Putting God Off

Second Sunday after Pentecost

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  I struggle with a bad habit.  And it manifests itself in two primary ways.  In one situation, I see some dirty dishes on my counter that can’t be washed in the dishwasher.  I know it will only take me about 5 minutes to clean them, but I don’t feel like it, so they sit on my kitchen counter until I get disgusted enough to actually clean them.  In the other situation, I have folded my clothes and they are in my room, ready to be put in my dresser drawers or hung up in the closet.  It will take me all of 5-10 minutes to do this.  But I’m tired and just want to go to bed, so I put it off as long as I can.  
    When it comes to these bad habits, the weight of inaction doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.  But the Gospel alludes to another way that we can procrastinate, and that is with our faith.  All the invitees to the banquet have reasons to delay attending.  And the reasons make sense as to why one would not go.  But the point of the parable is that the banquet is so important, that even those legitimate reasons make skipping out the wrong choice, because they may be left out for good.
    I can’t find an original source, but there’s a quote floating around the internet about procrastination that bears hearing: “Procrastination is the arrogant assumption that God owes you another chance to do tomorrow what He gave you a chance to do today.”  When it comes to doing the dishes or putting away laundry, maybe it’s not that bad.  But how many times do we think about or talk about truly growing in our faith with God, only to put it off until tomorrow, which God never promises we will have.
    Obviously, there are some ways in which one has to delay certain good spiritual desires.  For example, a stay at home mom may want to go to daily Mass, but with six kids that may not be practical.  She may have to wait at least until the kids can get in and out of the car and their appropriate car seats themselves.  But what is stopping her from taking a little time to look up the readings for the day and thinking about those readings as she cares for her kids and her house.  A dad may want to pray the Rosary each day with his family, but he works nights and the kids are all in bed after he leaves for work and then are up mostly when he is sleeping.  But what is stopping him from saying a decade or two on his way to and from work, and asking the rest of the family to pray while he catches up on his sleep?
    We have to make realistic goals that conform to our vocation.  God does not call married couples to follow all the monastic hours.  But He does want couples to pray together every day in some way.  God does not give every person the ability to go to Mass each day, or even to make a holy hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament each day.  But He does want us to offer up our daily sacrifices in union with the cross of Christ, whose perfect sacrifice is made present in an unbloody way in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.  Simply a quick, “God, I offer this to you” is a great way to accept your invitation to the banquet, and not make an excuse, however plausible you think it is, for not attending.  Or maybe, right after you wake up, you pray your morning offering, so that you have the intention of uniting everything you experience with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  

St. Paul

    Making little changes, and capitalizing on little opportunities may not seem like much, but daily little practices add up and can change the entire trajectory of one’s life.  By doing what we can, no matter how great or how small, we open ourselves up to more and more of God’s grace, until the areas of our life that we have not given over to God slowly transform into the actions God would take were He in our shoes.  When St. Paul wrote in his epistle to the Galatians, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me,” that didn’t happen all at once.  In fact, even after the Lord appeared to him, and Ananias healed Paul’s blindness, Paul went into Arabia for three years.  I would guess that the Apostle to the Gentiles had to slowly change his mind to more conform with Christ and work out how he could accept the Gospel and then share it with others.  But because he did those daily spiritual practices over three years, he could so identify with Christ that he became an icon of the one whose Gospel he proclaimed.  
    True transformation rarely happens quickly, and never happens if we put it off for tomorrow.  What if, as Garth Brooks sings, tomorrow never comes?  Based upon how we lived today and all the yesterdays that came before, would we be welcomed into the banquet?  Or would God say that we had other priorities, and that we will never taste of His banquet?  “Procrastination is the arrogant assumption that God owes you another chance to do tomorrow what He gave you a chance to do today.”  Don’t put off living your faith more deeply, according to your vocation.  Accept the invitation to the banquet, and prepare for the heavenly life now, with God the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Race Prepping

