Gifts From God

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost 
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  On 13 July 2012, while running for re-election in 2012, President Barack Obama said in Roanoke, Virginia, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”  The former president and I probably disagree on more things than we agree on, and I know that many (including a restaurant owner who is a friend of mine) saw this as an attack on entrepreneurs.  But there’s a way to read this phrase that is helpful for us as Catholics (which may be one of the very few helps Catholics received from the Obama administration).
    We all have gifts and talents.  The Holy Spirit has given us certain things that we can do that others cannot.  But God gave them as gifts; we didn’t create these abilities on our own.  Yes, personal effort was required in developing our gifts, but it’s not as if we created ourselves.  The Holy Spirit, God, gave gifts to us for the building up of the Kingdom of God.  St. Paul the Apostles lists gifts like wisdom, knowledge, healing, miracle-working, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and interpretation of tongues.  But they all, and so many other gifts, come from the Holy Spirit.  

    But our tendency is to be like the Pharisee and presume that all the good things we do come from ourselves.  The Pharisee did good things: he fasted twice per week, gave tithes, did not extort people, rendered to people what they deserved, and keep his libido in check.  But he told God in a way that he was responsible for those good things.  Pride ruined all the good things the Pharisee was doing, whereas humility made up for the bad things the tax collector or publican did.
    In the spiritual life, it’s so easy to feel like we’re the ones doing all the work.  And we do have to put in work.  The Apostle says, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”  Pelagius, a 5th-century British monk, probably used that phrase to defend his belief that we alone choose to be holy or to be sinful, which led to him to deny original sin.  This was condemned as the heresy Pelagianism.  Most heresies don’t go away for too long; they simply go dormant for a while.  And Pelagianism, even with the impact of our Protestant brothers and sisters who talk about salvation through faith alone (though faith alone is not, ironically, in the Bible), is still alive and well.  We like to tout how we do things on our own, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and achieve the American dream by our blood, sweat, and tears.  But when it comes to our spiritual life, any good we do comes only from God.  It is, as the Collect for the First Sunday after Pentecost prays: 
 

O God, the strength of all who hope in Thee, 
kindly be present to our invocations; 
and, because our mortal weakness can do nothing without Thee, 
bestow the help of Thy grace: 
that in carrying out Thy commandments, 
we may be pleasing to Thee in will and action.

St. Augustine, much beloved here at St. Matthew because of the Augustinians who served here, fought hard to combat Pelagianism, which was formally condemned by the Council of Carthage, a local council, in AD 418, and yet Pelagianism continues like a cockroach which never seems to die, but only scurries away.
    So how do we live in a non-Pelagian way?  Does this mean that our good works mean nothing?  Our good works mean something, but only because of God’s generosity.  We call this congruent merit, when we do something with God’s grace that God has promised to reward.  The reward surpasses the work we do, but because God has said that if we do this work, we shall be rewarded, we can expect it.  But again, notice that this is only due to God’s generosity, or a gratuitous gift.  Only Christ can truly merit anything as a matter of strict justice (which we call condign merit), because all of His works, in every aspect, are good.  
    One of the traps, even of those who find the freedom of virtue, is to attribute to ourselves the goodness of the act, which usually means we fall into sin shortly thereafter.  God can allow us to experience the weakness of our nature when not supported first by His grace to show us how little we can do.
    And yet even the little we can do, and even though it has to have God as its source, God desires.  God justified the tax collector who could not brag about anything he had done, but only asked for God’s mercy.  The tax collector acknowledged how much in need he was, which opened up the possibility for God’s grace to do its work.  So in our own lives, as we come before God, it’s good to acknowledge that we cannot do good on our own, but need God both to inspire the good, strengthen our good actions, and bring them to a good completion in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Much like Schrödinger’s cat, we both didn’t build it (because every good thing we can do comes from God) and we did build it (because we do have to cooperate with God’s grace as we choose good actions).  
    Nothing good happens without God.  When we think that we are so good and do so many good things, we forget that it is the Holy Spirit who gives us every good gift and talent, and we fall into the trap of the Pharisee who thinks he can justify or save himself.  Instead, even while we seek to cooperate with God’s grace through good deeds, we should be like the tax collector and realize that we need God’s mercy because we so easily choose lesser goods and choose not to use the gifts the Holy Spirit has given us, who with the Father and the Son is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.  

