that baptists were in charge, and they created a law that said that Bibles cannot be printed with the books we Catholics include but they tore out.  That wouldn’t be right.  But many of the laws that we should have do not have to be particular to one religion.  You can know abortion is wrong without being Catholic, just like you can know stealing is wrong without being Catholic.  We don’t eliminate all our laws against stealing just because we, as Catholics, hold theft to be immoral.  
    And further, the same Jesus who said, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God,” also said that if we are value family more than Him, then we are not truly following Him as He desires.  Certainly if father and mother, brothers and sisters come in second place to Christ, so should the Republican or Democratic parties.  
    We view things with our American understanding because that has been our culture that has pervaded much of what we do and how we think.  But Christ is not American, and His teachings don’t always square up with our Constitution.  We may pay taxes because they belong to Caesar, but when it comes to how we live our lives, including our politics, it is all subject to God and His will, because to God belongs all that is.

Loving Father and Mother

 Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

My sisters and I on a family vacation

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  My sister, Amanda, was married six months before I was ordained a deacon, so I cantored for her Mass.  My sister, Allison, was married after I was a priest, so I was able to celebrate that wedding Mass.  In both cases, I was blissfully unaware of all that goes in to planning a wedding reception.  But at some point after they were both married, the topic came up, and I learned about the cost and stress that accompany planning a wedding reception, and trying to see how many people will come.  They both mentioned how difficult it can be when a person RSVPed that they would attend (and so food had to be ordered for them), but then didn’t show up to the actual reception.  Perhaps that’s why the king in today’s parable from the Gospel was so upset, though I doubt my sisters were at the point of sending an army and destroying those who were AWOL.
    But the king was certainly mad, not only at those who abused his servants who announced the impending nuptials and killed the messengers, but even at those who would not come to the wedding, due to farming or business.  Was it simply because the king wanted his son’s wedding to be filled with guests?  Or was the king worried about all the food that had been ordered that no one would eat?
    Our Lord uses this image of a wedding, and God often uses the image of a husband and wife throughout the Scriptures to talk about His relationship with us.  So this parable is not simply about a party from two people getting “hitched.”  God is talking about the marriage that is taking place between God and us, His Bride, the Church.  In Christ, divinity and humanity are wed in an unbreakable bond.  Christ takes to Himself His Bride, the Church, and they become one flesh.  Those who are invited to the wedding are both guest and bride.  And God wants all His children, all those whom He created in His image and likeness, to be in attendance.  Nothing is more important, nothing more pressing.  And for those who seek to keep the bride away, a harsh punishment awaits.
    St. Augustine wrote a homily for the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost which dealt with this idea of marriage between God and His Church.  He writes:
 

Let us love the Lord our God.  Let us love His Church: Him as our Father, her as our Mother; Him as our Lord, her has His handmaid; for we are the children of His Handmaid.  And this marriage is joined together by a great love: let no one offend one partner, and seek to gain the favour [sic] of the other.

The love that we have for Christ extends to His Bride, the Church.  If we truly desire to love one, we must love the other.  We cannot hate our Father and at the same time love our Holy Mother Church.  Nor can we hate our Holy Mother Church and then claim to love the Father.  
    We probably don’t think of ourselves of hating one or the other.  But what do our actions say?  St. Augustine continues, “Let no one say: ‘I do go to idols; I also consult those who have familiar spirits, and the fortune tellers.  All the same, I have not left the Church of God.  I am still a Catholic.’  While clinging to your Mother, you have offended your Father.”  The particular sins in the time of St. Augustine may not be our particular sins, but he could ask today: do we make more time for sports than for God?  Do we read our horoscopes?  Do I put more trust in my own planning and will than the will and providence of God?  Those are probably more current ways that we may offend our Father.
    St. Augustine then looks at whether we can love our Father and yet hate our Mother.  He writes:
 

Again another will say: ‘Far be it from me to do such things.  I have nothing to do with soothsayers.  I do not go looking for someone possessed by a spirit, nor seek advice through sacrilegious divinations; nor do I go to the worship of demons.  And neither do I serve idols.  But I am however a Donatist.’  What does it avail you not to offend your Father, since He will punish your offenses against your Mother?  What does it profit you to praise the Lord, to honour [sic] Him, to preach Him, believe in His Son and confess that He sits at the right hand of God the Father; while at the same time you blaspheme His Church?  Does the example of human marriage not move you to correct your error?

