Trying to Take Over the World

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    Growing up as a child, one of my favorite TV shows was “Animaniacs,” which was a Warner Brothers cartoon that was spun off of Looney Tunes.  And one of the regular vignettes in the show was “Pinky and the Brain,” which followed two lab rats and their exploits after the lab was closed.  The Brain, as you might expect, had a super-developed intellect.  Pinky was a bit of a dummy.  And at the beginning of each vignette, Pinky would ask, “Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?”  And Brain would answer, “The same thing we do every night, Pinky–try to take over the world!”
    As Catholics, our goal is to take over the world.  But when we say that, we don’t mean it like Brain.  We’re not trying to subjugate the world to our political views or our personality or military might.  We’re trying to make the entire world Catholic, to be in relationship with Jesus Christ and find salvation through Him, which is the only way anybody can be saved.  
    Now, this language fell out of favor after the Second Vatican Council.  And certainly, we have to stay away from a sense of military or forceful takeover or subjugation.  But, it should not make us uncomfortable to say that God wants the entire world to be Catholic.  We can say this because Jesus Christ founded one Church, one community of believers who follow Him and live according to the way of life that truly gives us happiness because it is the way God created the world and us to best live.
    But this approach didn’t come out of nowhere.  This idea starts in the Garden of Eden.  God created humanity, Adam and Eve, to be in union with Him, and be His people.  And while Adam and Eve both sinned and ruptured our union with God, God sought to return us to Him.  And to do this, He chose a particular people, the Jewish people, to reclaim the world for Himself, as the world had often chosen to go astray and make other things gods and worship them, and then change the way God wanted us to interact with each other.  
    God reclaiming the world started small, with families.  Noah and his family; Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob’s twelve sons.  But God didn’t just choose these families so that the family reunion could be a little larger.  He chose them to bring others into relationship with God.  And eventually those families wanted an earthly king, first Saul and then David.  And God chooses David to spread the effects of Israel and to eliminate the enemies of Israel, who are false gods, demons, who fight against God.  And David finds a lot of success, expanding the kingdom of Israel to its largest borders in its history.  But, David’s son, Solomon, starts letting the enemies behind the gates because he takes foreign wives for himself.  The influence of the foreign gods, foreign ways of life, most often represented by foreign worship, starts to creep into God’s family.  And people become more disconnected from God, which is why the prophets constantly call back God’s people to God.  
    And this is where our first reading from Isaiah comes in.  Isaiah reminds the people that God didn’t call Israel simply for its own sake.  God called Israel to be a witness of holiness that would not only keep God’s people happy as God created them, but would also draw non-Jews, Gentiles, to Himself so that they, too, could find holiness and happiness, which only comes from God since He created us for Himself.  And just like foreign, sinful influence found itself expressed through wrong worship, so right relationship with God would find expression through right worship, through all peoples worshipping God in His home on earth, the Temple. 
    And through Christ, as St. Paul teaches, Jew and Gentile were united so that all people could find happiness in God and worship God as He wanted, which really means allowing God to determine how we live our lives.  Through Christ, all people could be reconciled, or be in right relationship, with God, though God never abandons his special call to Israel.  
    If Christ has revealed the truth about how we are to live and how He wants to be worshipped; and if Christ has created a Church that accurately conveys how to live and how to worship; and if that Church subsists in the Catholic Church, then we can say, without any hubris, that God wants the entire world to be Catholic.  Not because of anything we have done, but because of what Christ has done, which opens up to us the fullness of being in relationship with God.
    Where people took things too far in the past consists in a mentality that we were the best because of what we had done, and if others wanted to be part of the best, they could lower themselves and join us.  The Pharisees had basically this same approach.  Christ, instead, taught that God wanted us to reach out to those outside–sinners, tax collectors, Gentiles–so that they, too, could be part of God’s family and find true happiness by living in the way God created us to live.  
    But God still wants all His people, all the ones He has created in His image and likeness, to live in the fullness of the truth of the world as God created it and to be truly happy.  And that’s our role: to bring others into the fullness of that relationship with God that only exists in the Catholic Church.  We’re not the best because of what we have done.  We help people be the best because we have maintained the direct connection to Christ and what He has revealed, especially through His Death and Resurrection.  
    We, like Brain, are trying to take over the world.  But, unlike Brain, we’re not doing it for our own power trip or ego, but as servants of others and in service to the truth, Who is Christ.  We’re doing it because God wants all people united in the truth and charity, which expresses itself through right worship.  

Advent: A Time of Conversion

First Sunday of Advent

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  One of the many duties with which I help out for the Michigan State Police, or MSP for short, is working with those who want to join the MSP.  Wednesday nights will generally find me at Grand Blanc High School as I help applicants with water rescue drills (like treading water while passing a 10-pound brick, water pull-ups, and rescuing me or others who pretend to be drowning).  I have also “helped” applicants with physical training (though, they have mostly been in better shape than I am).  There’s a new Trooper Recruit School that will start in January, the 150th since the Department was founded in 1917, and a few of the applicants I have worked with will be in that school.  I want to make sure they are prepared as they can be before it starts, and I’m excited and hopeful for them to make it all the way through the twenty grueling weeks and graduate in May 2026.  I can’t do it for them, but I can assist them before and pray for them during their training.

