Presumption

Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Lent, 2013


Today all three readings present us with a lesson in what we might call spiritual or theological presumption.  In the Gospel we hear Christ basically warning his fellow Hebrews about presuming that the suffering that is afflicting the Galileans will not afflict them simply because they are the chosen people.  He also rails against the idea that those who suffer or die young in this world have somehow brought their misery upon themselves because of their sins.  And in his letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul tells them sternly that they should study the sins and failures of the Old Covenant so that they can work to avoid falling into the same traps, never presuming that because of God’s grace they are somehow beyond falling.  No, he tells them, whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall.  Moses seems to be completely oblivious that he is on the holy Mount Horeb, and just walks right up to the burning bush.  He receives a stern warning: come no nearer.  Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.

I think it is very important that we brush up on this theme of presumption from time to time because we live in a religious environment that is heavily influenced by protestant culture, and there are some very stark differences between the Catholic and protestant theology in this area.

Protestant theology teaches that if we have accepted Christ as our Lord, then his grace covers over our sins like snow, and even in our sinfulness we can be certain we are destined for heaven.  That is why a protestant can say that he or she is saved even while they are aware of having committed very serious sins or persisting in sin.

Catholic theology teaches that it is presumptuous to make such a declaration.  And that is why Catholics often don’t know how to respond when they are asked “Have you been saved?”
A Catholic response to the question would be “I am working on it, I trust that with God’s grace I will be, I am filled with confident hope and trust that God is leading me along the pathway to salvation.”   But a Catholic would not dare to say that he or she is definitively saved.

And this is because from the earliest days, the Church has taught that salvation requires cooperation with God’s grace, it requires that we use our freedom to love God and love our neighbor according to God’s will.  Luther used to say that God’s grace covers us like snow over a pile of dung – that we remain wretched even when we are saved and redeemed.  But this is entirely contrary to what we believe.  We believe that God saves us not simply by covering over our sins, but that he saves us by sanctifying us, by making us holy from the inside out.  Through the sacraments, Christ is at work continually helping us to die to ourselves and be more and more alive each day in him, and this is what we believe makes us holy, this is what we teach brings us salvation.  And because we fall short of that regularly, because we often resist Christ’s work of salvation in our sinfulness we also are very aware that we cannot, any of us, presume salvation.  That doesn’t mean we should fear damnation.  But it is clear that life is a constant struggle of working with God’s grace to achieve one and avoid the other.  No one can claim to be secure or lost until their last breath.

This is why the Church, following the teaching of Christ, urges us to be extremely cautious in any assumptions about the state of our moral life or the moral lives of others – both in the positive or negative.  If you look, for example, at our funeral prayers –
they speak about our hope, about our trust, about our certainty in God’s love and compassion and mercy.  But never will you hear Catholic theology stating with certainly that someone is either in heaven or in hell - except in the case of canonized saints, and that is because in those unique cases of a canonized saint there have been two confirmed miracles attributed to that person that prove that he or she must be in heaven.  Outside of that – no comment.

This may all seem a bit speculative.  Let’s look at the practical application to your life and to mine.   There are different ways that unhealthy spiritual presumption can manifest itself, both in the positive when we mistakenly assume we are guaranteed salvation, and in the negative, when we mistakenly presume that we cannot help but go to the other place.

A first and common level of presumption would be the sort that we see with Moses today: it is a kind of rashness or presumption in our approach to God.  Sometimes it is just a carelessness.
We can begin to presume a kind of informal and unserious relationship with God.  We get sloppy with sacred things, times, and places.  Don’t treat them with the care they deserve.
And this is presumption in the sense that we kind of dispense ourselves from the rigors of the spiritual life.  We give ourselves a pass – easy excuses – I’m doing better than I was, I could be like so and so, at least I (fill in the blank).  I’m a good person (that’s one of my favorites).