How easy it can be to say that we love God, and then not respect or not follow the Church and those whom God has put over us to govern us in the Church!  The Doctor of Grace continues, “If you have some patron, to whom you pay respects each day, whose doorstep you wear out with your attentions…supposing you were to make just one accusation against his wife, would you enter his house again?”  If someone came up to you with the kindest of words, showering love and giving you gifts, and then proceeded told you that your wife is a wicked woman, and that you married down, would you ever see that person again?  We cannot simply say we love God without loving the Church which is His Bride and our Mother.
    Certainly this is a difficult time of the Church.  It is difficult when the liturgy which we, and I include myself in that we, love and which helps us grow in holiness and adoration of our Father, has been restricted by Pope Francis (though in our own diocese, Bishop Boyea has been very gracious in basically letting us continue as we did before).  Every time Pope Francis gets on a plane, I get nervous about what he might say, and how I will need to explain it.  Certainly, select bishops (the bishops of Belgium, the homeland of my maternal grandmother, comes to mind) are tearing themselves away from the Church as did the Donatists.  
    But will we stay faithful to the one Church of Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church?  Instead of saying vile things about this bishop, or the pope, can we simply say, “I don’t understand” or “It saddens me that…” and, “I pray that God will resolve this issue”?  I am trying to move more and more to this approach, not always successfully, but I believe it is helping me grow in holiness.  And it pains me to see the calumnies and/or detractions hurled at others.  If others be wrong, then do not join in their error.  But do not add sin to sin by speaking uncharitably about another, be he prelate, priest, or layperson.  
    “Hold fast…Dearly Beloved” St. Augustine continues, “let all of you with one mind hold fast to God our Father, and to the Church our Mother.”  The Church has not erred on faith nor morals, as promised by Christ to St. Peter, our first pope.  Stay with our Holy Mother, the Church, no matter how the waves break against her hull, and stay with our Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Humility, Gentleness, and Patience, Even When We Disagree

 Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  We are in the midst of the midterm elections.  And both in the partisan elections and in the ballot proposals, there are high stakes and heavy consequences for the outcomes.  Whether in the debates or in television ads, we see all kinds of name-calling and mud-slinging, accusing the opposition of being the worst kinds of people.  In the midst of this rancor, we hear from St. Paul today: “live…with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace.”  
    We may think that this admonition is easy to make for St. Paul, because he doesn’t have to deal with “those kind of people” in his letter.  But, in almost every Pauline letter, there is division in the Church, and not simply divisions between rich and poor, but divisions in faith and morality.  Indeed, St. Paul exhorts the faithful in Corinth to excommunicate a member for his egregious behavior.  But still, he calls for gentleness and humility here, along with patience and unity.

    Fast forward a few centuries to St. Augustine of Hippo.  St. Augustine was no wilting flower.  He fought heresy whenever he found it.  Indeed, he fought heresies that sometimes made him seem to be contradicting himself, in order to emphasize either God’s grace or our participation with it.  The Pelagians taught the heresy that original sin has not tainted us, and so we can do good works simply by our nature, rather than by the grace of God.  The Donatists taught the heresy that sin was everywhere and made us wretches and the priest had to be a saint in order to validly confect the sacraments.  St. Augustine also fought the Manichaeans, who taught the heresy that the world was divided into good and evil, the spiritual being good, and the material being evil.  
    But St. Augustine, even while being tough on heresy, strove to follow the words of St. Paul that we heard today.  The Doctor of Grace wrote of those who denied the validity of Catholic baptism (no small accusation):
 

when we do not repeat their baptism but acknowledge it to be our own, we are saying to them: You are our brothers.  […] And so, dear brothers, we entreat you on their behalf, in the name of the very source of our love, by whose milk we are nourished, and whose bread is our strength, in the name of Christ our Lord and his gentle love.  For it is time now for us to show them great love and abundant compassion by praying to God for them.  […] They respond with the same Amen, not with us, but still the same.  And so pour out your hearts for them in prayer to God.  