Septuagesima

2010 Lansing Catholic Soccer Team

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  In my first assignment as a priest in East Lansing, I also worked closely with Lansing Catholic High School.  And, having formerly played soccer, I was fairly active with the boys’ soccer team.  Jokingly, one of the athletes, Joey, challenged me to a race, and I eventually accepted at the end of a later school day.  Students came out to the soccer field to watch me race Joey.  I think we even had the athletic director tell us when to start.  
    When we started, I was surprised at Joey’s speed, a speed he didn’t show that often on the soccer field.  But I tried to keep it close, hoping that I could pull ahead.  At about three-quarters of the field, Joey still had a small lead, but I felt funny, and my legs were feeling like jello.  Before I knew it I had fallen flat on my face, and Joey had won the race.  I was taken aback a bit, and it occurred to me just how out of shape I was, even at the young age of 27 or so.  It turns out 27 is different than 18, and when you don’t really do physical exercise, and you have a few adult beverages the night before, and don’t eat so well or hydrate the next morning, you can’t just race a seventeen-year-old and expect to win.  
    St. Paul in the epistle today talks about training, something I did not do in my race with Joey.  He talks about training bodies to win a race, but more importantly, training our souls to win an incorruptible crown, the ancient sign of victory.  And as we enter the -gesima Sundays–Septuagesima today, Sexagesima next Sunday, and Quinquagesima the Sunday after that–we are training ourselves for Lent, the time of great asceticism and self-denial.  Because sometimes, if we wait until the last minute and then decide to do these difficult penances, we may fall flat on our faces, hopefully not literally like I did, but spiritually.  
    Today, then, is a good day to start thinking about what you want to give up for Lent, and perhaps what extra prayers or works of charity you could add to your routine.  Do you have time in your schedule for daily Mass?  Or how about joining us for Stations of the Cross on Fridays after the 12:10 p.m. Mass?  Or maybe simply making the first Saturday Masses more regularly.  
    How about restraining the body from what it desires?  Do you give up meat every Friday?  Is fasting a regular part of your life?  Or maybe start pulling back on how often you’re on your phone for social media or games, and use that extra time for prayer, or for more time with your family.  No matter what  we are going to do, we should probably start training for it or at least thinking about it now, so that it doesn’t hit us all at once, and we then fail because we were not prepared.
    We should also not feel bad or despair if we haven’t had the strongest Lent before.  I know that sometimes we can defeat ourselves before we even get started by bemoaning the fact either that we have tried something hard and have not yet succeeded, or perhaps that we have not really tried anything difficult at all.  We may be like those who were standing around, even towards the end of the day.  But if we give our all, even for a small amount of time, the Lord promises in the Gospel today that we will receive a full wage; not because we deserve it, but due to His generosity.  
    And the payment that we receive has much more value than money.  What we receive by disciplining our bodies and restraining our desires is a fuller correspondence to the life of Christ.  Each time we say no when our will wants us to say yes, we are utilizing God’s grace for the proper ordering of ourselves, as happened in the Garden of Eden before the Fall: our bodies and minds were subject to our soul, which was subject to God.  And that was how Christ lived perfectly.  So the more that we allow God’s grace to configure us to Christ, the more we will be prepared for heaven.  And the more that we are prepared for heaven, the more likely it will be that we will inherit that great bequest of beatitude, or inherit it more quickly and have less time in Purgatory.
    But it’s also important to remember that our discipline does not earn us heaven.  It is easy to become like the servants hired at the beginning of the day, and feel like we have “earned” heaven because we have been working hard to follow Christ, and Christ owes us eternal happiness.  Christ owes us nothing.  Everything is a gift.  The ability to respond to God’s grace is itself a grace, and we cannot claim it as our own.  However, when we seek to respond to God’s grace, when we seek to conform our wills to Christ, He deigns to give us rewards as if we had earned it, but always doing so out of His Divine beneficence.  
    So, over these next few weeks before Lent begins on 14 February, start thinking about what you think God would encourage you do to for a Lenten discipline.  Prepare yourselves to enter the desert of Lent.  Don’t just show up and expect to succeed.  Seek God’s grace to mortify the flesh, so that you maybe be transformed by God’s grace to be more like Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns for ever and ever. 