    In Advent we focus on preparing for Christ: for His first coming some 2,000 years ago; for our celebration of His coming at Christmas; for His return in glory (we often refer to this as His second coming).  But He also comes to us, and not only us, in our day-to-day lives.  Our readings today, especially our Gospel, focus us on remaining watchful for the return of Christ in glory.  But we should also remain on high alert for the ways Christ wants to come to us today, and tomorrow, and the days afterwards.
    I also believe that Advent is also a special time to recognize how Christ comes to those who do not know Him, or do not know Him fully.  Advent is a special time to focus on conversions for those who do not believe in Christ, or for those who believe in Christ but do not have full union with the one Church He founded (the Catholic Church), or for those who have fallen away from the practice of their faith.  Are we attentive to how Christ works in the lives of those who are, in any way, ignorant of Him?
    It might seem odd to think that Christ could work in the heart of someone who is not directly connected to God in one way or another or who has walked away from Him.  But God offers what we call prevenient grace, the grace that comes before a movement of the soul towards God.  If we didn’t acknowledge this, we would say that we do some good work without God, and that God simply affirms the good we work we have begun, or gives us an ‘atta boy for something He hadn’t planned for us.  Instead, we know that any movement toward God is already a grace, because God begins all good work, and our job consists in cooperating with that grace.
    So who are the people in our lives that do not yet know God or do not recognize Christ as the Messiah or do not practice their Catholic faith?  God desires the salvation of every person.  God doesn’t want us to force conversion (as if a true conversion could be forced), but wants us to help others understand that He does exist, and not only that, but He loves us and wants to be in a relationship with us.  How do we do this?  For starters, we pray for that person.  Saul, who later became St. Paul, did not at first believe that our Lord was the Messiah, but I’m sure people prayed that he, a great Jewish scholar, might have the scales fall from his mind that prevented him from acknowledging how Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah.  And we know just how powerfully that happened, and how St. Paul became one of the world’s greatest proclaimers of the Gospel.  And all that from the prayers of those who followed Christ and who probably suffered persecution from Saul.
    Secondly, we can be attentive to what’s going on in a friend’s life.  When a person struggles or when an unexpected favor happens, that’s a great time to talk to them about God and His Church.  Christ wants the other to see how faith in Him can conquer any problem, and that He showers His blessings upon every person so that they can believe in Him.  But Christ uses us to help others to see that.  Maybe the conversation about God is not too explicit at first, but helping others to see God’s plan, and the ways we can cooperate with that plan, can help bring a person to faith.
    Thirdly, we can help them see that a full relationship with God and the truth He has revealed happens in the Catholic Church.  Sometimes Catholics get a little queasy about this part, because they may not feel like they know enough about the Church to answer all questions a person might have.  Don’t be afraid of saying, “I don’t know; let’s find out together.”  Or maybe, “I’ve always just trusted that it was true.  I can ask around to make sure this makes sense.”  The truths of the faith will stand up to any inquiry and academic rigor.  We don’t have to be afraid of other people questioning certain teachings.  
    So this Advent, commit yourself to watching for Christ to make himself known in someone who is not Catholic.  Pray for a non-Catholic or fallen away Catholic; help a non-Catholic or fallen away Catholic see how God is working or could work in his or her life; explain why the Catholic Church means so much to you and how her teachings help one live a truly happy life.  Will you always see successful conversions?  No.  But you will fulfill the call of Advent to watch for Christ’s coming in your daily life, and what joy you will have if that person does decide to become Catholic and join us as we all watch and wait for Christ to return in glory [who, with the Father, and the Holy Spirit, live and reign for ever.  Amen].

Stopping the Cycle

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

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

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

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.   