Cadets

Fourth Sunday of Lent

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Over the past ten or so years, the Michigan State Police has re-vamped its Cadet Program as a way to get young men and women connected to the State Police while still college-aged.  Part of the expectation is that they use the time (for which they get paid) to make sure they are physically fit enough to be admitted to recruit school.  Recently I was present when a few cadets, including our two cadets at the Flint Post, did a baseline assessment of their physical fitness.  They had to do 32 sit-ups and 30 push-ups (each within a minute), do a vertical jump and reach at least 17.5 inches from their vertical arm extension, and do a half-mile shuttle run in 4:29.  Most cadets don’t simply do this physical test cold: they work at surpassing the standard before they take the test.  But if they don’t pass it at first, they have more opportunities before they are accepted to reach the physical standard and hopefully enter the 20-week academy to become a Michigan State Police Trooper.
    Just as the cadets have to keep their eyes on the goal of becoming a Trooper, the Church sets before us today the goal of making it to heaven.  For the gradual today we pray Psalm 121: “I rejoiced when they said to me: let us go to the house of the Lord.”  For the tract we heard Psalm 124: “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, that stands forever.”  And we will return to Psalm 121 at the Communion Antiphon, as we hear: “Jerusalem is built as a city, strongly compact.  It is there that the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord.”  Of course, while the psalmist had the earthly Jerusalem in mind, God, the divine author, had the Jerusalem above in mind.  We rejoice because we go on pilgrimage through life towards heaven.  And when we trust in the Lord, nothing can shake us, because we are like heaven, which endures even as the ages pass.
    St. Paul, in his epistle to the Galatians, also references the Jerusalem above, which is like Isaac, whereas Sinai, the mountain of the law, references the earthly reality.  The Apostle challenges us not simply to look to the rules, but to the freedom that comes from allowing God’s grace to transform us, and the freedom that comes from conforming our wills to God’s.  During our Lenten pilgrimage, we do well to keep this in mind.  Our goal should not just be not eating meat on Fridays, or certain extra prayers, or generosity to the Church and the poor through almsgiving.  Those practices, like the law, do not save in and of themselves.  But when we utilize those penitential practices to live a life more like Christ, that is, allowing those practices to put to death in us anything that does not come from God, we gain freedom because we live as God created us: in accordance with His will.
    It can be so easy to keep the law mentality that St. Paul critiques in the epistle.  We set out penances for ourselves and presume that they will save us.  We take on a Pelagian mentality that we earn our salvation by the good works we do, and God simply approves of our struggle and rewards us for it.  But our penitential practices, like the law, does not save.  Christ saves us; we do not save ourselves.  But we follow God’s eternal law and we chastise ourselves with Lenten practices in order to discipline our flesh and realize that all too often we live more like an animal, by instinct and drive, than like a child of God, living by following the will of God and the higher ends of the spiritual realm.  
    We don’t teach, like the Manichaeans, that the body is evil, but we do know that it operates under the weight of sin and concupiscence, and desires things we should not desire, or desires things at inopportune times.  We strive to live, not just by bread, but by the Word of God.  We pray because we need communion with the Father to ignore the temptations of the devil.  We give alms because generosity with others, especially those who will not return payment, makes us more like our heavenly Father who makes the sun shine on the good and the bad, and makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust.  

    And just like the cadets not only have to work out to be able to do their push-ups, sit-ups, and run, but also have to eat well to stay in shape, we hear the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish in today’s Gospel, which starts out the famous Bread of Life discourse, which is St. John’s treatment of the Eucharist (rather than the synoptic Gospels which focus on the Eucharist at the Last Supper).  The Eucharist is the spiritual food that we need, not only to help us during our Lenten penances, but also to help us on our pilgrimage to heaven.  When we receive Holy Communion in a state of grace, God strengthens our souls to more easily choose the good and reject the bad.  He gives us the Body and Blood of His Son, Jesus Christ, to transform us and make His will our own more and more.  
    We are all cadets, not striving to be Michigan State Police Troopers, but striving to be the saints that God called us to be in Holy Baptism.  To do that, we have to keep our mind on our heavenly goal, and eat the right spiritual food that will strengthen us towards our divinely-appointed end.  May our Lenten practices and our worthy reception of Holy Communion keep us in good spiritual shape so that we can appear, without trepidation and with a clear conscience, at the judgement seat of our Lord Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen.   

Following Christ May Not be Easy

Septuagesima
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  One would be forgiven for thinking that, once one truly believes in Christ, everything goes easily.  We have a desire for doing right, and we want that desire and those righteous actions to carry with them the consequence of ease.  And certainly, even Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics points to how the truly virtuous person exhibits virtue without too much struggle.  A person who truly has the virtue of courage will exhibit courage, rather than cowardice or rashness, in his or her actions, and will not need to think about it much, because a virtue is a stable disposition or habit to choose a particular good.  
    At the same time, a person who exhibits every virtue is rare.  And so there is a kind of struggle that takes place as that person seeks to life a fully virtuous life.  A man may never struggle with remaining faithful to his wife, but he may struggle with telling the truth, or displaying magnanimity (greatness of soul), or tempering his desire for food.