All of these lines of thinking are presumptuous.  Why?  Because notice, they have nothing to do with what God has asked of us or told us that he expects.  Instead, they have to do with what we want to do, to justify, or with our own judgment, or the judgment of this world.  And it is presumptuous to think that our judgment, or the judgment of this world, is on the same level as God’s.  No – we are held to his standards and his standards alone – he is the judge.  We cannot, any of us, dispense ourselves from the teaching of Christ any more than we can dispense ourselves from having two arms and two legs.
This about an example in daily life when we might be the ones who have established the rules:  When the teenager arrives at the door late at night (or early in the morning) saying “Well, I know that you have constantly told me that I need to be home by 10:00pm, but I figured that was a bit harsh and that it would be fine if I got back by 2am.”  Or better “My girlfriend said that you would understand.”  That doesn’t go over well.  Presumption.

Another line of spiritual presumption has to do with the future…  to presume that we can repent later, that we can change our lives later, that we can accommodate sin for a bit longer before we get our acts together.  That’s the presumption that Jesus goes after today in the Gospel and that St. Paul warns against in our second reading.  We can never presume our ability to repent in the future.  Repent now.  That is a constant refrain in the scriptures.
The time to do good and avoid evil is now.  And this is repeated again and again by Christ to help us combat the lies and temptations of the evil one who is always trying to get us to put off doing good or avoiding evil just one more day.  God is merciful, and as Jesus teaches us in the Gospel passage today that he will give us the opportunity to bear fruit even when our track record has not been great.  But there will be a harvest: that is not a threat, it is simply reality.  We should not put the grace and mercy of God to the test.  We cannot presume upon God’s mercy as if we would live forever.  He will do everything he can to save us, but he will not violate our free choices.

And this leads to another and final area of presumption of a different sort that can be very problematic: when someone presumes to think that they will be always be trapped by sin, that they are tainted, that they have done something that cannot be forgiven.  On a few sad occasions I have heard someone say “God will never forgive me.”   Who are we to say?  That is not our role.  No, Christian hope tells us that we should seek and strive for holiness and that it is presumptuous to think that God’s grace is not capable of overcoming any obstacle and of making us saints.  In fact, what we do know from Christ is that God’s most intent desire and greatest effort in our world is directed toward bringing us to a sanctity and holiness that will give us true and lasting joy.  It is the height of presumption to think that somehow we could be beyond his ability to save, to think that we do not share in his plan of salvation, that we have not been made like every human being: for holiness, to be a saint.

How to we fight against sins of presumption?  We follow the example of Moses.  We remove our sandals. The sandals that would track into the Holy Ground of Christ’s teaching the rocks and dirt of our own judgment, the judgment of this world.  Instead, in all humility we must ask the Holy Spirit to help us to stand with bare theological feet before God and ask him to teach us his ways, to show us who he is and what he desires for us.  And then do our best to follow without compromise or hesitation, repenting quickly when we fail, not presuming, but trusting, that through the grace at work in us Christ is leading us along the path to eternal salvation.

Have You Lowered Your Spiritual Aspirations?

Homily for the Second Sunday of Lent, 2013


These descriptions of encounters with God that we find in the scriptures this weekend: think of just how incredible they are.  They read like something we might expect from a fantastical adventure book.

In the first reading from Genesis today we listen to this incredible exchange that Abraham had with God.  Speaking back and forth, receiving promises from God, Abraham experiences a deep intimacy with the Lord.  As the sun sets, he falls into a trance, and enters into a mysterious darkness as a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch pass between the pieces of the sacrifice he had laid before God.

And then, in our Gospel reading, we have this incredible theophany, or revelation of God in the transfiguration.  While Jesus was praying, Peter, James, and John witness his face change in appearance and his clothing become dazzling white.  Moses and Elijah appear with him in glory, and then a cloud descends upon them from which the voice of God speaks to them.

Our readings today emphasize the intimacy that the Triune God desires to have with humanity.  He invites each of us us, as he invited Peter, James, and John, into the very depths of his plans for us.  He does not hide himself from us, in Christ, God is revealed.

