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.  

How To Fix Us

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  There’s only so much repair work that can be done on an object before you have to buy a new one.  Patching it together eventually does not work.  As kids, when we would get a hole in the knees of our school uniform pants, mom or grandma would patch it up.  But if the patch got a hole in it, or if the stitching kept coming undone, mom and dad would break down and buy new navy blue pants.  Or maybe you had something that was duct taped together, until the adhesive started to wear out, and you had to finally get a new whatever rather than just taping it up again and again.  
    When we talk about the human person and following Christ, we’re not talking about a simple repair.  We need a comprehensive overhaul.  We may think we just need a few tweaks here and there, but in reality, what Christ desires of His followers is not possible except by His grace.  In order for our righteousness to surpass that of the Scribes and Pharisees, to live the deeper law that Christ gave in the Beatitudes, we can’t just muscle through ourselves.  The new law requires grace.  In order to exhibit the virtues St. Peter enumerates in the epistle, we cannot simply struggle hard enough in order to live that way.  We need Christ’s grace to transform us.
    When we talk about conversion, we often use the Greek word, metanoia.  That word comes from two Greek words, 𝜇𝜀𝜏𝛼, meaning change, and 𝜈𝜊𝜐𝜍, meaning mind.  But, perhaps better than mind is the idea of seeing the world differently.  Conversion, from the Latin words cum and versio, meaning to turn towards something, means that we see the world differently because we have turned ourselves towards Christ and have taken on His mind.  But it even goes beyond the intellect.  Conversion–metanoia–means that even our hearts are changed so that we re-direct our loves to the way that Christ loves.  
    And only when we love the way that Christ loves and see the way that Christ sees can return a blessing for a curse.  Only when we allow the grace of God to change us can we not only avoid murdering others, as the commandment prescribes, but also avoid hatred towards the other in our heart, the deeper meaning of the word “anger” that St. Matthew uses in the Gospel.  
    We don’t have it in this passage, but our Lord raises the bar for the sixth commandment as well as the fifth commandment.  Only when we allow the grace of God to change us so that we love as He loves can we not only avoid committing adultery and fornication, but we go deeper and avoid even using someone in our hearts and minds.  And for the eighth commandment, not only do we not swear by anything–not by heaven, not by Jerusalem, not by our head–but we let our yes mean yes and our no mean no.  We speak straightforwardly.
    Too often we try to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and then get frustrated when we cannot live up to the standard that we want, or the standard to which Christ calls us.  But we have to recognize that we are broken, and that Christ alone can repair us.  This is not to say that we are totally depraved, as some Protestants hold.  God still made us good, and that goodness exists in us no matter what.  However, that goodness does not always operate in us because of sin and our draw towards it.  And the healing that we need, the repair, only comes by what Christ has done for us.  Only He can heal what has wounded us.  It would be like trying to heal our own compound fracture without having any medical knowledge beyond a basic grasp of the body.  We might get some things right, but we will never be able to heal ourselves as we need to be healed to be whole again without the help of the Divine Physician.
    And this should give us hope.  Our salvation does not rest on us alone.  We do have to cooperate in it, and Christ gives us many opportunities to work with Him in going to heaven, but if we could save ourselves, all that Christ did and taught would be wholly unnecessary, which means that Abraham would have been able to go to heaven without a redeemer.  But that would make the sacrifice of Christ unnecessary, at least for some, which would be cruel to make a Son go through if it were not truly necessary.
    This is the great battle between Christ and the Pharisees.  They complained about the Lord always spending time with sinners, but the sinners were the ones who knew they were broken and couldn’t fix themselves.  The Pharisees thought they were fine, that they could live the Old Law perfectly on their own, and so did not need a redeemer, which made many of them miss out on the salvation Christ was offering.  

    Like the first line of the Coldplay song, “Fix You,” says, we tried our best but we didn’t succeed.  We tried to fix ourselves, but it didn’t work.  We needed a healer, a Salvator, to use the Latin, to fix what sin had broken in us.  And that’s precisely what Christ came to do.  He came to fix us so that we could offer blessings when we are cursed, so that we could be compassionate, so that our lips would not speak deceit.  Christ came so that our hearts and minds could be changed not only to avoid the grave actions of sin, but even to change the heart whence those grave actions arose.  We cannot do it on our own.  We cannot repair ourselves enough to be prepared for heaven.  We need Christ to fix us.  Christ who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen.   