    St. Paul talks about striving for self-mastery and living a virtue, and compares it to running a race.  He notes that only one person wins a prize for first place, and says that we should run so as to win, rather than simply seeking a participation trophy.  He even says that he competes and subjects his body to penances, in order that he might also win.  
    He then also talks about how all the Jews received a sort of baptism in Moses, whether through the cloud or through the sea, and all participated in a foreshadowing of the Eucharist through the spiritual food and spiritual drink that was Christ.  But the Apostle notes that most of them did not please God.  
    What we can understand from this is that just because we are baptized; just because we receive the Eucharist, doesn’t mean that we can rest on our laurels.  While both are important sacraments that, respectively, make us adopted children of God and give us spiritual strength to live as children of God, receiving sacraments doesn’t mean that the graces work in us necessarily.  The fault lies not with the grace that God gives, but with our receptivity to those graces: with how we allow the grace to operate in our lives.
    We refer to these two aspects of the sacrament with two Latin phrases: ex opere operato, and ex opere operantis.  Ex opere operato means “from the work having been worked,” and refers to the objective reality that the sacraments have, as long as they are celebrated as the Church intends (the right words, the right stuff, and the right minster).  Ex opere operantis means “from the work of the one working,” and refers to the subjective reality and fruitfulness that the sacraments have, which is based upon the holiness of the minister and the recipient.  The former steers us clear of the heresy of Donatism, which stated that an evil minister could invalidate a sacrament, even if he did everything else correctly, and the latter steers us clear of magic, which takes the approach that, no matter what, just say the right words and do the right things and a change takes place, no matter whether a person opens him or herself up to the graces that God wants to convey.  

    This helps us understand why some baptized Catholics do not live up to their call to be saints.  Did the baptism not take?  Of course it did (as long as the minister celebrated it validly)!  But that recipient might be putting up a block to those graces through personal sin after the fact, or maybe the minister gave bad catechesis and treated baptism like an empty ceremony that doesn’t accomplish anything.  
    This helps us understand why, after we receive the Eucharist, sometimes we still want to sin.  The joke is that in the church we’re all pious and grateful for the Body and Blood of Christ, but then as we try to pull out of the parking lot we lose our temper and act like heathens who do not know Christ’s command to love one another and be patient.  
    And this is why we do our penitential practices, especially in the upcoming season of Lent.  We don’t do penance to earn salvation; we can’t earn salvation.  That’s the heresy of Pelagianism.  But our penances help discipline us to open ourselves to the graces that God wants to give, because our sin puts up obstacles (the theological word is obex) to the fruitfulness of God’s grace.  When we fast, when we abstain, when we give alms, we recognize our need for deeper conversion and to rely on God, rather than on ourselves or the goods of the world.  We make more room for God so that the spring of grace He has given us in baptism flows unobstructed, and so that the sacramental grace transforms us from the inside out.  
    Some get this from the beginning, like the workers whom the master hired at the beginning of the day.  For others it takes a long time, like those who only worked for the last hour.  But if we allow God’s grace to transform us into the saints He wants us to be in baptism, even at the last moments, then our hope of eternal salvation can be strong.
    We all likely have ways that need to grow in virtue, and our upcoming Lenten season is the perfect time to open ourselves up more to God’s grace so that we can grow in virtue.  May we run so as to win the prize, knowing that it is God who makes any good work possible and completes any good work that we began by His inspiration: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Groundhog Day Delayed