Sin-Conversion-Forgiveness

 Fourth Sunday of Lent

    Right now we’re in the midst of the NCAA basketball tournament, often called March Madness.  The hard work of 68 teams throughout the regular season is put to the test, as they compete against the best teams in the nation, not just in their conferences.  In the end, one team will hold up the trophy, the physical sign that they are the best in the country.  It would certainly be easier if a team didn’t have to win the six games of the tournament to be crowned champion, but that trophy would mean a lot less, because it would not have come through hard work, good execution, and sometimes a little bit of luck.
    Just as there is a progression through March Madness, so there is a progression that we hear in the Gospel today about forgiveness as we heard the all-too-familiar parable of the Prodigal Son.  The main point of the parable is the mercy of the father, which Jesus uses to teach us about the mercy of our Heavenly Father.  But we also see how this whole process of sin, conversion, and forgiveness takes place, until the celebration in the father’s house at the son’s return.  
    Of course, the first part of this story is sin.  The son demands what is “his,” which isn’t really his yet.  He doesn’t want to depend on the father for what he needs.  When we sin, we don’t rely on our heavenly Father.  We take what we feel is ours, and we spend it on “dissipation.”  We think that we can make it on our own without God’s help.  In fact, when we separate ourselves from God, we notice how little we have, and how much like a famine it is.  If we don’t recognize how bad things are, we go from bad to worse, until we are surrounded by the mud of sin upon sin, and even hungry for the scraps that the pigs are eating, which is bad enough from our point of view, but even worse from the point of view of a Jew, to whom pigs are ritually unclean animals.
    The next part of the process in conversion is sometimes the hardest part: we recognize how bad things are.  Alcoholics Anonymous will talk about the necessity of hitting bottom before one can truly find sobriety.  The same is true with sin.  We can only truly seek conversion if we realize that we need help, and that we cannot take care of ourselves.  In the parable, Jesus refers to it as the son “coming to his senses.”  With so many sins, we tell ourselves it’s not so bad, it’s not really doing a lot of harm, and so we continue on.  Of course, when we do that, we keep ourselves away from the Father’s house.  We don’t find the way home, and we don’t really move much to get there.
    But if we do recognize the evil of our sins and the horrible effects they have on us, then we start back towards the Father.  Both the recognition of sin, and then the movement back to the Father are only possible because of God’s grace, to which we start to open ourselves.  Nothing that we can do that is good happens without God first making it possible.  As we open ourselves to being sorry for our sins, and leaving them behind, we start back to the Father’s house.  
    Part of this is being open and honest about our sins: that we chose them.  As a society, we are good at making excuses.  We’re never guilty for anything; it was always someone’s else’s fault.  Maybe it was our upbringing, or some external factor, or really anything, as long as we don’t have to take responsibility.  We don’t even know how to take responsibility in our apologies: “If I hurt you, then I’m sorry.”  A true contrition acknowledges that we have sinned, that we have done wrong, and that we have disobeyed and offended our heavenly Father.  In order to truly have the conversion that will heal us, we need to acknowledge our own role in sinning.  
    But, having come to our senses, recognized how bad things are, and started back to the Father to apologize for our sins, our loving Father runs out to meet us.  God doesn’t dangle forgiveness at the end of a line for us to try and catch, like the tricks we play with dogs and their toys as we hide it behind our backs, or keep swinging it back and forth, just out of the grasp of their mouths.  God runs to us to embrace us in love.  In the days of Jesus, no man would have run, not only because it showed a lack of dignity, but also because it was physically hard to do in sandals and a tunic.  And yet, that is what God does for us.  He cannot contain Himself and His love for us.  He cannot wait even the few extra minutes it will take for us to get to Him.  He runs to us.  

    And as He embraces us, He makes us His sons and daughters, though we are not deserving of that title.  We wasted our filial dignity, and spent it away.  But God gives it back to us, and then celebrates for and with us.  And he spares no expense.  He puts a robe around us, which is his love and our protection from the outside elements; a ring on our finger, which symbolizes our authority in the house of our Father again; and sandals on our feet to keep the dirt of sin from attaching itself to us.  
    The celebration is worth it.  But there are no shortcuts to forgiveness.  We cannot find the celebration at coming back to the Father’s house if we stay in the mire and the mud of our sins.  We cannot receive the robe, ring, sandals, and fattened calf if we do not acknowledge that we had earlier squandered our inheritance of eternal life and offended our Father, whose only desire for us is that we stay in His house and enjoy what He has set before us.  If we do wander away, though, the good news is that the love of the Father will welcome us back when we have repented and started back to Him.  If we don’t have the good sense of staying in the Father’s house, let’s at least have the good sense to come back after we’ve been away.

Judging Books and Wine

 Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  One of the early lessons we learn as a child is never judge a book by its cover.  There are many stories (some true, some invented) which seem to give credence to this maxim.  I don’t read a ton, but I can tell you that I often decide whether or not I want to pick-up a book by the cover.  There was also a story a year or so back about how wine labels have changed to try to encourage people (especially those of the female persuasion) to buy the bottle without knowing what the wine tastes like.  
    Our Lord seems to be saying that we should judge a book by its cover.  After all, good fruit equals a good tree; bad fruit equals a bad tree.  Doesn’t seem too complicated, and seems to make perfect sense.  And I’m certainly not here to contradict the words of the Son of God.