Going to Jesus with Faith

Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  This passage of the raising of the Jairus’s daughter (in Matthew’s account he is only called a certain official), with the healing of the woman with a hemorrhage sandwiched in-between, is important enough that it is included in all three synoptic Gospel accounts (Matthew, Mark, and Luke).  And we have two things going on: one, the Lord goes to raise the daughter of Jairus (Luke and Mark put her at the point of death, but not dead yet); two, the Lord heals the woman with the hemorrhage, seemingly without even knowing it (at least in the other accounts).  But both of these accounts show important aspects of the life of a disciple: going to Christ and having faith.
    In both parts of today’s Gospel, the people go to the Savior for what they want.  The official goes so that his daughter might have life.  He pleads with Christ to heal her, but after she has died, to raise her from the dead.  The woman needs healing, and interrupts the Lord’s journey to Jairus’s house.  She does not feel comfortable speaking with Christ, but has confidence that all she has to do is touch His clothes and she will be healed.  In both cases, the people go to Christ for what they need, and He provides for them.
    In both parts of today’s Gospel, that approach to the Lord is motivated by faith.  Jairus has faith that the Lord will heal or raise his daughter.  The woman has faith that if she but touches the hem of Christ’s garment that she will receive the healing for which she has long been searching.  In all three Gospel accounts, this story is fairly early in the Lord’s public ministry, so this faith is based mostly on the hope for who this itinerant rabbi might be.
    The two temptations for us as followers of Christ are to fall into the error of a kind of fideism, which the philosopher Alvin Plantinga describes as “the exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason”; or rationalism, where faith has no role in our lives, and we only follow scientific realities.  Now, both might seem like an extreme no one here would fall into, but they can sneak up quite quickly. 
    In the case of a brand of fideism, we go to God, which is good, but we don’t also utilize what God has revealed through human reason.  There are those who refuse to seek medical treatment because faith in God’s healing will suffice, and if God wants the person to be healed, that person will be healed.  When someone is sick, we should go to God to ask for the health of an individual.  We should have faith that God can do amazing things without any assistance from another, just like in the Gospel.  But we should also utilize that gifts that God has given, whether to us or to others, in utilizing the natural sciences to work God’s healing.  If a child’s arm is broken, we don’t just pray over that child, hoping that the bone will set itself correctly.  We pray for healing, and we take the child to a doctor to set the arm and put it in a cast.
    In the case of a type of rationalism, we ignore God altogether, and rely simply upon our wisdom.  While this might seem like something we would never do, especially as people who go to church, it can sneak in quite easily and clandestinely to our lives, such that, as we approach decisions, we fail to include God in those decisions at all.  We start out from the view that we know what is best, and ask God simply to affirm our decision, rather than putting our decision to him, and leaving space in our life for His will to be done.  We allow our reason to take the place of God’s providence, and leave no room for God to act.
    St. Paul says in today’s epistle that we should follow his example, and St. Paul was someone who both used reason and relied on faith in God.  He avoided the vicious extremes of fideism and rationalism, and took the virtuous middle road of rational faith, leaving room for God and also utilizing his own wisdom.  We see this in the trial St. Paul undergoes before he is sent to Rome for Caesar’s decision.

    St. Paul had been told by the Holy Spirit that he would go to Jerusalem to undergo imprisonment and hardships.  When, on his way to Jerusalem, he stopped in Caesarea, a prophet by the name of Agabus came to St. Paul, “too Paul’s belt, bound his own feet and hands with it, and said, ‘Thus says the holy Spirit: This is the way the Jews will bind the owner of this belt in Jerusalem, and they will hand him over to the Gentiles.’”  St. Paul was open to the will of God leading him back to Jerusalem.  But, when on trial before the high priest and Sanhedrin, Paul also realized that some were Pharisees, who believe in the resurrection, and some were Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection.  He used that knowledge to pit them against each other, saying that he was on trial for his belief in the resurrection of the dead, such that the Pharisees wanted to release him, but the Sadducees would not allow it.
    Towards the end of that trial, the Lord spoke to St. Paul and said, “‘Take courage.  For just as you have borne witness to my cause in Jerusalem, so you must also bear witness in Rome.’”  St. Paul was transferred back to Caesarea to be questioned by the Roman governor Felix.  The case wouldn’t be decided, as Felix and his successor, Festus, wanted to curry favor from the Jews, no doubt to help keep peace.  When St. Paul saw that Festus wanted to send him back to Jerusalem, he invoked his right as a Roman citizen, and said, “‘I appeal to Caesar.’”  Festus keeps him a little longer and lets him speak to King Agrippa.  King Agrippa, after hearing Paul’s testimony and witness of his faith, admits that Paul had done nothing wrong, and told Festus, “‘This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar.’”  But St. Paul knew that God wanted him to witness to the faith in Rome, so he appealed to Caesar, rather than risk the chance of being set free again.  St. Paul trusted in God, believed what God had revealed to him, but also used his reason and wit to cooperate with the plan of God.
     Our challenge today is to follow the example of Jairus and of the woman with the hemorrhage and of St. Paul: to go to the Lord when we are in any need, and to have faith in His plan.  This doesn’t mean that we ignore God’s gift of reason to us, nor does it mean that we ignore God and only use our reason.  Rather, we take our desires and plans to God, and submit them to His Divine Providence, knowing that sometimes God will intervene in some way to change our plans to be more in accord with His, and that sometimes God will allow our plans to proceed as we desired.  But the key is that we have faith in God, and that we go to Him in any need: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Obedience and Humility

Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Obedience and humility.  These two virtues, pointed to in our readings today, are probably two of the least practiced or appreciated virtues in society today.  In fact, there are probably people who consider either both or at least one of those virtues as not really that good.