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Even though Groundhog Day was last Sunday, you may feel like we’re in the movie with Bill Murray as we come to today.  After all, it’s another Super Bowl Sunday with the Kansas City Chiefs playing, and the Lions not.  But, we also celebrated this exact Mass, that of the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, on 11 November 2024, just 3 months ago, because we celebrated the Resumed Fifth Sunday after Epiphany to fill in the last weeks of the Sundays after Pentecost.  The Sundays after Epiphany and before Septuagesima this year are more plentiful than they were last year.
    Luckily, the Word of God is living and effective, and is a treasure that cannot be fully mined or a spring that can fully be drained.  If we think we have exhausted the meaning of Sacred Scripture, the deficiency is in us, not the Word of God.
    It is so easy to look at the list that St. Paul gives us as something we just have to do, virtues we have to check off a list.  We strive to show mercy, humility, modesty, and patience.  We aim to bear with one another and forgive each other, and especially to demonstrate charity towards all.  Maybe sometimes some of those are more difficult than others.  But we get so wrapped up in what we should do, that we end up in a kind of Pelagianism where we earn our salvation.  Maybe consciously or subconsciously we think to ourselves: ‘If I am merciful, then God has to let me in to heaven.  If I just muster up the right amount of patience, then I don’t have to worry about eternal salvation.’  We end up trying to save ourselves, which is impossible for us, since it was also impossible for Abraham, Moses, and David, whose holiness probably exceeded our own.
    How easy it is to put the cart in front of the horse!  We want to earn God’s love and God’s favor.  We figure that if we just do enough good things, or avoid enough bad things, then God will be happy with us and we can rest easy.  But notice that St. Paul encourages us to certain behavior because we are already the elect of God.  St. Paul gives us moral laws, behaviors to follow, because we are already the beloved of God.  We don’t do certain things so that God will love us.  God loves us, so we do certain things and live a certain way.  
    St. Paul takes for granted, as do the epistles that we hear each week, that we already know that we belong to God the Father as His beloved sons and daughters in the Son of God.  That is the great gift of our salvation!  We had nothing that could close the gap that original sin had created.  We had no goodness in us that even approached deserving to be saved.  St. Paul writes in his epistle the Romans, chapter five: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us….Indeed, if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, once reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”  
    So God’s saving love comes first, and then what we do is our response to that love.  If we think about it like dating, it also makes sense.  If the other person doesn’t love us, no matter how many good things we may do for that person, it doesn’t create that love.  However, if that person loves us, then we want to be better, we want to show our appreciation for that love.  And we show that appreciation by doing the things that help that love to grow.  We can’t earn the other person’s love, but once we have that love, if we truly love the other person, we change ourselves freely and to the best of our ability to show gratitude for that love.
    Or, to use a similar example that our Lord uses in the Gospel, God’s love has already been sown into the fields of our heart.  Weeds do sometimes pop up, but we pull them up at the proper time in response to the desire that our field be clear so that the fruit of Christ’s love can grow as fully as possible, and not lose out to the weeds.  It’s not as if we can clear the weeds from our entire field, and then God will sow His love in us.  
    I often preach a fairly rigorous message about living upright lives.  I myself try to do whatever I can to live as Christ and His Church have taught, and I like the rules and the clear delineations of what the expectations are.  But it’s good for me, and for you, to remember that we don’t earn God’s love.  Nothing we could ever do could make God love us.  God has already loved us, so much that He allowed His Son to die for our salvation.  What we do is the response to God’s love, not the catalyst of His love.  
    You, brothers and sisters, are already chosen by God for salvation.  You, brothers and sisters, are beloved by God because, after Holy Baptism, He sees and loves in you what He sees and loves in His Son, Jesus Christ.  Do not seek to be worthy of God’s love; it will never be enough.  Open yourselves to His love, and return that love by putting on the mind of Christ, and living the life that He lived: mercifully, humbly, modestly, patiently, and charitably.  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

We Can't Fix It Ourselves

Third Sunday after Epiphany
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Perhaps it’s just a guy thing, but I guess that at least the men here, and possible the women here, have had a time in their lives when someone said that they had a problem that needed to be fixed.  It could be a big problem or a small problem, but somehow something is not working.  And while the person may have worked on the issue for a while, the new person says, “Lemme take a look at it,” and goes to whatever is malfunctioning.  Maybe the person looks at it, maybe taps a few buttons, or maybe even tries some real troubleshooting.  Not always, but at least sometimes, the second person looking at it is just as lost as the first, and says something like, “Yeah, I can’t really figure out why it’s not working.” 