This guardian of orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right practice or worship), neither gave up the faith, nor gave up charity to those who had wandered away.
    Christ shows us the basis for what St. Augustine taught and lived.  He was very hard on the Pharisees, who had twisted the words of Sacred Scripture in favor of their own traditions.  They executed a sham trial of Him for blasphemy, and led Him to be put to death by the Romans, all the while mocking Him as He offered Himself for us on the altar of the cross.  Christ did not give in to their lies and perjury, but He also prayed for them as He offered Himself to the eternal Father.  
    So how are we are unity?  How gentle and humble are we, especially with those whom we oppose?  Do we automatically condemn and excise from our life, or do we seek reconciliation and peace, whether from afar when it is not possible due to antagonisms when in person, or even close up when we have the chance?
    And this goes, not only for political opponents, many of whom profess the same faith, even if their actions show a lack of understanding of that faith and a lack of integrity in living out that faith, but also for fellow Catholics and priests and bishops.  It is easy to ostracize those with whom we do not agree, and sometimes we must take harsh action.  But are we willing to pray for them, and even to meet and dialogue with them, not giving up the truth, but being willing to hear their position and agree where we can, and be charitable where we can?
    Last weekend I was in Chicago for the Annual Investiture Weekend of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem.  I am honored to be a member, and was glad to welcome one of our parishioners, Kishore, to this august group that supports the Christian presence in the Holy Land.  The spiritual leader of our North Central Lieutenancy is the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago.  He and I likely disagree on a number of priorities and prudential decisions when it comes to our Catholic faith.  There may even be areas where we disagree on the faith.  But, during one of our evening socials, he was suddenly right in front of me, and extended his hand in greeting.  I introduced myself, told him that I was a priest of Lansing, and we joked a bit about Bishop Boyea, who followed the Archbishop at the Josephenum as Rector.  We had a short, but pleasant conversation, before he moved on to other members to greet them.  I was struck by His Eminence’s sincere interest in meeting us, his charm, and his willingness to give of his time to be with us, when he likely has other more important matters (at least in his estimation) with which to deal.
    Meeting him didn’t change my disagreements with the head of the Church in Chicago.  It didn’t convince me that his prudential decisions were well-made.  I’m not signing up to be a member of his fan club (if he has one).  But it did bring home the Apostle’s admonition today, to be gentle and humble, patient, and to strive for unity where one can find it.
    Many Catholics today are quick to write-off those whom we feel are heterodox or heteropracticers (I just created that word for those who practice heteropraxy).  We can demonize them in words on blogs and Facebook posts, and then advocate all kinds of hateful actions, justified, in our minds, by seeking to maintain orthodoxy and orthopraxy.  But I think we would do well to follow the method of St. Augustine, who followed the method of St. Paul, who followed the model of our Lord: profess the truth, without giving in to error; hold fast to what God has revealed, even when it means suffering; but do all this with charity towards others, seeking forgiveness for those who have wandered away and who persecute us, simply for following and conforming ourselves to God.  Pour our your hearts for them to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

What Belongs to God

 Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  So, this is the Gospel passage where we start talking about politics and religion, church and state, and how the two intersect, how they should or shouldn’t intersect, what’s right in politics, what’s wrong in politics, etc.  Politics, though now considered a dirty word in some arenas, is a good thing, as it is the science of running the polis, the city (in Greek).  But I don’t know about you, but it seems like politics is all we talk about any more, even as a church.
    Don’t get me wrong: the Gospel has political implications.  If we truly believe in Jesus and follow Him, there are some things we cannot support, and some things that we must support.  But our Lord’s point is much greater than what we owe to government, and what we owe to God.
    Let’s start with the fact that, although the Herodians had tried to trap our Lord in a trap, He set one of His own.  And though Christ didn’t fall into the trap, the Herodians were quite easily ensnared.  What was that trap?  Well, to begin with, you have to go back one chapter to realize where our Lord is.  He was in the Temple.  He had entered into Jerusalem, had left for Bethany, and then had returned.  And the traps that the Pharisees are laying for Him are everywhere!  But the Savior ducks and weaves, and lands a few punches (metaphorically speaking) of His own.  