    Driving in Flint, I see examples of disobedience all the time.  And I’m not talking about driving maybe 1-5 mph over the speed limit.  Even (or maybe especially) when I’m not working with the Michigan State Police, I see people routinely driving 10 or more mph above the speed limit, or passing in the center turn lane, or even running red lights, or rolling through a stop sign.  And as someone who values obedience, it drives me nuts!
    But beyond traffic laws, the idea of obeying another bristles most Americans.  We find excuses why we shouldn’t have to obey this or that person: she’s a Republican; he’s a Democrat; she doesn’t follow through on her commitments; did you see what he did when he didn’t think anyone was looking?  The list goes on.  It’s not a bad thing to want integrity of life in someone who has authority over us.  But sometimes I think that we only would listen to Jesus or the Blessed Mother, because they’re sinless.
    And let’s be honest, we wouldn’t even listen to them.  We’d find some reason to write even Jesus or the Blessed Mother off when they tell us to do difficult things.  And we’d probably use their sinlessness against them: “Yeah, they tell us to do X, but that’s easy for them to say, they’re sinless!” 
    Jesus was no stranger to the discontinuity between instruction and example.  But He doesn’t tell the people to stop obeying the Pharisees and scribes in what they teach about they faith.  Instead, Jesus tells them not to follow their example, even while they follow what they teach.  And, He tells them to center their lives around the one master, the Christ (and that’s Jesus). 
    But to follow what someone teaches, even if their life doesn’t measure up to that standard, takes real humility.  Because humility admits that I don’t know everything, and that sometimes other people are going to legitimately ask me to do something that I don’t want to do, but that I should still do it anyway.  Humility says that I don’t have to be in charge of every aspect of my life, that I can actually find happiness in submitting to another’s will, as long as it’s not against what God has revealed. 
    And part of Jesus’ message today is that the important thing is to follow God’s will for our lives, even when those who are telling us to follow it don’t do so perfectly, or maybe don’t even try.  The most important thing is not the vehicle by which the message is conveyed; it’s the message.  When the truth presents itself to us, our only good option is to follow it, even if the message of truth is not spread by someone fully living that truth him or herself.
    Take last weekend’s Gospel: Jesus told us that the two great commandments are to love God with all of who we are, and love our neighbor as ourselves.  And I preached on what that looks like.  But, and this will come as no shock to at least some of you, I don’t always love God with all of who I am, and I don’t always love my neighbor.  I do my best to live out the great commandments, but I often fail.  Does that mean that you shouldn’t love God or your neighbor because I’m not doing it perfectly?  If that were the case, no one would ever hear the Gospel, because everyone who has preached the Gospel, outside of Jesus and Mary, have struggled to keep it, including our first pope, St. Peter.
    St. Paul reminds us that we hold the treasure of the Gospel in earthen vessels.  And he says that the reason for this is, “that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us.”  There is a method to knowing that everyone who preaches the Gospel does not fully live up to us, so that people aren’t convinced that it’s simply some special power that only an elite few have.  No, the power of the Gospel comes not from the messenger, but from God, the author of the Gospel. 
    Does that mean that we don’t worry about living the Gospel to our fullest ability because God will show the power of the Gospel even if we are not living it?  Certainly not.  There is a greater witness when someone has the integrity of living what they preach.  When someone lives contrary to that message, it lessens our desire to live according to the message, which is part of the definition of scandal.  Imagine a marriage counselor telling a couple to work out their differences through dialogue, and then you find out that he beats his wife whenever she does something he doesn’t like.  You’d be less likely to listen to him in the future.  So we should do our best to live out the message that we preach to others about following Christ.
    Still, we need not be overly worried when we do not live according to God’s will perfectly, and then decide not to preach what God teaches because we don’t always live up to it.  Yes, we should try our best to cooperate with God’s grace each day to do His will, but we shouldn’t cease our witness to the Gospel because we ourselves are not perfect.  The importance is that the truth is preached and that people have a chance to make it their own in their life, no matter who is preaching it.  May we be humble enough to do our best to live obediently to God’s will each day, making God’s will the most important thing in our life, rather than our own will.

The Power of Easter

Easter Sunday
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.].  What does Easter mean to you?  You have come here to Mass, so it clearly has some religious importance for you.  Perhaps it is also a day with extra time spent with extended family, and maybe a better meal than usual.  But I dare guess that Easter does not have the same potency for us as it did for our Lord’s first disciples.
    Part of the waning of the extraordinary nature of Easter is due to a lack of appreciation of the seriousness of sin.  Whether it directly affects us or not, we all live in an environment that supposes that everyone is basically good, and everyone generally goes to heaven.  The first disciples did not suffer that opinion; their experience told them the exact opposite.
    The disciples lived in a time when a foreign power occupied their homeland.  This foreign power, the Romans, pushed their pagan views upon all under their rule.  They promoted worshipping false gods; sexual immorality, both homo- and heterosexual in nature; violence and intimidation as the surest way to keep peace (we might say today: might makes right). 
    But the Romans were not the only problem for the Jews.  No, there was real spiritual oppression by their own religious leaders, twisting the law and its meaning.  No small number of Jews found themselves in a position outside of what the Pharisees taught as a moral way of life.  How often do the Gospels relate that tax collectors and sinners were following Christ and changing their lives!  There were also many diseases and illnesses that could shorten a person’s life or lead them to be ostracized from even family and friends.
    Among the Romans, the Pharisees, sickness, and a lack of personal holiness, the disciples knew they needed a savior.  They knew that they had to change, but didn’t know if they could do it.  They hoped for life after death, a place of the fullness of blessings and peace, but did not know if such a place were attainable. 
    We ourselves live in a time that differs greatly and in some ways not at all from the time of the disciples.  Advances in medicine have extended life expectancy, but there are new diseases being developed, and wreaking havoc across the world.  Some Catholic bishops, priests, and laity promote teachings contrary to the faith.  Rather than a foreign government pushing their will upon a particular people, a wide-sweeping acceptance of worship of money and power, sexual immorality of various kinds, seemingly endless violence, even against children, and a might-makes-right mentality are ubiquitous. 
    The power of Easter is that God the Son conquered all that is wrong and fallen through His Death and Resurrection.  We no longer have to wonder if life after death is possible; Christ died and came back to life.  If death, the consequence of sin, no longer has the last word, then everything good and holy is possible.  No power, whether earthly or spiritual, can hold us back if we are in Christ.  No oppressor will have the final victory over us if we belong to Christ, the Victor over sin, death, and everything that connects itself to those fallen realities.
    Easter gives us the answer, just as it gave the answer to the first disciples, and has given the answer to countless generations since then.  Easter is a reminder that sin and death do not get the last word, but God does, because God conquered sin and death in Christ.  If we want Easter to make a difference, and not just be a Sunday where we eat better food and see other relatives, then we must take hold of the Easter graces and practices and live them out each day and each week.  If we want to see endless violence and suffering end, then we need to live as Easter people.
    Easter means making God number one in our life.  Not sports.  Not vacations.  Not relaxation.  Not exercise.  Not even another person, as dear as they may be to us.  God has to be number one.  Those other things and many more are good, but they cannot take the place of God.  If you want the reign of sin and death to which we have grown so accustomed to end, go to church every Sunday and Holyday, not simply to go, but to be transformed by the grace of God.  Go to confession at least every month, to acknowledge that you are a sinner and in need of God’s mercy.  Allow Christ’s victory over sin to take hold in your life by handing over to Christ all that is fallen and sinful, and receive the mercy which makes possible true transformation. 
    Easter means not supporting death, in any of its forms.  If we wish to live in Easter joy, we cannot re-invite the works of death into our life, or the life of others.  In its most extreme positions, it means not supporting abortion or euthanasia.  How can we not expect death and destruction when it’s openly voted for and codified in law?  When we devalue one human life, we devalue all human lives.  Other works of death include racism, unjust prejudice, and even those actions and thoughts of hatred towards other at work, on the road, or in any other place.  None of those are part of the new life that Christ brought.  The demonization of those who have different views, even if the ideas they propose are wrong, does not contribute to the new life that Christ desires for us. 
    If we wish Easter to be more than simply another Sunday; if we wish to see an end to the widespread violence and hate, then we need to open ourselves up to the graces from God that take us away from death and lead us to eternal life.  Go to church every Sunday and Holyday; go to confession regularly; stop supporting works of death.  If we want the joy and peace of Easter, of Christ’s victory over sin and death, then live His life each day to the best of your ability.  Allow the power of Easter to resonate in every inch of our being.  [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]