    Having said that, it’s not quite as simple as: doing bad things makes you a bad person.  Pope St. John Paul II reminded us: “We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures, we are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of His Son, Jesus.”  Which of us hasn’t sinned?  And yet, we do not want to be defined by our sins, but by the love of God.  
    Even St. Paul today in the epistle spoke about the conversion of the Romans, how they had been slaves to sin, but they were now slaves of God.  If St. Paul would have defined the Romans by how they had acted before their conversion, he would have simply written them off as damned.  But instead he called them to new life in Christ.  So how do we understand the words that we heard in the Gospel?  
    Part of it, I believe, has to do with a reading of the other parables of our Lord, rather than this one.  In another place, Jesus talks about the weeds sown among the wheat.  He says to let the weeds go until harvest time, when they can be sorted from the wheat.  That sorting would only take place when the “fruit” of the stalk of wheat had come to fruition, when the harvest was ready.  But, at that point, you would be able to tell the good fruit from the bad fruit, the weeds from the wheat.  And perhaps this is what our Lord means when He talks about He says that we can judge a tree by its fruit: it is only at the end that it becomes apparent what the fruit is.
    Think about it in terms of your own life.  Unless you are the Blessed Mother, you have, like me, had moments in life of which you are not proud, where you wandered away from the love of God and His law.  At that moment, you and I were not bearing good fruit.  So, perhaps we should be cut down and thrown into the fire.  And yet, God did not do that.  God was patient with us, like the farmer in the Gospel parable who sees the fig tree not bearing fruit, but waits one more year to see if it bears fruit.  God is patient with us so that we can stop being slaves of the flesh, slaves of immorality, and start being not only slaves, but friends of God.  
    Does this mean that we rest on our laurels, and just coast until the end of life?  It is interesting that, no matter what times weekday Masses are celebrated, it does tend to be older people who attend.  There is a certain sobriety that comes when you realize that you have more years behind you than you have in front of you.  But that seriousness, that wisdom of being a senior, can be had by us now, and not just about going to Mass.  The danger with putting off true and deep conversion until the end is that we never know when our particular end will be.  I could die any day, and Jesus could return any day.  If I am in the habit of delaying my conversion, the change of my heart for our Lord, then I could be caught unawares, and the judgment may come to me like a thief in the night.  
    Each day we are invited to, as St. Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.”  We do battle and put the old man to death, while trying to be receptive to the grace of God which makes us new men and women in Christ.  Inasmuch as we do this, we are, likely bearing good fruit, which is a good sign.  Inasmuch as I strive for holiness by the grace of God, I am pointing towards heaven.  And, making a regular habit of confession, and perhaps knowing a very short but good act of contrition in case of extreme danger, God knows that I am doing my best to stop being a slave of sin.
    But even in our attempts to follow Jesus, that sin of apathy, or we might say sloth, can creep in.  ‘I am doing what I can, and I may not be perfect, but at least I’ll get to Purgatory,’ we might say to ourselves.  As one professor in seminary told me, humans often have a way of not getting their target, so aim for heaven, in case you fall a bit short.  Don’t aim for Purgatory, because if you miss, well, you get the picture.  
    Further, our Lord reminds us that lip service is not enough.  Words are cheap, and actions speak louder than words.  Even the demons know the truth, but they reject it.  We can know the truth, but do we embrace it?  Do we strive to go by the grace of God on the narrow way to salvation, or do we figure that, because we are in the Church that Jesus founded and have received the sacraments, we don’t have to worry or respond to the gift of salvation each day?  
    “The wages of sin is death,” St. Paul tells us (in grammar that only works in Greek).  If we embrace the death of sin in this life, we know what will await us in the next.  Our fruit, at the harvest of our particular judgement, will be bad.  But if we embrace the life of our Lord each day, our fruit, at the harvest of our particular judgement, will be good, and we will enjoy eternal happiness in the kingdom of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Our Approach to Others

 Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Parents here will recognize the time-honored teaching technique of repeating something in a variety of different ways with the same message.  If repeated enough, it can finally be understood.  And that is what we have heard from Jesus over the past few weeks.  Two weeks ago we heard the parable of the vineyard.  Those who came first were upset at those who came later, and yet were given the same payment.  Last weekend we heard the parable about the two sons.  The first was disobedient in words but obedient in actions.  The second was obedient in words but disobedient in actions.  This week we hear another vineyard parable, except this time, we hear about tenants who are supposed to care for the vineyard, but when the landowner sends servants to obtain the produce, they harass and kill them.  Finally, the landowner sends his son, but the tenants kill him, thinking that they will get his inheritance.

    These parables are probably being told towards the end of Jesus’ ministry before the crucifixion.  Two weeks ago the Gospel was from the beginning of Matthew, chapter 20.  Last week’s Gospel was Matthew, chapter 21, verses 28-32.  This week’s Gospel is Matthew, chapter 21, verses 33-43.  I say this because the beginning of Matthew, chapter 21 is the entry into Jerusalem that we celebrate each Palm Sunday. 