"Let your words teach and your actions speak"

Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

I think we have all been on one side or another of the following situation: a mother or father says to a child, “I need you to take out the trash, dear,” and the child says, “Ok,” and then some time passes, and the trash is not taken out because the child is playing a game, or watching tv, or doing something that he or she considers a little more important (and definitely more enjoyable) than taking out the trash.  That’s basically the same parable that Jesus gives today in the Gospel, and this parable is one to which we easily relate.

Talk, as is said, is cheap.  What really counts is actions.  We all know this.  If we loan someone money, and they keep telling us, “Oh yeah, I’ll get that to you by the end of the week,” but the weeks pass, and there is no reimbursement, we learn not to loan that person money.  Kids can sometimes get in trouble for not doing the chores they say they will but never seem to accomplish.  We can sometimes find out who our true friends are when we are in need and someone does or doesn’t stand by us.  What we say has exponentially more force when we follow it up by what we do.  St. Anthony of Padua said it this way: “Actions speak louder than words; let your words teach and your actions speak.  We are full of words but empty of action, and therefore are cursed by the Lord, since he himself cursed the fig tree when he found no fruit but only leaves.”  People say lots of things, but if they really want to make a difference, then those words need to be followed up by action.  The son in the Gospel who was praised was the one who originally said no, but did what the father wanted.

We have, in our life as Christians, said yes to the Lord on numerous occasions.  The minister of baptism says to parents,

You have asked to have your children baptized.  In doing so you are accepting the responsibility of training them in the practice of the faith.  It will be your duty to bring them up to keep God’s commandments as Christ taught us, by loving God and our neighbor.  Do you clearly understand what you are undertaking?

Parents say to God that they will raise their child or children in the faith.  And yet, how many times do we never see those parents again at Mass?  How many times do children, especially as they approach First Holy Communion, not know how to pray, either conversationally with God, or even our simple memorized prayers like the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be?  It is not uncommon, even for parents who send their children to a Catholic School, to think that they no longer have to worry about raising their children in the faith, and yet, my personal experience and so many studies have shown that when the faith is not lived out at home, even if the child attends a Catholic school, that child will abandon the practice of the faith.

Or if we look at another sacrament, the Sacrament of Confirmation.  In that sacrament, we are given more grace and power of the Holy Spirit to share our faith with others, and to live as witnesses to the faith that was, for most, professed for them in baptism.  But out of those who have been confirmed, who said to God that they want to accept the grace of the Holy Spirit, how many show that faith in their words and actions?  How many simply leave the majority of the practice of their faith at the doors of this church, so that their worship of God at Mass has no effect on the choices they make in their daily lives?  And that’s if people even continue to practice their faith after Confirmation.  The old cheesy joke about a pastor with a bat problem comes to mind: a young pastor has bats in the church.  He tries to kill them with a tennis racquet, but no luck; he tries an exterminator, but the bats keep coming back.  So he asks a neighboring, older pastor who previously had bats what to do.  The older pastor says, “I just confirmed my bats, and I never saw them in church again.”

The other temptation for us, as children of God, is to do what we probably all have done as kids.  When it came to our life at home, we have all probably said to ourselves ‘I’ll do my chores later when it’s more convenient.’  We have all also probably said to ourselves, ‘I’ll grow in my faith when I’m older.’  Whether it’s saying a rosary more frequently, saying daily prayers, going to an extra Mass or two during the week, or any other religious practice that we know is good, it can be very easy to say, “I’ll do that when I’m older or retired.”  And certainly sometimes our Mass time is not conducive to working people, since we start at 8:15 a.m.  But, I know we have more retired people in our parish than come to daily Mass.  It’s not a requirement, so I’m not saying you have to come, but how many of you have thought about daily Mass, and maybe even told God you would go more, but then don’t follow through?  It’s very easy for all of us, myself including, whether we’re in school, working, or retired, to promise God that we’re going to grow in our faith, and then not follow through, and so we keep saying that we’ll do it later.  But in reality, we never have later.  The future is never ours to own.  All we ever know is that we have today, and how we can live our faith in the present.

Today the Lord invites us to let our actions speak; to follow what we say by what we do.  May we all take seriously the admonition by St. John in his first letter, “let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.”