Not Them vs. Us

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

If you’ve been watching the news recently (a depressing venture, to be sure), you’ve heard about students from Convington Catholic High School at the March for Life.  A first video was shared which seemed to show an elder Native American activist being shouted at by the students, some with “Make America Great Again” hats, with one student in particular with a smug, very condescending smile on his face.  Some also claimed that the students were chanting “Build the Wall.”  The students were excoriated in the media as being the problem with America, and by some, the problem with the pro-life movement.  The Diocese of Convington apologized for the students’ behavior and judged them as guilty based upon the popular narrative at the time.

Shortly after the first video was released, a second video was released with more context, showing that the students were being yelled at by an African-American group that was protesting.  That group of people were yelling hateful things towards the students, so, to drown out the hate, they started doing school chants.  At that point, the elder Native American and his group walked towards the students, and the Native American elder stood very close to the smiling student.  That student explained that he was smiling to try to diffuse a very tense situation, and did what he thought was best to keep other students from the school from becoming verbally or physically abusive in retaliation.  Some apologies and retractions were issued about those who pounced on the first video, and these students were put forward as good examples of our youth not being baited into a fight, while others were excoriated for jumping to conclusions and reporting those conclusions before all the facts were available.

I’m not here to dissect all the blame in this situation, and who is right and who is wrong.  I’m here to preach the Gospel, and our Gospel today bears upon this situation.  Jesus in the Gospel says, quoting the Prophet Isaiah, that he has come “‘to proclaim liberty to captives…[and] to let the oppressed go free.’”  When we hear those words, we probably associate them with those who are incarcerated or held by strong forces (captives) and those who are downtrodden (the oppressed).  Maybe we think about it in social terms or government terms, or maybe even military or law enforcement terms (probably, some of those hearing it understood Jesus to mean that He was going to free them from Roman rule).  

But we are today captivated, that is to say, held by, and oppressed by more things than just foreign powers or strong worldly forces.  We are, I would suggested, held captive and oppressed by a mentality, from which Jesus came to free us.  That mentality, which captivates and oppresses us is a mentality which divides the world into “them” and “us.”  Jesus does not see people as “others,” but rather, as “His,” because all things have been handed over to Him by His Father, by our heavenly Father.  

This is not to say that Jesus naïvely thought that everyone was working for him.  How many times did Jesus condemn the scribes and Pharisees for their wrong interpretation of the law, their oppression of people, and they hypocrisy.  And yet, when a Pharisee came asking Jesus about the greatest commandment, and when Jesus responded, that Pharisee gave his assent to the teaching of Jesus, then Jesus told the Pharisee that he was not far from salvation.  Jesus condemned the misreading and skepticism about the resurrection of the dead by the Sadducees, and yet Nicodemus, one of the Sadducees, engaged in dialogue with Jesus about baptism and being born again, and there was no condemnation from Jesus.  Jesus told the adulterous woman to go and sin no more, and called tax collectors to stop cheating others, and called everyone to stop hating their enemies, or looking lustfully at people, or swearing oaths blithely.  But Jesus also welcomed sinners into His company and invited them to a relationship with Him so that they could find the conversion to which Jesus called them.