But we hit a snag with this, don’t we?  Then why don’t most of us experience God like Abraham, Peter, James, and John?  Why don’t we experience him the way that so many saints have experienced his presence in their lives, in such real and tangible ways?  Doesn’t our experience in our modern day and age show that God only reveals himself like this, in these kinds of dramatic and intimate ways, with a chosen and privileged few?  That the rest of us must be content to be those who are blessed because we believe even though we have not seen?  That walking with God, knowing and being known by him, is only for a chosen few?

No.  And this is very important, that we refuse to accept this idea that God is content or that it is somehow his plan to be distant from us.  We must resist the horrendously low spiritual aspirations of the culture in which we live - these hallmark endorsed vague feelings of God, this superficial sentimentalism that masquerades as genuine faith.  So many people think that this is what it is like to know God, that this is as good as it gets: to just feel good about life and about yourself, to be content and to be hopeful about one day being in a better place with him. Wishes and hopes, dreams and aspirations…

To this idea, to this vague, washed out spirituality, Christianity gives a decisive rebuttal.  No, that is not as good as it gets.  That is not what God wants for us – vague notions of a spiritual nature and the dim hope of heaven.

God wants us to know him, really and truly.  He challenges us to know him, to enter into a covenant with him, to be in on his plans, to be involved, to participate in the drama of his redemption.  To no just be obliviously floating through life in a bubble of niceties.  No – we are called right into the fray, into real spiritual dimensions that are mind boggling.  Beyond the limitation and banality that comes from living in a world constructed on our own terms.  God invites each of us into his life, a life that is so far beyond us, so immense, so beautiful, so alive that it is overwhelming.

And do we not want this too?  Aren’t we made, don’t we long for life that is more than what we can imagine?  Life that is more than we want?  Life that is beyond our ability to achieve or to even conceive?  Divine life, the life that God wants for us, is also the life we have been made for.

So why don’t we have this kind of intimacy with God?  Why don’t we enter dark clouds and speak with God?  Why aren’t we terrified out of our minds when we approach this altar, overwhelmed by the beauty of God’s love poured out for us?

Because, truth be told, we don’t want him enough.  No, we don’t.  If we did, we would spend as much time praying as we do watching tv or in idle conversation.  If we did, we would give as many hours to the study of his word in the scriptures as we give to study of our careers and hobbies.  If we did, we would be known throughout our community by our love for one another and our amazing generosity to the least among us who Christ tells us embody him.  If we did, opportunities to deepen prayer and learning about God offered by the parish would be packed and overflowing and the line at the confessional would wrap around the building.

What is limiting our intimacy with God is on our end, not his.  He wants each of us, he gives each of us the grace of the sacraments and scriptures to know him like Abraham, like Peter, James, and John.

It’s lent, it’s time for your priest to help you ask some hard questions:
Is God really number one with me?
Is this priority in words only, or also in my everyday decisions?
Do I often reflect that I am only a pilgrim here on earth, here for only a short while – and do I think of my eternity as I ought?
Am I convinced that the closer I am to the Lord in prayer the better I will be for everyone else?
Is my busyness often due to much ado about nothing?
Would I accept my husband or wife of close friend saying to me “I have no time to spend with you, I’m too busy.”?

The Triune God invites, calls to us, reminds us through St. Paul: Our citizenship is in heaven.  In the midst of our skeptical and faithless age, we cannot grow faith of heart, we cannot be content with a superficial knowledge of God and his ways, we cannot lower our spiritual aspirations.  We are called to ascend the mountain with Peter, James and John, not to settle for the valley.  We have been made to witness the glory of the Lord, to know him and be known by him.  To see our God face to face.

Prayer: Life Seasoned with the Salt of God's Love

Homily for the First Sunday of Lent, 2013

Lent is a time when the Church encourages us to intensify our spiritual efforts, particularly by undertaking the time tested disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  Today, as we hear of Christ’s journey into the desert for 40 days, I would like to focus for a bit on our efforts in prayer during our 40 days of Lenten desert.

For all of us, who live in what might be described as a technological jungle, prayer is a challenge.  Go to the restaurant, you can hardly hear yourself think.  Sound piped into the stores.  Even pumping gas, the thing starts squawking at you.  Tvs are often on at home.  Music or talk radio in the car.  It is a noisy and distracted world that we live in.  And we can almost become accustomed to this and think that people have always lived like this, that only monks and hermits live in silence.