    And the point Jesus is making in all three of these Gospels has to do with the attitude of the Chosen People, and specifically the religious leaders like the Pharisees, scribes, chief priests, and Sadducees, to the proclamation of the Gospel, the Good News, by Jesus.  In the first parable, Jesus compares the attitude of the members of the Chosen People who are not rejoicing that sinners and Gentiles (non-Jews) are hearing God’s word and changing their lives to those who went to work early in the day, but then were upset when those who came later and especially those who came at the last minute got paid the same.  In the second parable, Jesus compares the sinners and Gentiles who, at first, reject God’s command, but eventually do it, and compares certain members of the Chosen People to the second son who says he’ll follow God’s command, but then doesn’t follow through and actually do it.  And in this parable that we heard today, certain members of the Chosen People are the tenants.  The servants are the prophets whom God sent to teach the Chosen People how to live.  The son is Jesus.  And the religious leaders do the same thing as the tenants: they kill both the servants and the son.  In all of these parables, Jesus is telling some of those who were listening that they were on the wrong path, and needed to convert and accept the Gospel.  And especially the religious leaders who heard this got angrier and angrier because they knew Jesus was talking about them (which is why the continued to conspire to put Jesus to death).
    So what does this have to do with us?  I would say that Catholics, in particular, can struggle in the same ways as those to whom Jesus was addressing His parables.  So often, especially in these days, Catholics have the mentality that, as long as we’re baptized and we’re not Hitler or Stalin, then we’re good; we’re on the right path.  But Jesus is telling us that, while baptism is important as the ordinary means of salvation and the way Jesus taught us to come into communion with God, it’s not like if we have our baptism card then we’re all set.  We are constantly called to deeper and deeper conversion, to deepen our love for and our understanding of God.  Each day there are parts of our lives that need to change to be more like Jesus; we’re never done.  Baptism can easily become for us like circumcision was for some of the the Jews at that time: as long as I’ve gone through it then I don’t need to worry about anything.  And that’s simply not how a relationship with God works.  If we truly love God, we try each day to be a better friend of God, not resting on our laurels of previously having a good day or week with God, or even simply on the fact that we’ve had our Catholic card punched.
    The other struggle we can have is based upon how we view welcoming others into the Catholic faith.  Sometimes we can feel like a person needs to have it all together before they can be invited to church.  Certainly, entrance into the Catholic Church requires that daily conversion about which I just spoke.  But Jesus didn’t tells sinners that they needed to be a saint before they could start following Him.  He called them to follow so that they could become a saint.  Now, to be sure, becoming a saint means configuring our life to Christ and starting certain actions and leaving other actions behind.  Jesus never pretended that a person’s sins didn’t matter.  But he didn’t let their sins stop the conversation about moving in the right direction.  The woman caught in adultery in John’s Gospel is a perfect example: Jesus doesn’t condemn the woman for her adultery.  But after not condemning her, He tells her to go and sin no more.  
    This is not to say that we can approach everything that Jesus offers no matter what.  If our lives are not right in major ways, we should not approach the Eucharist.  If we are in an irregular marriage; if we support (by words or deeds) abortion and/or euthanasia; if we have stolen something of significant value, then approaching Jesus in the Eucharist as if none of that makes a difference is not the way Jesus wants us to do things.  But, on the other hand, it also doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t want us to see us again our interact with us again until we get our lives right by our own strength.  We can’t do it on our own strength.  We need Jesus to convert our hearts, and therefore our lives, so that we can, once more, have communion with Jesus in the Eucharist.  
    Today Jesus invites us not to set up more barriers to interacting with Jesus than He does.  He calls us each not to treat baptism as a “get out of hell free” card.  He calls each of us–me and you–to deeper conversion each day, to pattern our life more on Jesus each day, so that we can turn away from sin, and be faithful to the Gospel.

The Conversion Process

Fifth Sunday of Lent-3rd Scrutiny

For the past two weeks at this Mass, we have had the readings from Year A.  We do this because of the scrutinies, the rites by which we ask God to cast out from our Elect any evil which is in them, and to prepare them for the Easter Sacraments–Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist.  In one sense, Bilal, our Elect, these readings have been specifically for you.  

Each Gospel passage (and the other readings as well that point to it) has hit home a theme of conversion, which is the process which has led you here.  On the third Sunday of Lent, we heard about the woman at the well, the woman who came to know Jesus more deeply as Jesus conversed with her.  He went from “a Jew,” to “Sir,” to “the Prophet,” to “the Messiah.”  And all of that happened because of a conversation with Jesus at a well.  Jesus was thirsting, not so much for the water, but for her.

On the fourth Sunday of Lent, we heard about the man born blind.  The man cannot see, and yet recognizes that Jesus is not an ordinary person.  Never before, he tells the Pharisees, has a man cured a man who was blind from birth.  And yet that is what Jesus did.  Because Jesus opens the eyes of the man, the man believes in Jesus, while the Pharisees, whose eyes were opened but hearts were closed, remain blind in their unbelief.

Today, the fifth Sunday of Lent, we hear about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.  Martha, the woman who was so concerned with serving Jesus that she forget to actually spend time with him, now is the sister who has faith that Jesus can do anything, that Jesus is Himself the Resurrection and the life.  And, sure enough, even though Lazarus was in the tomb for four days, deader than dead, Jesus brought Lazarus back to life.  

These readings were not chosen on accident.  Holy Mother Church, reflecting on her newborn children, sprung to life from the waters of baptism, saw in these three Gospel passages a message so important for you, our Elect, that she bid them to be read every year, even when it would interrupt the usual cycle of readings.

And She did this because in these three Gospel passages is the format for conversion: conversation with Jesus; Jesus opening our eyes; Jesus raising us to new life.  In your own life, Bilal, Jesus has spoken to you, to you heart.  And you sought to know more about him.  I can remember the day when you asked me about the Catholic Church, and what we believe, and we sat and talked on the pew in the narthex.  Jesus Himself spoke with you, maybe not about your past, but about your future, and about who He is.  

Through the Rites of Christian Initiation of Adults, which we have been celebrating with you for months, Jesus has also opened your eyes to see how He is who He says He is: God.  In fact, ever since Bishop Boyea chose you for the Easter Sacraments at the Rite of Election which you celebrated the Saturday after Ash Wednesday, you have been in the period that the Church calls “Purification and Enlightenment.”  In these last weeks of your preparation, Jesus has been opening your eyes to believe in Him more deeply, so that you are ready to follow Him always.

And today, as we hear about Jesus raising Lazarus to new life, you are being prepared to die with Christ and be buried with Him in the waters of baptism, so that you can rise with Him to new life.  You are almost at that point where Christ calls you out of the tomb into the radiance of new life with Him.

