"Thank God Ahead of Time"

 Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Bl. Solanus Casey

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  “Thank God ahead of time!”  This was a phrase that I had heard Bl. Solanus Casey used in counseling others.  When I looked it up on the Internet, just to make sure I was getting it correct, I found a story that accompanied the phrase from the Capuchins Vocations Director.  Bl. Solanus said this phrase to the parents of a sixteen-month-old girl, Elizabeth, who was dying of leukemia.  I don’t know what I would think or say if a priest, no matter how holy he was supposed to be, told me, as I presented my dying one-year-old, to him.  And yet, the girl got better once she got home, with no trace of leukemia.
    Thank God ahead of time.  It’s easy to thank God when we get something we want.  I would dare say that most of us are probably the type of people who, when we get something we want, say thank you, especially to God.  It’s a lesson we learn with others, too, from a young age: when someone gives us something, we say thank you.  The Samaritan leper in today’s Gospel certainly was grateful and returned to Jesus to express that gratitude.
    But can we thank God ahead of time, when we don’t know what will happen, or when we don’t get what we want?  That is much harder.  This Friday is my birthday, but my best friend is working, so we had made plans to spend Wednesday afternoon together.  I had it all planned out (as we planners tend to do): he’d come to Mass, then we’d grab a bite to eat, then watch a minor league baseball game.  A fun time.  Then, two Fridays ago, my friend told me that he had been unexpectedly scheduled to work on Wednesday, and wouldn’t be free until 5 or 6.  Thanking God was not on my mind or in my heart.
    That afternoon is really not all that important.  There are certainly things much more grave and important than having a good time with a friend to celebrate a birthday.  But I still found it hard to thank God, because I felt like something had been taken away from me that I deserved.  
    Perhaps that’s what makes thanking God so hard when it’s not what we want: we feel we deserve better, or are being cheated.  And when that’s the case, there’s very little room in our hearts for gratitude.  That mentality can still be present when we get what we want: we deserve this blessing; we earned this good thing that God allowed for us.  Perhaps that’s what the other nine lepers were thinking: I put my faith in Jesus, I have confidence that He can heal me, so when I am healed, it’s exactly as I planned.  When we receive good things from God, things we want, that mentality may even creep into our minds: I go to Mass every Sunday (maybe even some weekdays); I donate time, talent, and treasure to the Church; I pray my daily devotions and my rosary; I deserve good things from God.
    Contrast that mentality with the mentality of another saint, St. Thomas More.  He wrote these words to his daughter Margaret from his cell in the Tower of London, and, soon after writing this, witnessed to the faith by his death:
 

Although I know well, Margaret, that because of my past wickedness I deserve to be abandoned by God, I cannot but trust in his merciful goodness.  His grace has strengthened me until now and made me content to lose goods, land, and life as well, rather than to swear against my conscience. […] And, therefore, my own good daughter, do not let your mind be troubled over anything that shall happen to me in this world.  Nothing can come but what God wills.  And I am very sure that whatever that be, however bad it may seem, it shall indeed be the best.

Here was a man who was falsely imprisoned, who had lost material stability, as well as personal access to his family, and was facing death, and yet he could say that whatever God wills is for the best.  This was not a man who thought he deserved anything, except for abandonment by God because of past sins.  And yet, he could stay faithful to God and thank Him for whatever occurred.

St. Thomas More

    I’m clearly not a model of this virtue, and no saint.  But I suppose that what helps me is to try to abandon the belief that I am owed anything by God, other than His love, and even love cannot, we could say, be owed; it must be freely given or not be love.  Yet God does love us, and He does give us many blessings, but also allows certain difficulties.  But anything that God even allows, somehow is meant to work for our good, the good of our salvation.  And if it is for our good, then perhaps we can, even begrudgingly, thank God for it, even ahead of time.
    Saying thank you to God usually happens after something happens to us, usually for the better.  But, in order to grow in this virtue of gratitude, in order to embrace thanking God ahead of time, we should start the practice each day, as part of our morning offering or morning prayers and devotions, to thank God for whatever will happen to us during that upcoming day.  Even the simple phrase, “Thank you God for whatever will happen today” can put us in the mindset that whatever happens, “however bad it may seem, it shall indeed be the best,” as St. Thomas More said.  Or perhaps you can make as your own the phrase of our beloved Michigan saint, Bl. Solanus Casey: “Thank God ahead of time!”: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