Denarius with the image of Marcus Aurelius

    So, in the temple, the Herodians are asked to pull out a Roman coin.  We don’t think much of it, because we carry money around with us everywhere.  But, because there was a commandment about not having a graven images, a good Jew would have never brought a Roman coin into the Temple, because that was bringing the image of a pagan god (the emperor) into the house of the true God.  That’s why there were money changers in the Temple: you had to exchange your pagan coins–that, outside the Temple were necessary for daily business–for Jewish coins that did not break the Law.  So the Herodians are actually shown to be breaking the law by having those Roman coins with them.  
    But further, there’s this point about giving God what belongs to God.  A good Jew, going back to Genesis 1 and 2, would ascribe everything as a good creation of God.  Certainly, we wouldn’t talk this way about artifacts (like coins) that were man-made.  But break the coin down to its constitutive parts, and you get metals, which are fancy rocks, which are part of the earth, which God created.  And the skill of mining those fancy rocks was given by God by the creation of a rational brain in humans.  And the strength needed to flatten out the fancy rocks and shape them in such a way was also given, at least indirectly, by God.  Everything came from God.  God loaned, as it were, everything to mankind, making man and woman the stewards of creation.  So everything really belongs to God.
    So are we to give God everything?  In a word, yes!  When God asks for something, He’s not asking for a gift from us, or asking us to be benevolent and generous.  He is asking for what is rightfully His.  A steward was never the owner of the property of the household, though he could buy and sell.  A steward always did business realizing that the goods which he bought and sold truly belonged to the Master, for which he would have to account.  So nothing is, strictly speaking, ours.  This is where St. Thomas Aquinas gets the idea, repeated throughout the ages and dating back to the church fathers, that while we can own private property–we can possess things for ourselves–there is a universal destination of goods.  As St. Basil the Great says, “The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.”  He can only say that if everything, ultimately, belongs to God.  
    Consecrated men and women live this out radically (at the root) by not owning private property.  I was recently at dinner with a family whose son is a religious brother.  This topic came up about owning all things in common, and, as happens, the question of common underwear came up.  Of course, people use their own underwear (at least in most congregations).  But, this brother was quick to point out that the underwear was not, technically, his; it belongs to the community.  For we seculars, whether priests or married, we can’t simply say that the universal destination of goods are only for consecrated men and women.  According to our vocation, we also are called to make sure that others, especially in the household of faith, are not in need while we are in excess.
    But offering God everything does not stop at what is tangible.  God desires and deserves everything, and that means everything.  The joy that we have when we are praised for a job well done should be given back to God.  The sorrow we have when we don’t do as well as a job as we wanted should also be given back to God.  And everything in-between.  
    God desires our all.  Lumen gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, states: 

For all [the laity’s] works, prayers and apostolic endeavors, their ordinary married and family life, their daily occupations, their physical and mental relaxation, if carried out in the Spirit, and even the hardships of life, if patiently borne–all these become "spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”  Together with the offering of the Lord’s body, they are most fittingly offered in the celebration of the Eucharist.

Everything you do as laity, and everything I do as a priest, is meant to be offered to God, because, in the end, everything comes from God; it is His.  The only thing we do on our own is sin, and even that God wants, so that He can, by His grace, heal us and transform us.  
    As with any Scripture, there are many ways to apply today’s Gospel.  But today the Lord invites us to truly give Him our all, united with the bread and wine which I offer on your behalf to the Eternal Father, through Christ the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Offer to God your everything, and you will find that you have lost nothing, but gained everything, because God, as our loving Father, withholds nothing of what we need.  So give to God what belongs to God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

The Gospel according to "Saved by the Bell"?