But these are also for us, because conversion is a process that is never done.  Each one of us, though we come as Christ’s faithful, have not always been so faithful.  There are parts of each of our lives that do not belong to Christ fully, and need conversion.  And so, Jesus continues to talk with us about those parts of our life.  He talks with us about our sinfulness, like the Samaritan woman, and the ways that our life is not configured to Him, not to condemn us, but to draw us to the freedom that only Jesus can give.

We, though we have been enlightened by Christ, still have some areas of blindness in our lives.  Each person here has things that we do not see, for a variety of reason, which we will not see unless we ask Jesus to open our eyes.  Some of these are failings that we have had since birth; others are failings that we have developed along the way.  But Christ wants to illuminate our vision so that we can see our failings, turn away from them, and turn back to Jesus.  

Though many of us have been through the waters of new birth in baptism, we all make deals with death.  We blockade ourselves into the tomb by our sins, which cause spiritual death.  We often want new life, but we sometimes don’t want it enough to accept it from Jesus.  The tomb may be musty, it may be dark, it may be a place of death, but sometimes we are comfortable with it, because death has become second nature to us, and we are surrounded by a culture of death.  But, Jesus wants to raise us to new life, and sometimes it’s someone else who begs the Lord to give us that new life.  

Yes, Bilal, these readings are for you, as our Elect, but they’re for all of us here.  Conversion does not end with baptism, or confirmation, or the Eucharist.  Conversion is a life-long process, of dying to sin and rising with Christ to new life.  Your first period of conversion is almost complete.  Your baptism is less than two weeks away.  Then you will join with us in continuing the conversion to which Jesus invites us each and every day, week, month, and year.

Drawing Closer to Jesus

Third Sunday of Lent

We are a month away from Easter Sunday.  Those words might sound exciting and comforting to you, as your Lenten penances only have 4 more weeks, but as a priest, four weeks to Easter is the busiest time of the year.  In addition to the usual busyness, I am one of the assistant Masters of Ceremonies for the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday morning, so I’m assisting with a lot of the behind the scenes work.  And, this is my first Easter here, so I’m learning how things have been done here before, and feeling my way through the liturgical celebrations as we enter into them.  This is my favorite time of year in the Church calendar, but it’s also the most intense, and, if we let it be, the most powerful.

Today we hear our first long Gospel, prepping us for Holy Week.  That’s not really why we have these long Gospels over the next three weeks, but it seems to work out that we have three long Gospels to prepare us for the Passion Narrative (a super long Gospel) that we will hear on Palm Sunday and Good Friday.  Today’s Gospel and the next two weeks’ Gospels are passages which deal with conversion, our major theme during Lent.  

Today’s conversion story is about a woman of Samaria.  And in her conversion, she comes to know Jesus more and more as the story continues.  She starts out by referring to Jesus simply as “a Jew.”  There’s no personal interaction, only referencing his religion.  But Jesus draws her in more closely, as he offers her living water.

That encounter with Jesus leads to a change in tone.  No longer is Jesus simply “you, a Jew,” but is now “Sir.”  Jesus offers her something, and she’s interested in this “living water” she is speaking about.  She likes the idea of never having to draw water again, because she is drawing water, alone, at the hottest part of the day.  We’ll learn why later in this story.

Then Jesus changes the subject.  And it is probably not the subject that modern, polite people would talk about.  Jesus says, “‘Go call your husband,’” knowing full well what her situation is.  This woman at the well is an adulteress, which is why she’s drawing water alone at the hottest part of the day.  She has been married five times before, and the man she is living with currently is not her husband.  She, of course, doesn’t want to admit this (who would?), and coyly says, “‘I do not have a husband.’”  But Jesus reveals to her a part of her life that is not in order.  This leads her to acknowledge Jesus in a different way; she comes to know Him more.  He is not, “you, a Jew,” and he is no longer just “Sir.”  He is, she says, a prophet.  

But feeling a little uneasy about the trajectory of this conversation about her love life, she changes it to something she knows will divert attention away from her personal life: how to worship.  Not much has changed today: if you want to get someone in a heated conversation, talk about how you think Mass should be celebrated.  But Jesus doesn’t rebuff her question.  He answers by stating that true worshippers will worship God the Father in Spirit and truth. 

After talking to her about worshipping well, she is drawn to talk about the Messiah.  And Jesus says to her, “‘I am he, the one speaking with you.’”  Jesus reveals Himself and His mission.  When she first started, she did not recognize Him as anything but a foreigner.  Now she is led to think of Him as the Messiah, which in Greek, is translated 𝛸𝜌𝜄𝜎𝜏𝜊𝜍, which we translate as Christ.  From there she tells everybody about Jesus, and they come to believe as well.

This process of conversion is present in our own lives, as well.  It is present in the life of our Elect, Alexis, who is preparing for the Sacraments of Initiation.  It is present in Chris, our Candidate, preparing to be received into the Church and receive the Sacraments of Confirmation and the Eucharist.  But it is, or should be, present in each one of us.  All of us have opportunities to grow closer to Jesus.

Some of us, honestly, don’t know Jesus that well.  He is, we might say, only “you, a Jew.”  He is a stranger to us.  Some of us know about Jesus.  Maybe we come to Mass every week, we do our duty, or we come because that’s what we’ve always done on Sundays.  But Jesus still isn’t known well to us.  He is simply a respected person.  But we keep him at arm’s length, because we like the way we live, and we don’t want to have to change.