A Birthday and a Wedding

Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord (Christmas)

    When we think of Christmas as a celebration, we often think of it as a birthday celebration.  And it certainly is.  We celebrate the birth of Jesus in the flesh in Bethlehem.  Some families have even gone so far as to have birthday cake on Christmas, or to sing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus at the family Christmas.
    But we can also think about Christmas as a wedding.  Our church takes on some of the appearance of a wedding.  At wedding, the church often is decorated with lots of flowers, like the poinsettias that we have here.  Often times you’ll have more candles lit at a wedding.  At wedding Masses we sing the Gloria, the song of the angels in heaven when Jesus was born.  And people dress up for weddings, like so many of you are dressed up today. 
    But the wedding that we celebrate is not between a man and wife, but between heaven and earth, between divinity and humanity, between God and man.  At Christmas heaven descends to earth as Jesus is born.  At Christmas we come to know of the union, never to be broken or divorced, between divinity and humanity in the Person of Jesus.  At Christmas, the angels make known the birth of the God-man, Jesus Christ, the Son of God and son of Mary. 
    The Prophet Isaiah himself uses the image of a wedding:

No more shall people call you “Forsaken,” or your land, “Desolate,” but you shall be called “My Delight,” and your land, “Espoused.”  For the Lord delights in you and makes your land his spouse.  As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride so shall your God rejoice in you.

God is our Builder and marries our humanity in Jesus.  God is our bridegroom and we, His people, are His bride.  No longer are we weighed down by our past sinfulness; no longer are we forsaken or desolate.  But we are the delight of the Lord, and espoused to Him. 
    We were not a bride that was desirable, because of our unfaithfulness.  We had been engaged or betrothed to God through Abraham, when God chose to make us His People.  But time and time again, we were unfaithful to God and wandered away from Him.  We were burdened by the yoke of slavery to sin, and Satan was our taskmaster.  But when Jesus Christ was born, He, the only one by whom we are saved, took us back to Himself and freed us from our bondage.  Jesus is truly “a savior…born for [us]” who heals us from our ancient wound of sin and gives us the freedom of the children of God.
    This is Good News!  This is the wedding announcement that should make all of us rejoice and be glad on this holy night/day.  For “The Lord has bared his holy arm in the sight of all the nations;” “All the ends of the earth have seen the saving power of God.”  “In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets; in these last days, he has spoken to us through the Son.”  God has finally wedded us in Christ, and He will always stay faithful to His marriage vows, even when we stray and are unfaithful. 
    And this Good News is renewed for us each time we come to Mass.  In every Mass, it is as if Jesus is born again, as the bread and wine presented by you become the Body and Blood of Jesus.  Especially on Sunday Masses, we almost always sing the hymn of the angels, the Gloria, as Christ is born in our hearing of the Word of God, and in the confection of the Eucharist.  Heaven is joined to earth, with all the angels and saints, who worship God the Father through Christ the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit.
    But think about a wedding, and think about how you respond to that joyful news.  My sister, Allison, was married this past March, and my sister, Amanda, celebrates her 11th Anniversary on 27 December.  People were so happy and shared the news to those they met, in person and over social media.  Weddings are reasons for celebration and sharing that joy with others.  And so is the wedding of heaven and earth, divinity and humanity, God and man.  Isaiah encourages us: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings glad tidings, announcing peace, bearing good news, announcing salvation.”  Will we keep this good news of this special wedding to ourselves?  Will we keep the lamp of joy under a bushel basket of fear?  Or will we join with the angels and shepherds in proclaiming to the ends of the earth the wedding which brings salvation to all those who have sat in the shadow of death?  The wedding is certainly good news.  And “Blessed are those called to the wedding feast of the Lamb.”

My brother-in-law, Tom, with my sister, Allison

Celebrating Birthdays

Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist

In our own times, birthdays are big deals.  Everybody I know celebrates birthdays, or avoids their celebration because they don’t want to be reminded that they’re going older.  Some people celebrate half birthdays (another excuse to party, I suppose), and some priests I know joke about celebrating an octave (8 consecutive days) of the day of their birth, just like we do for Jesus in the Octave of Christmas.