But until modern times, most every person on the planet would have lived with long periods of silence in their everyday lives.  Working out on the fields or in the woods – they did not have boom boxes or ipods.  It’s not like they could play a troupe of musicians to follow them around.  At home doing chores – perhaps they whistled from time to time or sang songs to themselves, but that would grow older after a while.  While studying or working in various trades – really in most every human activity until recently, most people experienced long periods of silence.

But we live in a different world, a world that seemingly never stops, never just sits and listens.

And it is easy to fall into the trap of becoming habituated and even dependent on an environment of perpetual noise, to the point where we become uncomfortable with quiet and immediately find ourselves turning something on so that we never have to be alone with the silence.  And this is a great danger to us, and a tendency of our modern life that we need to fight to resist.

Because a reasonable amount of silence and solitude is not something that the Christian can avoid without peril.  We cannot live a perpetually distracted life, only allowing God to break in now and then as if he were yet one more distraction in the long line of distractions.  There are fundamental conversations that God needs to have with us that can only happen in the silence, in deep prayer.  Just as you would never take your spouse out on a valentine’s date sitting in the middle of the highway if the relationship was important to you, so we cannot pretend that our relationship with God is important to us if we do not set aside time to be with him quietly in prayer.  If we do not enter into the desert.

Of course the question soon arises: but what do we do in the desert?  What do we do in the silence?  Many of us suddenly find ourselves overcome with distractions.  It can be worse than the noise: all of a sudden all of the things that we need to do, all of the concerns and worries about the day and about the future come pouring through the flood gates.  And furthermore, it is often in the desert when the wiles of the evil one are unmasked.  When all of the distractions have been cleared away and we are forced to face our demons, we have to face our sins, our insecurities.

The scriptures teach us how to respond when we encounter distraction and temptation in prayer:
In the first reading, Moses tells the priests that when offering sacrifice they are to recount the good deeds of the Lord, to remember what God has done for them.  And this is most profoundly done when we turn to the scriptures, as our Lord did when he found himself tempted by Satan.  We too, when we come to prayer, to silence, can find great help in avoiding distraction by focusing on God’s word, on the scriptures.
One of the most sure methods of prayer, called lectio divina, or sacred reading, is based on this experience.  In lectio divina we begin with a passage of scripture, perhaps the readings from the day.  After thinking about them, we work to then apply the meaning to our lives, to hear the lesson that God is trying to teach us through his word.  And then finally this reflection leads to a conversation with God himself, to a dialogue of prayer.

The rosary or other devotional prayers like the divine mercy chaplet can also help us to enter into the posture of prayer before God, provided that we do not become narrow in our focus, just trying to get our rosary or other devotion in for the day.  We need to remember that each decade of the rosary invites us to contemplate an aspect or mystery of Christ’s life, and to be open to hearing what Christ wants to teach us through these mysteries.

Simply accomplishing a prayer, whether it be the rosary or the divine mercy chaplet, or the liturgy of the hours, can never be the goal.  The goal is an openness with God, a time of listening to him and speaking with him as we would speak with a friend.  If we are in the middle of prayer and feel ourselves wanting to just sit with God, to just be with him in silence, listening, then we should not be afraid to let our words pause for a moment.  Again, the goal is to be open to Christ.

Christian prayer begins and ends with these intentional and necessary times of uninterrupted and intense prayer that we incorporate into our morning or evening routines, but we should all seek to live prayerfully throughout the day.  We are called to live in a way that is recollected, that is open to God, in situations where we are not able to sit down and read or without a rosary: we might be in the car or working on some project, shoveling snow… something like that.  And yet in all of the different circumstances of life, we are invited by the Holy Spirit, especially in this season of Lent,  to make every effort to keep our eyes fixed on God.