We have become captives and oppressed by a worldview that divides the world.  We are all too happy to condemn them when they don’t agree with us.  This is hard to do as humans, because we’re social and want to belong.  So we demonize others, put them down, so that we can write them off.  Look at Congress and the President over the past month.  Nothing was getting done because each side had demonized the other.  There’s plenty of blame to go around for both sides; no one side is perfectly innocent.  The same goes for the coverage of the Convington Catholic students.  And yet, we willingly let ourselves be led like lemmings to a pre-determined conclusion because of a political or social affiliation that we value more than our affiliation with Jesus.  St. Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians: 

remember that at one time you, Gentiles in the flesh…were at that time without Christ, alienated from the community of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world.  But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become nearly by the blood of Christ.  For he is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh…[creating] in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace.

St. Paul puts it in terms of Gentile and Jew, the Jewish division of the world.  But it applies to any division we make in our world.

There are people who do evil in the world.  There is legitimate blame for things that people do wrong, for which we can hold them accountable.  But if we see the world through the lens of “them” vs. “us,” then we are ignoring the Good News that Jesus came to bring, that He came to bring us freedom from being held captive and oppressed by division, and that God’s freedom, prophesied by Isaiah, has been fulfilled by Christ.

God's View of Marriage

Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

My sister, Allison,
and her fiancé, Tom

My youngest sister, Allison, is getting married in March.  This is the first and only wedding that I’ll have the chance to do for one of my siblings (unless, God-forbid, a spouse dies), since my other sister, Amanda, got married before I was a priest.  Of course, in all of the prep, there’s the wedding questions about the Mass, the dress, the tuxedos or suits, the reception, the food, and whom to invite.  As a priest, I see lots of different options for how weddings are celebrated.  I will say that entertainment and mass media has increased the ideas that people have (some good, some bad) for what their wedding should look like.

What almost never gets considered, or is given only a small consideration, is how the Church, the Bride of Christ, views the wedding and, more importantly, the marriage.  We hear about marriage in our first reading and Gospel today, but before I get there, I do want to take the opportunity to say that the Church expects certain things even from the wedding, ways that our Catholic understanding of marriage is expressed.  But just having a wedding in a church is a big part of that.  A wedding is not a ceremony whose goal is to make the couple look as much like royalty as possible.  A wedding is supposed to be in a Catholic church (unless the bride or groom would find such a location offensive due to their Jewish or Muslim faith) because marriage is a sacred covenant, an agreement between the couple, yes, but also between the couple and God.  And a church is a place where God dwells in a way that God doesn’t dwell on a beach, in a fancy barn, or anywhere else.  

But, back to the readings.  In our first reading we hear about God creating marriage.  It’s not explicit, but God creates Eve for Adam, as an equal partner, to compliment him.  Man and woman are different (I know that, for many of us, that’s common sense, but in today’s culture, saying that man and woman are different is quite shocking!).  And in creating Eve to be with Adam, God creates marriage.  And since God created marriage, and since God does always what is for our good, we see in Adam and Eve a pattern with which we have no authority to tinker.  Marriage cannot be one man and two women; it cannot be one woman and two men; it cannot be two people of the same sex.  That doesn’t sound loving, but everything God does for us is an act of love, and Scripture makes it very clear how God created marriage.  

Now, throughout the Old Testament, God continued to reveal more about how He created marriage.  But, sometimes the message got muddled.  And that’s where our Gospel comes in.  The Pharisees ask Jesus if, as Moses said, divorce is still allowed in following Jesus.  Jesus had overturned a lot of what the Pharisees thought was right, and so they’re seeing if he’s upending marriage, too.  Moses allowed a husband to divorce his wife for certain reasons, including infidelity.  But Jesus clarifies: man and woman in marriage are no longer two, but one flesh, joined by God.  So what God has joined together, no one must separate.  

As radical as it now sounds to say that two men or two women cannot be married in the eyes of God and His Church, it was that radical in the time of Jesus to say that divorce could not happen.  This was not an easy statement.  It was very counter-cultural.  But Jesus, who is God, who is Love Incarnate, tells us this so that we can truly be happy.

This is, I’m sure, where all sorts of objections come to our mind.  When we think about how the Church does not allow or recognize homosexual marriage, maybe we think it’s not fair to have two people who feel a certain way for each other to deny them marriage.  But marriage is ordered toward sex (as well as union and fidelity and the good of the spouses), and sex is ordered toward children.  All the goods of marriage have to be present to be part of God’s plan.  Older people get married, yes, but even sometimes older people conceive children; just ask Abraham and Sarah or Elizabeth and Zechariah.  And God reveals in the Old and New Testament that only those who are married can have holy sex.

When we think about divorce and remarriage, sometimes people bring up cases of abuse, and say that the Church is saying they need to stay in those abusive relationships.  We turn back to Genesis: Adam and Eve are co-equal partners, who are there to help each other.  Abuse is not an example of helping each other.  Marriages can be annulled if abuse happens, but even before that, the defense of self and/or one’s children is another basic part of God’s teaching.  If you’re in an abusive relationship, God is not calling you to be a verbal or physical punching bag.  Come to me, and I’ll help you to take care of your marriage situation.  

Even if you’re not part of an abusive marriage that broke up, but simply divorced, I can help you examine if there was an obstacle that existed before you were married, even if it was only known after you got married.  Or if you have questions about your marriage situation, I’ll be glad to help you understand it in the light of what God has revealed in Sacred Scripture and the teaching of the Church so that you can be truly happy according to God’s plan.  I’m not here to beat you up spiritually or emotionally even if your marriage is not what is part of God’s plan; I’m here to help you get to that place where your marriage reflects God’s vision for marriage.