But for the Church, we generally celebrate the day a person died.  We don’t do this because we’re morbid, but because, especially as the Church first started celebrating holy men and women, we were celebrating martyrs, those who died for the faith.  So the date of their death was actually the date of their victory through Christ, the day they were born to eternal life; we might call it their heavenly birthday.  So today’s celebration, which supersedes a Sunday celebration, something not all that common, means something pretty big.  There are really only three birthdays that the Church celebrates: the Nativity of the Lord on 25 December, which is one of the holiest days of the year, after Easter; the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 8 September, which, when it falls on a Sunday, is not celebrated; and the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, which is one of the handful of days in the Church’s calendar that has different readings for the vigil, the night before, than for the day.

Birthplace of St. John the Baptist
in En Kerem

And St. John the Baptist, the Precursor, as he is also called, is a pretty big deal.  He’s not as holy as the Blessed Virgin Mary, but he prepares the way for the Lord.  He plows the ground, as it were, so that the seed of faith that Jesus plants, can grow in the hearts of the men and women of his time.

John is known as being, what we would call a radical: he wears camel hair and eats locusts and honey.  He lives near the Jordan River, in a mainly uninhabited place, and tells everybody that they’re sinners, in need of repentance.  He calls out King Herod for his unlawful marriage to his brother’s wife, and St. John loses his head for it.  But the word radical does not really mean extreme.  Radical comes from the Latin word radix, which means root.  Our English word radish is simply a transliteration of the Latin word, which, in another form can be radice.  Not a very inventive word for not a very special root that we eat.  But John goes to the root of following Jesus: proclaiming repentance in preparation for Jesus.

In the Gospel on Saturday we hear about how John’s conception is achieved miraculously, but without faith from his father, Zechariah, believing it could happen, and so he is struck mute by the Archangel Gabriel.  And in the Gospel on Sunday, we hear about the naming of John, which frees Zechariah’s tongue and allows him to proclaim God’s wonders again.  But in both the first readings, we hear about being a prophet, speaking God’s Word to the people, which is exactly the mission of St. John the Baptist.

And that is exactly the mission of all of us: to proclaim God’s Word.  And that Word is not so much a particular teaching (though we can teach others about what God says), but a Person, the eternal Word of God that St. John the Apostle and Evangelist talks about, the Word that was in the beginning, the Word that was with God and is God.  We, like Jeremiah, like Isaiah, like St. John the Baptist, are called to prepare the way of the Lord, to make straight His paths.  

But, you might say, if you’re paying attention and not reading your bulletin, Jesus has already come!  We don’t need to prepare for Him, any more than we need to prepare for the Belgium vs. Panama World Cup Soccer game, because it’s already come.  But, in fact, Jesus’ coming happens daily to each person.  Each day Jesus wants to enter our hearts.  But in order to do that, we have to be prepared for him, and in order to be prepared, someone has to help us prepare, and that’s where we come in.  Each day we are called to help people see Jesus in what we say and in what we do: in the kind word to a person who is having a rough day; in the challenging word that we speak with love to a person who is not living as Jesus teaches us; in serving people in the food pantry.  But we have to be purposeful about it, about making it about Jesus.  When the person asks us why we are being kind to them, or why we are lovingly challenging them, or why we are serving them, we need to witness to Jesus and say it’s because Jesus loves them, and as followers of Jesus so do we.  It’s not enough to hope that they’ll catch on.

Imagine if John had been calling people to repentance, but then when Jesus came by, not said, “Behold the Lamb of God!”  He would not have completed his mission.  If, when John was baptizing and being asked why, John said, “I don’t really feel comfortable talking about it,” instead of, “One is coming after me who will baptize you with fire!”, maybe we wouldn’t be celebrating the Nativity of St. John the Baptist.  But we are.  And that in itself is a challenge to us to be like John, to prepare the way of the Lord, to help Jesus find a welcome home by our participation in the mission to proclaim the Word of God, the eternal Word of God, Jesus Christ in our daily words and actions.  

Be radical!  Embrace your mission!  Prepare the way for the Lord!