1600 years ago, St. John Chrysostom spoke to his parishioners about this kind of daily practice of prayer.  He told them “Our spirit should be quick to reach out toward God not only when it is engaged in meditation; at other times also, when it is carrying out its duties, caring for the needy, performing works of charity, giving generously in the service of others, our spirit should long for God, and call him to mind, so that these works may be seasoned with the salt of God’s love, and so make a palatable offering to the Lord of the universe. Throughout the whole of our lives we may enjoy the benefit that comes from prayer if we devote a great deal of time to it.”

Prayer is essential.  Christ was able to resist the temptations of the evil because he was united to his heavenly father in prayer.  His miracles were all worked in prayer.  He prayed from the beginning of the day to the end, and he taught his disciples and all of us that we should strive to pray without ceasing.  To be mindful, really is what that means, to be aware and mindful that our Lord walks with us, and to be quick to turn to him.

It is Beautiful to be Old!

Ash Wednesday, 2013

I imagine that many of us had particular plans about lent this year.  Maybe plans to give up certain things that we have traditionally given up each year, such as sweets or tv, or new routines that have been planning, like going to daily Mass or the Stations of the Cross.  These practices of increased prayer and fasting are very important in allowing us to be open to the conversion that Christ wishes to offer us this season.

But then on Monday we had quite a surprise, didn’t we?  The pope will be resigning.  And so our  40 days of preparation for Easter will now coincide with preparation for and the receiving of a new Pope.  Even though these events will take place in Rome, I am sure that we will all be quite aware of the developments through modern media – which is a real blessing.  Because the Pope is not just the bishop of Rome; he is also the supreme pontiff of the universal Church, one who is a sign and a protector of the unity of all Catholics to Christ and to one another.

So now our lent takes on a different flavor, doesn’t it?  And we might ask, well what flavor?  Is it the flavor of endless speculation about who will be the next pope?  I certainly hope not.
Is it the flavor of endless comparing of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and trying to figure out what qualities the next pope will need?  I think that is not really for us to decide.  So how can we observe lent this year while at the same time taking into account this critical time in the life of the Church?

I would suggest two ways:
1. By increasing our prayer for the Church.  We have already been praying for a new bishop.  Now we have the added responsibility of praying for a new pope.  Concretely, I would suggest that we pray for the Church and for the cardinals who will elect the pope on a daily basis in the coming weeks.  Even if it is a short prayer in the morning.  The media and much of our world do not understand the truth about how leadership is selected in the Church: that it is a process of prayer and fasting, not one of power and politicking.  And we can participate in this prayerful discernment here in our parish as we ask God to help the Church to be receptive to the guidance of the Holy Spirit as she discerns who will be our new earthly shepherd.

2. But there is a second way that I think our Lenten observance can change this year, that I want to emphasize in particular.  And that is in our prayer for the pope, who has reached a point in his life where his health is failing, and to also be particularly attentive to those who share in the same cross, the elderly of our parish.  How quickly the pope himself has been forgotten in the news coverage, as tv crews run off to try to figure out who the next guy will be, and how easily in our own community we pass by the homes and institutions where our own elderly live.

We tend to focus on the first two of the three aspects of Lent: prayer and fasting.  But this is also a season that should be characterized by almsgiving: the giving of ourselves, of our time, of our gifts, of our financial resources, of our attention to others; a time of generosity.  The pope’s announcement reminds us of the cross that our older brothers carry – and encourages us to reach out in support and in solidarity with them.  For those of you who are older and who are experiencing the burdens of old age, I encourage you in a particular way to be united to the pope in prayer and in reaching out to others.  I would like to close with an address given by Pope Benedict when he visited a nursing home in Rome this past November, probably already then aware that he would be resigning this spring:

“I come to you as Bishop of Rome, but also as an old man visiting his peers. It would be superfluous to say that I am well acquainted with the difficulties, problems and limitations of this age and I know that for many these difficulties are more acute due to the economic crisis. At times, at a certain age, one may look back nostalgically at the time of our youth when we were fresh and planning for the future. Thus at times our gaze is veiled by sadness, seeing this phase of life as the time of sunset. This morning, addressing all the elderly in spirit, although I am aware of the difficulties that our age entails I would like to tell you with deep conviction: it is beautiful to be old! At every phase of life it is necessary to be able to discover the presence and blessing of the Lord and the riches they bring. We must never let ourselves be imprisoned by sorrow! We have received the gift of longevity. Living is beautiful even at our age, despite some “aches and pains” and a few limitations. In our faces may there always be the joy of feeling loved by God and not sadness.