Kelly Kapowski & Zack Morris

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Last weekend, Deacon Dave gave a great homily on our call to take care of what God has given us, especially human life in all its stages.  A lot of times, when we think about caring for human life, we think of our opposition to abortion, or of caring for mothers who are carrying a child in their womb, or of making sure that the elderly are not euthanized.  But, Deacon Dave last week reminded us, and our readings today also remind us, of another aspect of caring for our fellow brothers and sisters: our care for the poor and marginalized.
    It’s ironic, because last Saturday morning I was watching “Saved by the Bell,” which was a favorite TV show of mine in middle and high school.  I am a little ashamed to admit that, when I was in middle school I hoped my high school experience at Lansing Catholic would be like that at Bayside High.  I am not as ashamed to admit that I also liked watching “Saved by the Bell” because I had a crush on Kelly Kapowski, one of the lead female characters.  In any case, last Saturday’s episodes that I saw were a two-part Christmas episode where Zack Morris, the leading male character, meets an attractive young woman working at the mall, and he wants to date her, and then meets a homeless man in the mall bathroom.  It turns out the man and the young woman are father and daughter.  Zack is alerted to some of his stereotypes regarding homeless people, and does his best to help this family and give them a merry Christmas.  It was a good lead-up to today’s Gospel and first reading.
    Jesus in the Gospel today reminds us that, not only are we to love God, but we are also to love our neighbor.  And the Lord tells the Chosen People through Moses that loving their neighbor means not mistreating aliens (a word that is not popular today but just means “a person from another place”); taking care of widows and orphans (who, in that day, did not have social security or welfare to sustain them; they were totally reliant on the community for their survival); and caring in general for the poor.  We, as followers of Jesus, are held to this same standard, and are called as part of our care for human life, to do our best to care for the poor and marginalized.
    In the “Saved by the Bell” episode, the producers did a great job of pointing out that the homeless are not homogenous in their circumstances.  The father in the episode had been a computer programmer, and had been laid off by his company.  He tried to find work, even traveling to a different State, but couldn’t get a job.  I think often times we say, “the poor,” and consider them all the same.  But there are different types of poverty, even within the category of financial poverty.
    Caring for the poor can be difficult, because I believe that all of us want to help the poor, but we may not know how, and we may wonder about the person’s particular circumstances.  Or maybe we feel that it’s the government’s place to care for the needs of all the poor, so that the poor will leave us alone.  But we need to encounter the poor so that we can recall that they are human, created in the image and likeness of God, just as we are.
    Still, there are different needs.  One person can be poor because he has a disability that does not allow him to work.  Another person can be poor because she lost her job and doesn’t have any savings to get her through unemployment.  Another person can be poor because medical bills for an unexpected illness or injury depleted almost all financial resources.  Or a person could be poor because they don’t want to work and would rather collect money from government programs.  There’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, which can seem frustrating or daunting.  And yet, we are still called to assist the poor.
    There are also structures that can sometimes encourage people to be poor, or rely on the government for their existence.  There are people who want to work, but if they work, they won’t qualify for welfare, and the money they would earn in a job is less than they would get from welfare.  Work is part of our responsibility as citizens, to use our gifts and talents for the building up of society, and contributes to assistance like social security and Medicare, but it also reminds the person of his or her dignity.  It’s surprising to me that people with better financial and economic minds than mine don’t come up with a system where, if a person earned less from working at a job, the difference between solely being on welfare and the paycheck could be made up by welfare, thus taking care of people and helping people find the dignity of work, which, St. Paul says, we need to do if we are able.
    But, as I mentioned earlier, caring for the poor cannot be pawned off on the government.  It was Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” who complained that he paid taxes to care for the poor, so that should be enough.  We are called, to the extent that we’re able, to assist the poor personally, even if that means donating time instead of treasure (and I know the North End Soup Kitchen and Catholic Charities can use some volunteers).  Sometimes volunteering is the best way to help when we don’t know if the person begging at the top of the exit ramp truly needs the help (which I believe some do) or are trying to prey on people’s sympathies, though they could work rather than beg.
    But no matter how we do it, God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–invites us today to truly see the poor, not as a homogenous group of people, but as individuals, created in the image and likeness of God.  And as we look upon their suffering, to do what we can, even if just the smallest little bit, to show them the love of God by assisting them.  In that way, too, we can be part of a culture that respects all life, from natural conception to natural death.