There are a lot of groups that give us what they think is the key to a happy marriage.  We see royal marriages, Hollywood marriages, and what some people call marriage but which are, in God’s eyes, not marriage.  Go to the Creator of marriage to understand how to live this beautiful Sacrament.  Go to what He has revealed through Scripture and the Church to understand how marriage truly works.  It may be difficult; it may be counter-cultural.  But, as it comes from the source of all true happiness and joy, it will make you truly happy and filled with joy.

Glorifying God and Lifting Burdens

Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

This week is the week the Church in the United States focuses on promoting vocations to the priesthood, diaconate, and consecrated life, and it’s called National Vocation Awareness Week.  That may seem odd, because our first reading from Malachi and our Gospel passage sound pretty rough on priests.  God the Father, speaking through Malachi, has some harsh words for priests: “If you do not listen, if you do not lay it to bear, to give glory to my name, says the LORD of hosts, I will send a curse upon you.”  God the Son, Jesus, also is critical of the scribes and Pharisees, who were not necessarily priests, but who were leaders of the Jewish communities in their day: “‘The scribes and Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses.  Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example.  For they preach but they do not practice.  They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them.’”  It doesn’t sound like God the Father or Jesus has much love for priests and religious leaders!

  But, on the contrary, God the Father and Jesus both love priests, but they both also hold priests to a very high standard, because they are acting in God’s Name and are called to reflect who God is.  As Jesus says elsewhere, “To whom much has been given, much will be expected.”  God through Malachi chastises the priests because they are not leading the people in giving glory to God’s Name.  And Jesus does not condemn the priests for what they are teaching, but for what they fail to do in terms of helping God’s people.  Sadly, in our own country, a few priests have not led the people in glorifying God, and they have not helped God’s people, but have hurt them, sometimes in horrific ways.  

So what is the solution?  Should we get rid of priests?  Should we close down the seminaries and become Christian communities who do not have priests because a small group of priests have not lived up to their vocation?  To do so would be not put ourselves as masters of the Church, and as I preached a few months ago, it is not our Church; the Church belongs to Jesus; She is His Bride.  Instead, we need better priests.

People often ask me what I do each day (usually right before someone else chimes in that priests only work for an hour or two on Sundays).  And I can say that no two days are exactly the same.  There are some common things, but you never know what will happen on any given day.  The most important part of my job is to do what Malachi said: to lead you in giving glory to God, and that happens most perfectly, most eminently, in the Mass.  The Mass is the high point of my day, as I offer to God the Father through Christ the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit, the one, acceptable sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross for the salvation of the world.  And in that, I hopefully draw you in, not to glorify ourselves, not to focus inward on how great we are, because we are not great, but rather, to glorify God and so focus on serving God first in the Mass and then after the Mass in our daily lives.  That is the key to a priest’s life: the Mass; the Eucharist.

Outside of that, I try to do what Jesus condemned the scribes and Pharisees for not doing: practicing what I preach, and lifting burdens from people’s shoulders.  Practicing what I preach means treating ever parishioner the way I would want to be treated, and treating them according to what the Church, sitting on the Chair of St. Peter, has taught, never giving special consideration because a person is famous, gives a lot, or is a friend.  Each day I also try to lift the burdens of the people in my parish, as I talk to them about their marriages, as I hear their confessions and offer them God’s mercy, as I try to help our school students see how much God loves them and help them to mature as Catholic young men and women.  Does it take a lot out of me?  Certainly.  Being a priest is about giving of oneself, in a similar way to how marriage is about giving of oneself (without the sex part).  But that is why the Eucharist is so important, because it is the source of the strength and wisdom, without which a priest would quickly burn out and become useless.

The reality is that we need more priests.  We need courageous, adventurous men who are trying to live according to God’s law to become priests.  We don’t need sissies; they won’t make it.  The priesthood calls for a man’s man; not a man with machismo, who is all about his own strength, but for a man who seeks to glorify God and care for the people entrusted to his care, even when the people don’t want the care that he knows God wants for them.  You don’t have to be perfect to become a priest; I’m living proof of that!  But you do have to want to follow God as perfectly as you can, so that God can be glorified, and His people can be cared for in love and truth.  

The Spirit of the Law

Sixth Week in Ordinary Time

Some, or maybe many of you, have heard that I have applied to become the chaplain of the Flint Post of the Michigan State Police.  I’m almost done with the process and will know by the middle of March whether I have been approved or not.  In the mean time, hoping that I am approved, and trying to get to know the troopers, I have been doing ride-alongs with them.  Many people who have experiences with law enforcement have negative experiences with them, because they have been caught doing something wrong.  But in my ride-alongs, I have been extremely impressed with the mercy of the troopers, and how often people get only a warning.  In fact, on one ride-along, a trooper asked me (and he said, “Be honest,”), “Do you think I should be doing anything differently?”  I told him that, if I were in his shoes, I probably would have given out more tickets and given fewer warnings.  He chuckled.

Besides what I see as a generally antagonistic culture when it comes to law enforcement (i.e., the cops are always wrong, they use way too much force all the time, they’re all racist, they’re horrible human beings, etc.), we are also in a culture that does not value the law.  Many people, if not we ourselves, feel like the rules were made to be broken, and that rules get in the way, rather than help us.  

So Jesus’ words today might be hard to swallow.  After all, Jesus, so we hear, wasn’t about laws and rules!  That’s why he was so tough on the Pharisees and the scribes!  But what did Jesus say today?  “‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.  I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.  Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law.’”  It would be hard to argue the whole “spirit of the law” theory while quoting these words.