Dear friends, at our age we often experience the need of the help of others; and this also happens to the Pope.  I would like to ask you to seek in this too a gift of the Lord, because being sustained and accompanied, feeling the affection of others is a grace!
This is important in every stage of life: no one can live alone and without help; the human being is relational. And in this case I see, with pleasure, that all those who help and all those who are helped form one family, whose lifeblood is love.  Dear elderly brothers and sisters, the days sometimes seem long and empty, with difficulties, few engagements and few meetings; never feel down at heart: you are a wealth for society, even in suffering and sickness.  The Pope loves you and relies on all of you! May you feel beloved by God and know how to bring a ray of God’s love to this society of ours, often so individualistic and so efficiency-oriented. And God will always be with you and with all those who support you with their affection and their help.”

Flailing on the Operating Table?

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Ordinary Time, 2013

“Woe is me, I am doomed.”  This seems to be the most common response of someone who has an authentic call from God to minister to his people.

And this might seem a bit strange, given that we know because of Christ that our God is a God of love and mercy and not of wrath of vengeance.  It would seem that those who would experience him most intimately would be comforted by his presence and set at ease by his love.  And yet it is interesting that in the inspired scriptures of the Church, those who encounter God most intimately so often were overcome by fear and the sense of being unworthy.  Moses was petrified when he saw the burning bush, Jeremiah felt he was too young, Isaiah as we hear today, did not feel worthy.  We could list a whole litany of other prophets and kings who trembled before the presence of God.  Some might say, “Oh, well that’s because the God of the Old Testament was severe and full of wrath.” but this is hardly borne out when we read the New Testament, is it?  Ss. Peter and Paul both reacted in the same way as the prophets before them when they were called by Christ: “Depart from me Lord, I am a sinful man.” St. Peter says.  Hardly the words of one who is confident or unafraid.  St. Paul’s encounter with Christ had left him blind and entirely disoriented.  In our second reading today, he reminds the Corinthians of his unworthiness and sinfulness, that he does not even consider himself fit to be called an apostle.

Does this mean, some might ask that we should start teaching our young people, and all Catholics for that matter, that they should be afraid of God?  Of course not.

But do we not have to somehow take account of this?  Can we really pretend that an experience of God should always be pleasant when it seems that for so many saints it really was not?

Now clearly many people have had incredibly pleasant encounters with God.  In fact, that is a huge understatement: the heights of joy and peace have been found in his presence by countless saints.  One only has to read the great mystics to know that intimacy with God is to be embraced by love himself, to be surrounded by love, to be filled with it – and that no greater joy can be found than this experience of God.  Indeed, that is what we all await in heaven, right?

But there is the rub – the heights of joy in God’s presence are experienced by saints.  Saints who are pure of heart and receptive to God’s grace, who are completely at home in his presence, whose wills are entirely aligned to God’s will.  Unfortunately, most of us don’t fall into that category.  And so our experience of being in God’s presence, of receiving his invitation to follow him, of growing in intimacy with him is not always easy.  Often, when we encounter God, we feel a kind of dividedness inside of us, in the will – a sense of friction, of being unsettled, of tension.  Sometimes, if we are clinging to sins or to worldly idols, God’s presence can even feel menacing, threatening.  Like a surgeon with a scalpel, or a dentist with a drill.  And we want to cringe, we want him to leave us alone.  Many times the experience of God drawing near to us downright uncomfortable.

As we enter into the season of Lent, these readings provide us with a valuable reflection.  They remind us that those whom God calls he also purifies, and that this work of purification and healing is often difficult.