Kenny Chesney the Theologian

 Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    Since I’ve been a priest for ten years, people ask me if I just recycle my old homilies.  Generally, the answer is no, as each time I preach I am in a different place, and so is the parish to which I’m preaching.  And yet, as I heard this Gospel passage, and saw the theme developing, especially from the first reading and Gospel, my mind kept going back to a Kenny Chesney song that I knew I had used before in a Sunday homily.
    So I went to my blog where I keep all my homilies to see how I had used it, and if I had used it here at St. Pius X.  And lo and behold, I have used the song…twice…once in 2012 when I was at St. Thomas Aquinas parish in East Lansing, and once in 2014 when I was administrator of St. Joseph parish in Adrian.  So, now I guess it’s your turn to hear the words of this Kenney Chesney song that my previous two parishes had heard.
    The song is from the album “Lucky Old Sun,” and was written by Jim Collins and Marty Dodson.  It became Kenny’s fifteenth number one hit.  The song is entitled, “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven.”  Country music has long been known for its lyrics, and was described by Harlan Howard as “three chords and the truth.”  The lyrics I’ll highlight today are from the refrain and a little from a verse.  Kenny sings:

Everybody wants to go to heaven,
Have a mansion high above the clouds.
Everybody want to go to heaven,
But nobody want to go now.
[…]
Said preacher maybe you didn’t see me
Throw an extra twenty in the plate.
There’s one for everything I did last night
And one to get me through today.
Here’s a ten to help you remember
Next time you got the good Lord’s ear,
Say I’m coming but there ain’t no hurry
I’m having fun down here.

The lyrics are even better with the melody.
    There is truth in those lyrics, as in there are people who would say those words echo their sentiments.  There’s this general desire of people to go heaven, that mountain of the Lord about which the Prophet Isaiah spoke in our first reading.  But, if pressed, there are things that they would prefer to do while on earth, items to check off their bucket list, however saintly or devilish, that they want to do first.  Everyone wants to say with Psalm 23, “and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord / for years to come,” even if they don’t always want to follow the lead of the Good Shepherd and go to the pastures He points out.
    So there’s this cognitive disconnect.  When we hear the parable that Jesus tells, the one we hear today about the wedding feast to which the king invited guests, we think they’re crazy to say “thank, but not thanks,” especially for something as simple as farming or doing business.  But, if pressed, we often RSVP in the negative, but for worse or flimsier reasons than for farming or business.  
    The excuses become even more mundane if we look at the Mass as the foretaste of heaven.  Each week I say: “Behold the Lamb of God.  Behold him who takes away the sins of the world.  Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.”  This is as close to heaven on earth as we can come.  And yet, even without COVID, we have all sorts of excuses why we can’t make it.  
    But truly, each day we are RSVPing to the King’s invitation for the wedding feast for His Son, Jesus.  Each day we make choices that say, “Yes, I’m coming,” or “Nobody want to go now.”  And what the Gospel reminds us is that a simple desire to go may not be enough.  Jesus, in the parable, tells of a guest who came, but one was not in a wedding garment (and in the parable it’s a man, which isn’t surprising, since men often wouldn’t know how to dress for a particular occasion).  The king says to him, “‘My friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?’”  The man has no answer.  So he is bound and cast outside into the darkness.  
    When we were baptized, we were given a wedding garment, a white cloth which represented the cleanness of our soul.  The priest said, “you have become a new creation and have clothed yourself in Christ.  May this white garment be a sign to you of your Christian dignity.  With your family and friends to help you by word and example, bring it unstained into eternal life.”  When we make a choice against God, when we deem something other than God a higher and more important good, we stain that garment.  God, in His mercy, can cleanse it for us in the Sacrament of Penance, but we still have to hold on to it (symbolically speaking) and not throw it away by our choices.  
    It is so easy to fix our hearts and minds and attention on what is earthly, on the physical things that scream for our attention.  It is so easy to go day-to-day with an earthly mentality, that we don’t want to go to heaven, yet.  But that is why St. Paul reminds us to set our minds on what is above.  That is why, as we will hear in a few minutes, we are invited to lift up our hearts, so that we are, once more, reminded that getting to heaven is our top concern so that, at our time, we are ready for the wedding feast of the Lamb.