But Jesus was a spirit of the law guy.  Now, the spirit of the law does not mean undoing the law.  So often that’s what we want it to mean: the spirit of the law means we don’t have to follow the real law.  But as Jesus goes beyond the letter of the law (Thou shalt not kill…, thou shalt not commit adultery…, whoever divorces his wife…, do not take a false oath…), He seems to make things stricter, not looser.  

As a confessor, I’m not sure I have ever had someone say, “Yeah, I killed somebody.”  But I do often hear anger and hatred and vengeance of the heart.  But Jesus goes beyond simply doing bodily harm.  He goes to the heart of the issue, which is, pardon the earlier pun, the heart.  

The letter of the law says that I cannot take an innocent life.  If we consider how many people are on earth, and how many of them ever actually murder someone (murder being the word we use for the taking of an innocent life), that percentage is probably pretty low.  But how many of us have wanted to do someone serious harm because they wronged us?  How many of us have held something against another person in hatred and vengeance?  That’s probably a much larger percentage.  But Jesus, the new Moses, the new Lawgiver, tells us that our offering here at Mass is only acceptable if we have been reconciled with those with whom we have issues.  If there is a large separation between us and another person, or us and God, we should go to confession, receive forgiveness of sins, and only then present ourselves for Holy Communion.

The letter of the law says that we can’t have marital relations with a person who is not our spouse or who is married to another.  Jesus reminds us that the infidelity or unchastity does not begin with the exterior parts of our body, but begins in our hearts and in our minds.

The teaching on divorce might seem very difficult.  After all, Jesus makes it very clear that we cannot divorce and remarry without committing adultery, unless the marriage is unlawful.  This is the passage that the Church points to in what is commonly referred to as the annulment process.  The Church examines the validity, or lawfulness, of the marriage.  But until the Church declares that bond unlawful, each spouse is bound to live a life free of sexual relations with someone other than their spouse.  

Whenever Jesus gives us a law, it is meant to guide us to lead happy lives.  And in my ride-alongs with the Michigan State Police, I can tell you that, outside traffic stops, the difficult situations into which the troopers are called began earlier than when 911 was called: with anger or lust in the heart; with distrust; or with any other issue.  The calls we responded to were simply the outer manifestations of interior problems that had been festering for some time.  

Today we are invited to listen to the words of Jesus.  To paraphrase our first reading from Sirach, if we follow the words of Jesus, we will be happy and be in a right relationship with God.  Before us are the choices between good and evil, life and death.  Choose the life-giving words of Jesus.  

Not Only the Externals

Solemnity of Pentecost–During the Day

If there’s one thing Jesus got after the Pharisees about time and time again in the Gospel, it was doing only the external things, without having the internal change of heart and life.  I know that it is very easy for me to think, “How could you simply do the religious deeds on the outside, without letting it change you on the inside?”.  And yet, how many times does the same thing happen to us at Pentecost?  Many people wear red for Pentecost, to match the vestments of the priest, and to remind themselves of the Holy Spirit, who is always celebrated with the color red.  But how many of us go beyond the externals of wearing red, and actually try to have the Holy Spirit be a more active part of their lives?  There’s nothing wrong with wearing red on Pentecost, but if it’s all we do, then we’re in the same boat as the Pharisees.

In our faith life, we can be like a story from the Acts of the Apostles.  St. Paul was preaching in Ephesus, and finds some disciples.  He asks them, “‘Did you receive the holy Spirit when you became believers?’  They answered him, ‘We have never even heard that there is a holy Spirit.’”  We’ve probably heard of the Holy Spirit, but how many of us live like we don’t even know He exists.  As I asked a few weeks ago, how many of us pray to the Holy Spirit?  

Catholics can sometimes be afraid, I think, of the Holy Spirit.  We see Pentecostals doing what we consider to be weird sorts of stuff when they claim to have the Holy Spirit.  Catholics who belong the Charismatic Renewal will sometimes talk in tongues, or will heal people, or speak about a “word from God” or a prophecy.  Because many Catholics don’t have those gifts or talk in that way, it can seem quite strange to us.  But unless we believe that the Holy Spirit decided to call it quits after the age of the Apostles, then there’s no reason why those gifts cannot be active in the Church today.  Maybe none of us have any of those gifts; maybe some of us do.  But those special charisms, those special gifts which are meant to be used for the building up of the Church, are still active, as are many other gifts in the Church, all given to us by the Holy Spirit.

In one sense, we should all be Charismatic Catholics.  Not necessarily in the sense that we need to attend Christ the King parish in Ann Arbor, but in the sense that we should live a Spirit-filled life.  It is the Spirit who helps us to pray as we ought, the Spirit who gives us strength to resist temptation and sin, the Spirit who gives us the courage to proclaim Christ by what we say and by what we do.  If we do not have a relationship with the Holy Spirit, then all those things which God calls us to do by baptism and confirmation, will be impossible.  

We might be scared; we might think we don’t have what it takes.  So did the Apostles.  Why do you think they were hiding in the upper room?  Jesus told them to return to Jerusalem and wait for the Holy Spirit, but they didn’t necessarily have to all stay in the same place.  Still, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they were so overcome with joy that people thought they were drunk.  They heard them proclaiming Jesus in many different languages, the languages of the pilgrims who had come from Jerusalem from all over the world.  