Rather than resisting this redemptive work of God, like a patient flailing about on the operating table, or squirming on the dentist’s chair, lent invites us to enter into this penitential season with trust and courage.  The courage to stand before God.  And maybe we will tremble a bit – not because we don’t trust him but because we know how much work he has to do on us, we know how serious the illness is, how attached we are to idols that need to go.  If we find ourselves a bit anxious, a bit apprehensive about serious spiritual renewal, then our readings today remind us that we are in good company.  

But remember: Isaiah held still as the burning ember was touched to his mouth.  St. Peter did not jump out of the boat.  They knew that whatever they had to endure, whatever they would be asked to leave behind, whatever discipline they would need embrace – these things would be but light afflictions compared with the joy that awaits those who are united to God’s will and vessels of his love.

May we be given the same grace as we enter into this penitential season: the grace to be humble and courageous in placing our lives before the Lord.  He wishes to heal us, to purify us, and then to send us into the world to proclaim his love and mercy to all people.  May we not shrink back at his approach, turn away from his invitation, but instead even though our knees weaken a bit, though our palms begin to sweat – may we humbly place our lives before him this lent: through our reception of the sacrament of penance, and through our increased prayer, penance and almsgiving.

Loving in the Midst of Conflict

Homily for the 4th Sunday of Ordinary Time, 2013

Most people will do a lot to avoid conflict.  I certainly don’t enjoy it – and I suspect if I were to go down the row in each pew very few of you would say you enjoy it.  The feeling in the pit of the stomach, the frustration, the anger that often results of the anxiety that dogs us.  No fun.

Yet most of us, I imagine, find ourselves in situations that are marked with conflict on a pretty regular basis.  Perhaps in our home – there are different times when we find ourselves at odds with our wife or husband and just can’t seem to resolve underlying issues.  It may not always be out in the open, but there is a frustration and a lack of harmony that has made what should be a life-giving relationship into an energy sapping relationship.  Or conflict with our children, who often at one time or another generally tend to decide that we are their enemies.  Or perhaps we encounter conflict with our parents or sisters and brothers or other extended family who are making choices or doing things that just seem to constantly antagonize.  So many people today are living in one of the many difficult situations brought about through a divorce, trying to navigate how to relate to a former spouse or a new step-parent or new step children or a former spouse or all of the other relationships that can be fraught with difficulty.  And of course there is often conflict that manifests itself in the workplace with co-workers or supervisors or employees.  And conflict often arises between neighbors and friends, within various community associations and, yes, even in the Church.

Our lives are incredibly social, and this matrix of social interaction that we find ourselves in the middle of exists in a fallen world, a world marked by limitations, and sin, and division.

When conflict gets especially strong, when it’s the middle of winter and everyone is grouchy, I imagine we have all hit the point when we just want to run away, to escape – when we feel like we just can’t handle the conflict any more.  That it is too much for us to take.

The readings today offer encouragement when we come to that precipice, to the brow of a hill, just as our Lord did in the Gospel we just heard – when it feels like those who are closest to us despise us or do not understand us.  Remember that Jesus was in his home town, with the people who he knew best – and these were the people who he loved, who he had grown up with.  Can you imagine the feeling in the pit of his stomach, the anxiety that he felt?

We should never forget that our Lord knew the feeling of rejection and conflict well – he knew it better than most of us.  His words, his teaching was more often than not met with resistance, with scorn and mockery or outright hatred.  His own disciples and family were often in conflict around him and with him.  He did not live a charmed life, a carefree life, surrounded only by those who agreed with him or did what he asked of them and tried to please him.  Instead, it seems that he sometimes even purposefully waded into social situations that he knew were bound to create conflict, he did not avoid social tension and awkwardness in the least – it seems that many times he almost sought it out.

I think two questions arise from his example and can be a great help and guide for us.  First, why did he do it? And secondly, how did he do it?

Why did he do it?  Why did Jesus submit to social conflict in the first place, we might ask.  Why didn’t he go and found a monastery with his disciples and make others come to him, preferably after climbing up a very steep mountain, so that only those who truly wanted to hear his teaching and follow his example would follow him.  Why did he instead choose to constantly place himself in the midst of detractors and antagonists?
Love, I think, is the ultimate answer.  Jesus shows us that if you refuse to enter into situations of conflict in this fallen world, you also refuse to enter situations that are most in need of love.