Some of us recognize Jesus as a good guy, a religious leader, someone who speaks for God (in other words, a prophet).  We feel that tug at our soul for God, and maybe we’ve even had some religious experiences in our lives when we felt really close to God.  But we still don’t recognize who Jesus fully is.  Some of us recognize Jesus as the Messiah.  We’re very active in our faith, but there are still some areas of our life that we don’t want Jesus to see, and we’re not sure we want to tell others about Jesus.  That seems a bit pushy to tell others about Jesus.  

No matter where we are in our faith, Jesus calls us to a deeper relationship with Him.  Sometimes, as we grow closer to Him, He reveals our need for Him, a need that only He can satisfy, no matter how much we try to fill that need with other, passing things.  Sometimes Jesus even points out our sins to us, in order to reject our sins and choose Him.  But Jesus always wants us to grow close to Him, especially through our worship of the Trinity in Mass.  And then He wants us to tell others about Him.  Where are we in our conversion?  We are never done; we can always grow closer to God.  Are we open to letting God change our lives?

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

Blessed with a Long Gospel

Third Sunday of Lent–Scrutinies

As you stood and heard this long Gospel passage today, the Gospel of the Samaritan woman at the well, I am sure that certain words were going through your mind: words like “blest,” “privileged,” and “fortunate.”  Those were the words that were going through your mind, right?

Those should be the words that came to your mind as you heard this Gospel, because this Gospel is only read during this year when the Church is celebrating the Scrutinies.  And we only celebrate the Scrutinies when we have the Elect of God, those who are to be baptized, confirmed, and receive the Eucharist for the first time at the Easter Vigil.  The Elect are the children in the womb of this parish, who are about to be born to new life in the Sacraments.  The Scrutinies, the ritual book tells us, 

are reinforced by an exorcism, are rites for self-searching and repentance and have above all a spiritual purpose.  [They] are meant to uncover, then heal all that is weak, defective, or sinful in the hearts of the elect; to bring out, then strengthen all that is upright, strong, and good.  [They] are celebrated in order to deliver the elect from the power of sin and Satan, to protect them against temptation, and to give them strength in Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life.

Now, this isn’t the kind of exorcism where heads spin and pea soup gets spit out.  This is a minor exorcism, meant to establish in the Elect the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  

This long Gospel is read because it is an example of conversion, to which the Elect have been called, and by which they can be strengthened.  And this is a perfect example of what happens when we encounter Christ.  At first the woman fights the conversion, speaking about how Jews and Samaritans are not supposed to mix.  But Jesus doesn’t give up.  He offers the woman living water, not just the water that she came to draw to quench her physical thirst.  And the woman wants it, but doesn’t quite understand just what Jesus is saying.  When we encounter Jesus, He offers a gift to us, and we may fight it, or may not fully understand what He wants to give us.

But then, as the encounter continues, Jesus identifies the ways in which there is separation between God and her.  She tries to avoid the situation by saying the truth, just not all the truth.  When confronted with the truth by Truth Himself, she tries to avoid again, and tries to start a fight about how worship should go.  But she is still drawn in.  At the beginning of the encounter, Jesus was just, “a Jew.”  After He promises her living water, He is “Sir.”  When He reveals her past, He is “a prophet.”  

When we are in the presence of holiness, our sinfulness has to be confronted in order to be cast out.  This is not always fun, and it’s not something we always want to do.  So we, too, often try to change the subject, rationalize away our sins, or even try to complain about the Mass being too long or celebrated in a way that we don’t like.  But when we truly encounter Christ, we, too, move from just Jesus the morally good guy, to Jesus the teacher, to Jesus the prophet who speaks for God.

Jesus sidesteps her argument about the Mass, and speaks about who God desires her to follow Him and worship God in spirit and truth.  He then reveals Himself as the Messiah, the anointed one of God, the desire of her heart.  And the woman cannot hold in her joy at becoming a follower of Jesus, but tell others.  

Jesus doesn’t stop with our sinfulness.  He tells us how much He loves us and wants us to follow Him and worship God in spirit and truth and reveals Himself to us as the desire of our hearts.  And if we truly have come into contact with Jesus, then we should want to tell others.  We see Jesus as the Son of God, who reveals us to ourselves so that we can truly be happy.  

Our Elect of God started by inquiring about who this Jesus guy is.  They were drawn to Him.  Then they drew closer in starting the process of learning what it means to be Catholic.  And recently, they were chosen by God through the ministry of the bishop to become Catholic at the Easter Vigil.  Let us pray for them that they will continue to know Jesus more fully until they are configured to Him in baptism.  Let us pray for ourselves, that we will also be converted more like the Samaritan woman, and tell those we know about Jesus the Messiah.

Love Changes Us

Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

            When I was a junior in high school, there was this girl I had a big crush on.  She sat right in front of me in Spanish class.  She was attractive, kind, and into her faith: the trifecta of beauty.  But she and I weren’t really good friends.  So I had to figure out a way to get to talk with her, and more than just comparing notes for Spanish class.  I soon learned that she was into country music, so I started listening to country, too.  Before that, my only exposure to America’s music had been the classic stuff (like George Jones or Merle Haggard) I’d hear at my grandparents on a Saturday morning listening to WITL as they cooked pancakes and sausage for us.  But, I started listening to both old and new so this girl and I could talk.