    Our Lord in the Gospel today first heals a leper by touching Him.  This would have shocked people, since leprosy was so contagious, and lepers had to stay away from the public.  But Christ “fixes” him by healing the disease.  And then the centurion comes with another person to heal, and the Lord is about to go over to help that one.  But then a funny thing happens: the centurion says that physical presence is not necessary; a simple word will suffice.  The Lord, unlike us with our limitations, “fixes” the servant from afar; no tapping, kicking, or troubleshooting involved.  He wills it and it is done.
    Our world is, in many cases, broken.  But we can’t fix it.  No matter how many times we take a look at it, or how many times we tap here, kick there, re-read the manual, and press buttons, the healing of the world cannot be accomplished by human effort alone.  It needs Christ.  But how many times are we like the proverbial man, wanting our chance to take a look at it and fix the broken appliance? 
    Instead, the Lord invites us to have the faith of the centurion, and to trust that He can fix it, even without taking a second look, because He is the manufacturer, and knows exactly what is needed.  We are often closet-Pelagians: we figure if we simply do the right things, teach the right things, fast on the right days, then we will be saints.  We leave no room for God to fix us, and then wonder why we keep ending up broken.  We lack faith in God’s ability to heal and save.  And when we lack that faith, then like in Capernaum where people didn’t have faith in their local friend, Jesus, He’s not able to do many miracles. 
    How many times do we think that if we just did something ourselves, or if something within human control changed, then the world would be better?  We can go from the macro to the micro scale: if we had a different president; if we had different politicians; if we had a different pope; if we had a different bishop; if we had a different pastor; if we had a different spouse; if we had better-behaved kids.  All these different scenarios are where we are the agents of change and healing.  The Church survived and survives persecutions and bad governments; the Church survived bad popes, bishops, and priests; family holiness comes with the family we have, not the mythical family where everything seems perfect.  And all that is possible, not because the people were so great, but because God is, and the people relied on God for fixing the world.
    This is not to say, of course, that we shouldn’t do our best to elect politicians who promote what we know are universal goods; that we shouldn’t expect our pontiff to speak clearly and charitably about the unchanging truths of the faith; that bishops and priests shouldn’t be models of holiness and sound preaching; that families shouldn’t do all they can to respond to God’s grace and live in harmony and charity with each other.  Of course all those things are good.  But there has never been a time when everything was perfect in the Church, not even when our Lord walked the earth.  And the biggest changes came simply from individuals deciding to open themselves up to God’s grace and respond by doing their best to follow God’s will rather than their own.
    This also impacts what happens when others harm us.  St. Paul reminds us not to take revenge into our own hands, but to do good to those who wrong us.  Revenge belongs to God, because God is the only one who can effectively change the world for the better at its root.  When we decide to be agents of vengeance, we do not mete out perfect justice, but add at least a little bit of injustice to the equation, to try to convince the other not to wrong us again.  But that only leads to a vicious cycle where the other person, not truly aggrieved, takes revenge on us, giving us a little more than what justice demands, etc., etc.  Again, revenge is the Pelagian tendency in us that says that I have to be the one to fix the world, and hopefully God will bless my efforts.  Instead, St. Paul tells us to overcome evil with God, which will be its own revenge upon a person who does us wrong. 
    On this last Sunday before the -gesima Sundays, God invites us to have faith in Him and how He works, to trust in His timing and His ways over our own.  Yes, we should still cooperate with God’s grace, and achieve whatever good we can, but not as if we’re going to fix the world.  The good we do will be a response to God’s grace, which is the only thing that can fix the world.   Whenever we try to take God’s place, we do a very poor job of it.  Let God be God, who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.  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. 

If You Want Something Done Right, Ask for God's Help

Third Sunday after Epiphany
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.  I can’t tell you how many times I have operated under that saying.  In the long run it may help to explain things to others and have them assist you with your task, but in a crunch, it’s so much easier to do what you know needs to be done, and to make sure it’s done in a correct way.
    While this approach can be helpful in daily tasks at home or at work, it is poison to our faith.  St. Paul tells us, “do not be wise in your own estimation.”  The apostle talks not only about head knowledge, but also about thinking that we can take care of ourselves when it comes to our needs.  When something goes wrong, we figure out a way to fix it.  When we need something done, we do it.  We maybe even think that the phrase, “God helps those who help themselves” is a phrase from the Scriptures or at least uttered by a saint, when, in fact, it likely originated in pagan Greece. 

    Our Gospel tells us the approach that we should take, and does so twice over.  We heard about the leper and about the centurion.  Both demonstrated how to live the spiritual life: go to Jesus.  The leper certainly wanted health.  He wanted to be reunited with the rest of the community of Israel, and to be able to worship God in the temple.  But he couldn’t give himself what he wanted most.  He couldn’t do it himself.  So he went to our Lord and said, “‘Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.’”  He relied on the Lord and on the Lord’s good will, and did not presume that the Lord would even grant his request.  But he had faith that Christ could heal him, and heal him Christ did.
    The centurion wanted health for his slave.  He wanted the paralysis to end.  But he did not consider himself worthy to have our Lord even come to his house to do the miracle.  He simply had faith that Christ could heal, even from afar.  Maybe the centurion had tried doctors to cure the paralysis.  Maybe he had tried to take of the matter himself.  But to no avail. 
    It is also important to note that slaves were property.  Yet the centurion did not treat his slave as property.  If you have a horse that is lame, you euthanize it and put it out of its misery, because it is no longer good for anything, just using up supplies.  If a tree is no longer producing fruit, you cut it down so that something else can be planted that will produce food.  Countless Romans had likely dispatched their slaves because they were no longer able to help with the work that the estate required.  Yet the centurion had not killed his slave, but asked for healing.  And he trusted that the Lord could heal.
    When we trust only ourselves to advance spiritually, we are doomed to failure.  When we figure that we have gotten ourselves into a mess, and so we have to get ourselves out, we will not succeed.  Only with God’s help can we find the healing that we need.  Only with God’s help will we find progress in the spiritual life.  Only with God’s help can we find freedom from the messes in which we so often find ourselves.
    It is so easy to become Pelagians.  Pelagius was a British layman who taught that we have to reach out to God first, to do some good first, which God will then approve.  Pelagius denied original sin, and said that we could be holy without the assistance of grace.  This was declared heretical by the local Council of Carthage in 411, and was vehemently opposed by St. Augustine of Hippo.