What is Love...Baby Don't Hurt Me

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

If you were to say the phrase, “What is love?” to a certain generation of people, they would immediately think (or say or sing), “Baby, don’t hurt me,” and would, if not too beyond the pale, probably start bobbing their head side to side (and even if they couldn’t, they would want to).  It’s almost a conditioned response, like Pavlov’s dog drooling when a bell rings.

Today Jesus gives us the two greatest commandments, and they both focus on love.  The greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind.  The second commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves.  In both of these cases, we are called to love.  This makes perfect sense, as, if we look at the object in all Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses, the first three deal with love of God (thou shalt not have other gods besides me; thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; and the Sabbath rest), while the other seven deal with love of neighbor (Honor thy father and mother; thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness; thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife or thy neighbor’s goods).  

In theory, love is easy.  We all probably know that loving God is most important (especially because we’re here at Mass), and we know we need to love our neighbor.  In the theoretical realm we are with Jesus 100%.  But as it gets down to the nitty gritty, things can seem much more complicated.  We can truly start to wonder, “What is love?”

After all, we use the word for lots of things and people: I love my parents; I love my spouse; I love my siblings; I love my friends; I love pizza.  But if we love pizza in the same way we love our parents, something is off.  And if we love our friends in the same way we love our spouse, that tends to lead to trouble.  So love is not so clear a word to understand.

Love today often means a kind of respect for another person’s choices whatever they may be, as long as that person’s choices do not affect me personally.  Love seems to mean that anything goes, as long as person really desires something or someone, no matter what objective reality, or even the Church or Bible says.  People can try to rationalize all sorts of behavior by stating that God loves us, as if the love of God turns a blind eye to anything fallen or sinful.  People are very quick to say, as they’re rationalizing something contrary to Catholic faith or morality, “God loves me as I am,” to which I quickly respond, “But He loves you too much to leave you as you are.”  God’s love is a divinizing love; it is a love that seeks to make us like Himself, which means it is a love that calls us to reject all that is sinful and broken in us.  We cannot appeal to the love of God to support the killing of an elderly person in euthanasia; we cannot appeal to the love of God to support sex outside of marriage; we cannot appeal to the love of God to support doing that which is contrary to God’s law or the natural law.

And that divinizing love, because it is who God is, does not stop with God.  It begins with God, and the love we have for God has to be the most important, but to truly be the love of God, it also has to extend to our brothers and sisters.  St. John says it this way in his first letter, “whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.  […]whoever loves God must also love his brother.”  We are given a challenging example of that in our first reading: “‘You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.  […] If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry.’”  Now, before you tune me out because you think I’m going to support one political party or another, let me make this clear: I am not supporting a Republican or Democratic Party platform.  The Church supports both the right to immigrate, as well as the right of states to legitimately limit immigration.  The following are quotes from Paragraph 2241 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent that they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. […]

Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption.  Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens. [emphasis original]

We can civilly discuss all day current policies in place in the United States.  But the key is whether or not our approach to immigrants is one based in love.  And as Catholics we should especially consider the plight of immigrants, even as we protect our own country, because the words from Exodus could very easily be changed to: You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens from Italy, or Ireland, or Germany, or Poland.  If we can stand before the judgment seat of God with a clear conscience on the way we speak about and treat immigrants, and that it was based on love of God and neighbor, then we have nothing to fear.  But so often, our idea of love, whether it comes to immigrants, or to other moral issues, needs to be purified by the Word of God and the teachings of the Church, so that it truly reflects the love of God which seeks to make us like Himself.