            I’m sure I’m not the only guy who has “expanded his horizons” in order to talk more with a girl.  In fact, I’d guess that most of you husbands have changed certain things in order to impress your wives, even if it was just learning how to put the seat down.  And many wives here have probably learned to put up with idiosyncrasies they never envisioned because they love their husbands.

According to tradition, the Sycamore
tree which Zacchaeus climbed
to see Jesus in Jericho

            Love of a person, whether it be just a crush, or even into marriage, changes us, and hopefully for the better.  When we love someone, we are willing to do things differently for the one we love.  We see that in our Gospel today.  Zacchaeus comes into contact with Jesus, whom he loves, and Zacchaeus changes.  Jesus doesn’t even say anything to him, other than asking to eat at his house, and Zacchaeus affirms, “‘Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over.’”  Zacchaeus loves Jesus enough that he is willing to give away half of what he owns to the poor, and to make good any cheating that he had done before when collecting people’s taxes.

            Here we are, the People of God, sons and daughters adopted by God the Father in baptism, many of us coming into contact with Jesus at least once a week as we hear His Word, are reminded of His presence through the ministry of the priest, and receive the Body and Blood of Jesus into us.  We have come to meet Jesus and He makes Himself known to us in the People, in His Word, in the Priest, and especially in the Eucharist, and are we different?  Are we willing to change for the one we claim to love?  If not, how much do we really love Him?

            One of my favorite scenes from “The Godfather III” is when Michael Corleone is making his confession.  Cardinal Lamberto, who is hearing his confession, picks up a little rock that has been sitting in a fountain and says, “Look at this stone.  It has been lying in the water for a very long time, but the water has not penetrated it.”  He breaks the stone.  “Look.” he says, “Perfectly dry.  The same thing has happened to men in Europe.  For centuries they have been surrounded by Christianity, but Christ has not penetrated.  Christ doesn’t breathe within them.”  We could say the same thing about us Americans.  For over two centuries we have had the faith active in the US, sometimes under great persecution, but has Christ effected us?  Has Jesus changed us?  Do we love Jesus enough that we want to change how we live?

            Will it be hard to change?  More difficult from some than for others.  We are enmeshed in a culture of death that sacrifices the life of an innocent child for the sake of a comfortable lifestyle; that desires comfort above all else; that objectifies men and women as tools to satisfy our lust and libido, whether on the internet, or in real life, even in marriages; that denies that anyone can say one thing is true and another is false because everyone has their point of view, and we can’t really know truth; that rewards power and mocks obedience to legitimate authority.  It is the culture in which I grew up; it is the culture in which many of you grew up; it is the culture in which we all now live.  But it is not significantly different from the culture in AD 33, or 67, or 90.  The only thing that is different is that in our country, we have the right to freely practice our religion, at least for now.  We face a similar culture as the Greco-Roman culture of the time of the greatest flourishing of our faith, the largest explosion of heart-felt conversions.  The pagans didn’t change their life because the philosophy and the rules of the Christians made more sense or made life easier, they changed their life because they fell in love with Jesus, and every other change they had to make was worth it because of His love and the gift of eternal life that He offered to those who follow Him. 

            This New Evangelization that we keep talking about is all about getting to know and love Jesus.  We have received the Sacraments, which are catalysts for a relationship with Jesus, but I dare say that many of us in this celebration of the Mass are practical strangers to Jesus.  We know Jesus as well as we know President Obama, or Pope Francis, or Miguel Cabrera.  We know of them, maybe we know a lot about them, but we don’t know them personally.  And because we don’t know Jesus personally, we cannot be in love with Him; we cannot love a person that we don’t know.  Zacchaeus was willing to go out on a limb—literally—to get to know Jesus, and so was able to love Him and be transformed by that love.  What are we willing to do to get to know Jesus?

            If we are willing to change what music we listen to, or how we appear, or what we do for a person we merely crush on, let alone another human person we truly love, why are we not willing to change for the Divine Person who loved us so much, even when we were unlovable, that He died for us?  Why do we pretend that being a stranger to Jesus is an acceptable way to live our Catholic faith?  Are we afraid to change?  Are we afraid of what Jesus will demand?  Pope Benedict XVI once said:

Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way?  If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that he might take something away from us?  Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful?  Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom?  …No!  If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great.  No!  Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide.  Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed.  Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation.  And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of a long personal experience of life, I say to you…Do not be afraid of Christ!  He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything.  When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return.  Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ—and you will find true life.”

            Luckily, as our first reading states, the Lord is merciful and patient.  He gives us time to know Him more deeply and love Him.  He stands knocking at the doors of our hearts, waiting for us to answer.  But we do not have unlimited time.  Brothers and sisters, “now is the acceptable time!  Now is the day of salvation!”  Join a Bible study; join a faith-sharing group; serve at a soup kitchen; read books on the faith like the US Catholic Catechism for Adults, YouthCat, and books on the lives of the saints.  Do all you can to see Jesus, to know Jesus, to love Jesus.  “Do not be afraid!”