      If anyone could understand that merely willing the good was not enough, St. Augustine certainly did.  He had tried almost every philosophy, every seductive way of living, including fathering a child out of wedlock.  Even after his mind began to believe in the truth of Catholicism, his will could not seem to follow.  Then, one day, at his wits end from the frustration of not being able to do what he wanted, he heard a voice call out, “Tolle, lege,” "Take, read," opened up St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, and was “knocked over” by God’s grace, which allowed him to live as he desired, according to the law of Christ and His Church. 
    But how often do we think that we are somehow more privileged than St. Augustine, that we can do it by ourselves?  We have a virtue in our life, and so we decide to achieve it, not asking for God’s help, or only doing so as a second thought.  God has to be the beginning, the middle, and the end of achieving any virtue.  We cannot start a virtue on our own, continue a virtue on our own, or achieve a virtue on our own.  The only thing we can do on our own is sin.  The rest is made possible by God’s grace.
    Or, perhaps there is a sin that we are fighting.  Perhaps we have been fighting it for some time, and we do not find any progress.  I try to give some helpful advice in the confessional, especially if I am not pressed for time, for ways that we can respond to God’s grace and cooperate with it.  But so often we forget that those practical pointers are meant to accompany prayer and asking for divine help, rather than pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. 
    Do we need to cooperate with God’s grace?  Certainly.  Can we be passive in our own conversion?  Certainly not.  But how often do we try to be wise in our own estimation and create plans which are not based in the will of God, and then find ourselves shocked that it didn’t work on our own?
    When it comes to the spiritual life, a better adage would be: if you want something done right, let God start the work.  Or: God helps those who ask for it.  Or, to quote the Psalms, “Unless the Lord build the house, in vain do its builders labor.”  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Beginning, Continuing, and Strengthening

 Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  One of the great devotions that has grown in the Church over the past 50 or so years is the Chaplet of Divine Mercy.  Pope St. John Paul II certainly aided in its dissemination through making the Sunday in the Octave of Easter also Divine Mercy Sunday.  St. Augustine, many centuries before St. Faustina, had noted that the water and blood that poured forth from Christ’s side represented baptism and the Eucharist, respectively, which, St. Augustine said, were a symbol for the entire Church.

    Baptism is where we get our start in the Church.  I have recently had the pleasure and honor of baptizing four babies whose parents attend this Mass.  Since I arrived in Flint, I haven’t baptized four babies in two months.  And I know there are more babies on the way!  That is a great blessing for our parish and for the families!!
    But baptism, while celebrated once in a lifetime, is a sacrament that we are meant to live out each day.  St. Paul tells us that we were baptized into our Lord’s death, so that we can also rise with Him to new life.  But then he goes on to say that our old self was crucified so that our sinful body might be done away with, so that we are no longer in slavery to sin.  I don’t know about you, but my old self, my concupiscence, my desire to disobey God, which remains even after baptism, is not something that went away when I was baptized.  It is something that has to be dealt with each and every day.  It has to be crucified each and every day.
    Because while baptism is once, the fruits of baptism are meant for each day.  Each day God gives us the necessary grace to avoid mortal sin.  Each day He gives us the grace to be more and more a child of God, not only in name but in deed.  Each day God wants to deepen our participation in the life of the Church.  But we have to respond.  God does not force His grace on us.  God does not make us be His children.  God does not coerce us to participate in the life of the Church.
    So often in the Church today, the baptism is about the day itself and the celebration: in the best light in the sacramental celebration; in the worst light in the baptism party afterwards.  But then, how much effort is put forth after that day?  The responsibility that Catholic parents take upon themselves at baptism to form their children in the faith is a lifetime commitment.  The same can be said for marriage, which should always come before children.  Imagine (and I have dealt with broken marriages where this has happened) that all you cared about was the wedding day (and perhaps the wedding night), and then you stopped putting in any effort to your marriage.  You’ll probably be seeing me again, but not for a baptism, but for some counseling or worse!
    Baptism is not a get-out-of-hell-free card that we will just pull out at our judgment, any more than a marriage license means we never need to work on our relationship again.  It is the beginning of a new life, not the end of all effort to live the faith.
    But our Lord also knows that we need strength to live out that call to die daily to our selves and live for Him.  And so He gave us the Eucharist as our food for the pilgrimage to heaven.  The crowd who had been following Jesus was tired.  They needed something to continue following Him.  So He fed them with bread and fish.  So our Lord feeds us, not with fish, and not with bread, but with His own Body and Blood.  This supernatural nourishment gives us the ability to live for Christ and daily die to our old self.  The Eucharist fills us even more with necessary grace, and increases sacramental and saving grace within us.  
    But the Eucharist also gives us strength as we do those daily ascetical works that also help us live for the Lord more.  The pious practices that we do are not earning our salvation, as no one can earn it, but is showing that we want God more and our old self less.  Abstaining from meat on Fridays, or fasting, or the extra prayers that we say, or time spent in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, or the Rosary or Chaplet of Divine mercy are all meant to help us grow closer to God and remind our bodies that this earth is not all there is to live for, that our appetites do not need to rule us.  
    Our Lord invites us today to reflect on how we are living out our baptismal call, day-by-day.  Are we trying to cooperate with God’s grace to put the sinful old man to death?  Or are we living a life that is focused on Christ?  Do we work to end hate, in thought and/or word, or do we let our tongues and our passions rule us?  Do we lack custody of the eyes, heart, and body, or do we practice the virtue of chastity?  Again, we can’t do it by ourselves; that’s the error of Pelagianism.   We need God’s grace and God’s strength to be able to do anything.  But with our worthy reception of the Eucharist, all things are possible for us in Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen. 