God wants us to live a Spirit-filled life.  The Spirit gives us the grace we need to be saints.  He brings the peace of Christ.  He forgives sins.  We need the Holy Spirit.  Adrian needs more people on fire with the Holy Spirit in order to be transformed.  Without the Holy Spirit, we cannot be the people God wants us to be.  Without the Holy Spirit, we will remain timid and stay in the upper room, instead of going to those we know to introduce them to Christ or to strengthen their relationship with him.  We need to be reminded of what Jesus told us, and be taught by Jesus, rather than by our fallen world.  

Pray for the seven-fold gift of the Holy Spirit.  Pray that God pours His Holy Spirit upon all the residents of Adrian, that they will be alive with His love and power to transform this city into the city God wants it to be.  Pray to the Holy Spirit and grow in relationship with Him so that we will not be like the Pharisees who have the externals down but are dead inside.  Pray to the Holy Spirit to give you new life!

You Can't Cheat God

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human Freedom by Bishop Boyea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GOD BLESS YOU ALL

Catechism, #1730-1802

How's Your Sight?

Fourth Sunday of Lent—Second Scrutiny

            I remember the night pretty clearly: I was driving back to Sacred Heart Major Seminary from St. John the Evangelist parish in Fenton, where I was assigned as a transitional deacon.  It was dark out, and a steady rain began as I merged onto MI-10, the Lodge.  I suddenly noticed that, even just driving 57 miles per hour (with everyone flying by me, I might add) I couldn’t see the lines that separated each lane.  I didn’t want to slow down and get run over, but I certainly wanted to stay in my own lane so I didn’t cause or get in an accident. 

            At that time of my life, I was the only one of my parents and my two sisters who didn’t have corrective lenses.  But, when I finally made it safely home, I knew that I needed to at least get my eyes checked.  When I went to the optometrist, and she started to put those different lenses over my eyes for the reading chart, I suddenly realized how fuzzy the world had been, and how I hadn’t really been able to see.

            Our first reading and Gospel today give us an insight as to how God sees.  When Samuel goes to anoint a new king, after Saul had disobeyed the Lord, Samuel is directed to Jesse’s sons.  Samuel sees Eliab, the one he is sure is supposed to be king.  But the Spirit of God tells him that Eliab is not God’s choice.  And then Samuel goes through seven sons, but God does not choose any of them.  Finally, the youngest, David, is called in from the fields and is anointed as the new king of Israel (though he doesn’t formally become king for quite a while).  When Samuel wants to know why it was not Eliab, and likely why it was not the other sons, God tells Samuel, “‘Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance, but the LORD looks into the heart.’”

            In our Gospel today, there’s a lot of seeing going on, but not all of it is true sight.  We begin with the disciples who see a man blind from birth.  When they look at him, they see a sinner, or at least the son of sinners.  But then Jesus looks at the man, and sees, not sinfulness, but a man whose cure of blindness at the hands of Jesus will make manifest the work of God.  Then the Pharisees see the man born blind, and they ask him about Jesus, whom they had also seen before.  The Pharisees see the man, now cured, and still see a sinner.  They look at Jesus as a horrible sinner who does work on the Sabbath.  And the man himself, though his sight is given to him at once, gradually sees who Jesus is, as he first calls Jesus a man, and then a prophet, and then the Son of Man and Lord.

            How easy it is to look upon failure or a lack of something as a curse.  As Catholics we’re particularly proficient at seeing something bad happen and figure that God is somehow punishing us.  Whether its an illness like cancer, or the loss of a job, or a troubled marriage, or whatever curse we feel we’re under, it’s easier to assume that God is, for one reason or another, punishing us for something we did, even if it was a long time ago. 

            And while there are sometimes bad consequences that follow from our bad choices, Jesus reminds us that what seems like a curse can truly be a way for the glory of God to shine forth.  For years the man born blind and maybe his parents assumed they had done something wrong; many people saw it that way, including the Pharisees.  But Jesus says that the man’s blindness was there so that he could be healed by Jesus and give glory to God.  Sometimes, our maladies or negative circumstances are ways that we can draw closer to God and reorder our lives properly.  Ironically, sometimes the bad stuff that happens can actually be a great blessing.

            These elect that we have with us today: those who will be baptized, confirmed, and make their first Holy Communion, have been on a path from spiritual blindness to sight, a pilgrimage we’re all on in different ways, but a path for them which is leading to be able to see with the eyes of God.  They began by inquiring about the faith, learning more about this man Jesus and His Body the Church, and why so many have joy who know Him.  Then they were accepted as catechumens, those who are seeking to be joined to Jesus in a certain way, and to know and love Him better as they open the Word and see it active in their lives as Jesus who is The Prophet speaks for God as His Word.  Then Bishop Boyea, in the name of Christ, chose them for the Easter Sacraments.  As they  continue today through the scrutinies where they are prayed for in a special way in these last weeks before Easter, they come to the sacraments so that they can profess Jesus as Lord, as God.  They are like the man born blind who, after he was healed, spoke about Jesus as a man; who when questioned by the Pharisees called Jesus a prophet; and when asked by Jesus, professed Him as Lord, which is the title used for God. 

            These Elect challenge us to see with the eyes of God, as they are growing to do.  They challenge us to approach the world with the sight of God, rather than putting people in the boxes that make us most comfortable and either accepting or rejecting them based on our criteria.  What a tragedy and a true scandal it would be for those who have been baptized, who have been enlightened by Christ, to not see with the eyes of faith that we received in baptism.  Look at other people, work, relaxation, and world situations with the eyes of God, so that we can look at what the world considers darkness, and bring the light of Christ.