Invites, RSVPs, and Attendance

Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Ironically, as I was preparing for the homily this past week, I received an invitation in the mail for a wedding that is being celebrated in July.  Talk about the Word of God being active and alive!

With Facebook, there are more and more events to which we can be invited.  Sometimes there are still the paper invitations, especially with weddings, but I have seen more and more people go to online invitations for open houses, parties, and we use it on our parish Facebook page for different events happening in our parish.

An invitation is, firstly, a sign that we are important to the person doing the inviting.  I remember when I was helping to plan my ordination reception with my parents.  There were all the considerations about whom to invite.  Because you can’t only invite one second cousin.  If you invite one, you have to invite them all.  But sometimes you’re closer with some family members than with others.  So if we’re invited, it is a sign that we are important enough to get the invite.  And I think that’s one of the takeaways from the Gospel reading today: God considers each of us important enough to invite to His wedding feast.  That’s no small thing.  God wants each of us to share eternal life with him.  

Isaiah describes that wedding feast using the image of the mountain of the Lord.  There will be the best of foods and the best of wines.  The quality of the food and wine is so good that Isaiah does something common when something is too good for words: he repeats himself.  But beyond the food and wine, on the mountain of the Lord there is no more death, no more tears, and no more reproach (which is a word we don’t hear that much and means “the expression of disapproval or disappointment”).  The day of the mountain of the Lord is a day of rejoicing, because God has saved us.  And this reading is one of the suggested readings for funerals, because the mountain of the Lord should be the goal of our life, and it’s where we hope our loved ones go after death.

But, another takeaway from the Gospel is that not everyone RSVPs to the invitation in the affirmative.  There are people who decline the invite for things of lesser importance: farming, business, or even just ignoring the invite altogether.  Even though invited, they don’t give much weight to the relationship with the person who is inviting them to rejoice with him and his family.  And when there is more room for guests, because so many people have not accepted the invitation, the king invites others, some who are good, but even some who are bad.  Just because we are invited does not mean we go.  We have to choose to go to the wedding; simply having the invitation is not enough.

And lastly, Jesus talks about one of the guests not having the proper garments for a wedding.  Even though the king was glad to invite the good and bad alike, there were expectations about proper dress for the wedding.  And the one who did not have the proper garment was thrown out into the darkness, in the place of “wailing and grinding of teeth.”  When I hear those words about a garment, I immediately think of the words that I tell a child or adult at baptism: “you have become a new creation, and have clothed yourself in Christ.  See in this white garment the outward sign of your Christian dignity.  With your family and friends to help you by word and example, bring that dignity unstained into the everlasting life of heaven.”  We are told at our baptism, when we receive our invitation, that on the mountain of the Lord, at the Lord’s wedding feast, there is a proper clothing requirement, and that requirement is supposed to white to represent our purity from sin.  Reconciliation is, as it were, bleach, that, by God’s grace, washes clean our baptismal garment that we have soiled by our disobedience to God.

So often, evangelicals will ask the question, “Are you saved?”, and our Gospel helps us answer that question with a Catholic answer.  We were saved when we were baptized, when we accepted the invitation from Jesus to attend His wedding feast in heaven as we died with Christ in the waters of baptism that freed us from sin and made us children of God and members of the Church.  We are being saved as we, by the grace of God, try to keep our baptismal garment clean and daily act in such a way as to show that we want to attend the wedding at the end of time.  And we hope to be saved when we are invited to the banquet hall, with the proper wedding garment, and are able to rejoice with Jesus in the Kingdom of Heaven forever.  

Being baptized isn’t enough.  Baptism is the invitation to the wedding feast.  We have to respond to the invitation that Jesus extends to us each day of our life.  Because Jesus also says at the end of our Gospel, that, “‘Many are invited, but few are chosen.’”  Let’s not ignore this invitation, or act in such a way that shows that we have better things to do than to go attend the wedding feast of the Lamb.  Let us make our own the words that we hear at each Mass: “Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.”