Our True Identity

Feast of the Baptism of the Lord

One of the most popular Disney movies is “The Lion King.”  I think we’ve all seen it; I know as a kid I watched it too many times to count.  Powers did a great stage production of it last year.  Towards the end of the movie, there is a powerful scene, and I won’t be able to do justice to it here, but it’s the scene where Rafiki, the wise baboon, tells Simba, now grown and hanging out in the jungle with Timon and Pumba, that his father, Mufasa, is still alive (remember that Scar had killed Mufasa when Mufasa saved Simba).  Rafiki takes Simba to a pool, where Simba looks into the pool and sees his reflection.  Disappionted, Simba says that it’s just his reflection.  “Look harder,” Rafiki says.  And Simba looks again.  Rafiki continues, “You see, he lives in you.”

Today we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord.  Even though Jesus was already God the Father’s co-eternal Son, still, the voice of the Father is heard from the heavens, “‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.’”  Jesus had no need to be baptized, but he still allowed St. John the Baptist to baptize him as a model for what we are to do, and to show us the reality of what happens.

When we are baptized, original sin is washed away from us, like dirt being washed away by the water.  When we are baptized, we become a member of the Church, the mystical Body of Christ, the group of those who follow Jesus’ teachings.  When we are baptized, even if we cannot hear it, the voice of the Father comes from heaven and says, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”  In baptism, we become sons and daughters in the Son of God.  God gives us His life, and imprints in us the identity of His Son, Jesus Christ.  That becomes who we are, and who we are meant to be.

Too often, we identify ourselves by something other than our baptism.  Maybe we identify ourselves by our work, by what we do.  Maybe we identify ourselves by our worldly successes, by how much money we make, or the home we own, or the car we drive.  Maybe we identify ourselves by our failures, by the mistakes we make, the sins we commit, the standards, realistic or unrealistic, that are set for us or that we set for ourselves.  I know that’s my Achille’s heal: to identify myself by my failures, and Lord knows there’s enough of them to think about!  But, however we think we should identify ourselves, God invites us today to identify ourselves the way He does: by our baptism. 

In Baptism we are given a dignity that infinitely surpasses anything we could hope to achieve on earth.  Even if we were the most powerful, the richest, the most famous person on earth, that is nothing compared to how God sees us.  Even the weakest, poorest, most insignificant person, if baptized, is a son or daughter of God in the Son of God, and has worth beyond measure in the eyes of God.  Think about how much love God has for Jesus.  Try to imagine it!  You can’t imagine it, because God’s love for Jesus is infinite, and our finite minds could never even come close to processing how much God loves Jesus.  Now, because of baptism, that love that God the Father has for Jesus is given, freely and generously, to us.  In baptism, we are joined to Christ so that the Father sees Jesus whenever He sees us.

It is that identity that then becomes the way we should live our lives.  We don’t live a certain way to earn God’s love.  That’s foolish and a heresy (Pelagianism).  We can never earn God’s love.  If we were to live the best and holist life ever, we could still never earn God’s love.  But the identity that we receive in baptism, the identity of Christ, that calls us to live in a certain way, to live as Jesus would live, to the best of our ability.  It is supposed to be, as St. Paul says, no longer I who lives but Christ who lives in me.  

Think back to the Lion King.  Simba had grown used to living as a wart hog and a meer cat.  It was fun, it was carefree (hakuna matata!), but it wasn’t who Simba was.  Sin is often fun, it’s almost always carefree.  But it’s not who we are.  We are not our jobs.  We are not our successes.  Most importantly, we are not our failures.  Satan tries to convince us that our identity is in something other than our baptism.  Simba, though, was a lion and a king.  And it was living according to that identity that gave him true joy.  We are, in Christ, little anointed ones, little christs.  In Jesus, we are sons and daughters of God.  That identity gives us true joy, and helps us know how we are to live our life.

When we were baptized, we went from merely being our parents’ child, to being a child of God in the Son of God.  God made our identity that of His beloved Son.  That is how we should see ourselves.  That shows us how to act in life.  That is the most important thing to know about who we are.  Today the voice of the Father speaks: “‘You are my beloved Son.’”

What We Deserve

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

            I love traveling, and especially if it’s a trip covering a long distance, I much prefer to fly than to drive.  I get very excited taking off, but I have to admit that each time we prepare for landing, I get a little nervous.  It certainly doesn’t help if it’s raining, or windy, or snowy.  What I’ve come to notice is that the most important thing is the approach to the runway.  If that’s going well, then there’s not as much to worry about.

            Really, in our Gospel and second reading today, we see how approach makes all the difference in the world.  In the Gospel, the Pharisee approaches salvation as if it’s a shoe-in.  He does the right stuff, so he should go to heaven, right?  His money doesn’t possess him, he tells the truth, he doesn’t sleep around, and he’s generous with his money, so there’s nothing to worry about!

            Except that he’s so convinced that if he just does the right things, then God will have to give him eternal salvation.  After all, he’s earned it!  This is in stark contrast with the Tax Collector, who approaches salvation as if it is a gift, a gift that he does not deserve, a gift that, perhaps, he has already lost.  He realizes that he is engaged in a business which is supporting a foreign, idolatrous power.  And, to make his own living, he must tell people that they owe more than they really do.

            It’s very easy for us to fall in the Pharisee’s mindset, because it’s reaffirmed for us in almost all we do.  When we go to the iTunes store we pay $1.29 and we get a song.  When we go to class we turn in all our work, do our best, and we deserve an A, or a B at the lowest.  We are a culture of entitlement.  The world owes me.  And we can act the same way with God.  We can figure that we deserve salvation because we haven’t done anything majorly wrong, and even if we have, we’ve gone to confession.  So God owes us heaven. 

            If we approach God this way, then not only are we like the Pharisee, but we are also falling into the sin of Pelagianism.  Pelagianism was a heresy, named after a monk called Pelagius, which asserted that we earn our own salvation.  God merely grants us what we have worked so hard to achieve.  It’s such a dangerous heresy because it’s very close to the truth, and it sounds like how life works in every other way.  But the reality is that we can never do anything to earn our salvation.  No avoidance of sins or good works can ever make God save us.  Rather, God offers us salvation as an unearned gift.  We have to respond to that gift, but it is, in the end, still a gift that we cannot and do not earn. 

            So then, how can St. Paul be so certain of his own salvation?  He says, “I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith.  From now on the crown of righteousness awaits me, which the Lord, the just judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearance.”  Isn’t St. Paul assuming that he earned his salvation?  He was, after all, a Pharisee before he converted. 

            No, St. Paul is not a Pelagian.  Rather, he knows how he has responded to God’s gift of salvation, a gift which he, in other letters, he admits he does not deserve, and he has acted in a way that shows that he has accepted that gift of salvation which God freely gives to those who believe in Him.  The Lord does not want us to suffer for all eternity in hell.  But He also respects our freedom, a freedom that can return love for the limitless love we have been shown by God in the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross, or a freedom which can reject God’s love by sins of greed, dishonesty, sexual immorality, and lack of stewardship of the gifts God has given to us. 

            And so we must have the right approach.  We ought to use our freedom to gain the true freedom which comes from following God rather than the license of doing anything, which only enslaves us to our passions and sin and Satan.  We must respond to God’s gift of love and salvation in all aspects of our life: how we vote; how we raise our families; what charities we support; how we witness to Christ to our friends and family; how we express love to others.  And then, for the times when we have failed to respond well to God’s love, we should take the approach of the tax collector, and ask for mercy from the All-Merciful God, who will forgive us for our sins that we have committed out of weakness.  And then, if we are truly contrite, and seek to receive God’s gift of salvation by the way we act, then we can have a sure and certain hope that if we have competed well, and finished the race, and kept the faith, that a crown of righteousness will also await us who have longed for the second coming of Christ at the end of time.  To that same Jesus Christ be glory forever and ever.  Amen.