The cross is the clearest proclamation of this truth: where did Christ show us the greatest love?  In the final and greatest conflict of his life.  Christ manifests the greatness of his love precisely where it is needed the most: in places of conflict.  St. Paul understood this character of the love of Christ profoundly, as we hear in the well-known passage from 2nd Corinthians today.  The portrait of love that he paints is one of tireless endurance to the end, of sacrifice and generosity of heart – a love that is made to exist precisely in situations and relationships of conflict: where else would we need to be patient and kind, avoiding a quick temper or brooding over injury, bearing all things and enduring all things?  Certainly not in heaven!  Love only manifests itself according to these attributes in a fallen world, in a world of conflict and strife.  It is precisely in these moments, St. Paul knew from the experience of his own life which seems to have been one conflict following upon another, it is precisely in these conflicts that he knew the love of Christ could and should shine most clearly through him if he was open and working to be receptive to the Holy Spirit.

And that brings us to our second question.  Well, okay, we understand why it is important not to avoid conflict, because God’s love is needed there and we are called to be vessels of his love.  But how?  How do we not get beat down?  How do we not get drawn into the conflict ourselves?  It’s one thing to know what is needed, it is quite another to have the strength and the capacity to give it.  To love in the midst of conflict is perhaps the most daunting tasks that any Christian faces.

How much we all need to hear the words that Jeremiah speaks to us today: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you.  Be not crushed on their account, as though I would leave you crushed before them; they will fight against you but not prevail over you, for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD.”

To love those who love you?  That doesn’t take much character – children love like that, St. Paul tells us, criminals love like that, Jesus tells us.  But to love those who curse you?  Those who malign you?  Those who want to kill you?  To love in the midst of conflict?  You can only do that when you know and experience the love of God – when you are rooted in him, when you carry his love within you.  I don’t know any other way.  That is why the martyrs have always been the greatest of Christian witnesses.  Those who saw their love in the midst of conflict and hatred could not help but sense that the martyrs were drawing upon a powerful source of love beyond themselves, a source of love that seemed inexhaustible.  And they were – they were drawing on the love of Christ.  That same inexhaustible source of love is given to us today – Christ does not give us a partial portion of his love, but all of it – as much as we want, as much as we are willing to receive.  May he help us to approach him with open hearts, hearts prepared and ready to be filled and then poured as we bring the love of Christ into the places of conflict in our world.

Liberty to Captives

Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, 2013

The notion of freedom that is widely promoted today centers on the ability of the individual to be in absolute control of the world around them.   We can see this notion in so many commercials.  The person behind the new car console or the new computer screen or the new dishwasher is shown to us with almost divine powers: it will do whatever you want at the push of the button.  This product will make reality conform to your will, and it will make that happen quickly and easily.  You too, can be the master of your universe, you can avoid compromise, you can be completely and entirely free to make the world as you would like it to be.

Ecologically and socially, we see the same notion of freedom centered on the absolute power of the will: to be free means that I can determine for myself - just as I would fabricate a landscape or a character in a video game - the natural world around me, regardless of environmental consequences.  The size, shape, gender, looks, functioning and even urges of my own body are all adapted to what I want.  And further: all social interaction is on my terms. The so called ‘liberated’ person associates with those who they desire to associate with,  determining for themselves at any given moment who will be their spouse, family, friends, children, parents, and neighbors, who they will like, and who they won't.

In cases like abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia we see how far this distorted sense of freedom can go.  How many today argue that our freedom requires the ability to exercise control over life and death itself?  To end one’s own life or the life of another human person is claimed to be a choice that the free person must be able make without reference to others.

Without reference to others, without reference to God, without reference to even our very selves: this is how we are told free people should be able to act.  Without reference to anyone or anything, just pure absolute will.

But that is, actually, the very definition of hell.  Life without reference to anyone or anything.  An existence that produces only isolation, restlessness, and slavery.  How restless, how lonely, how enslaved we become when our own will is our master.  Slowly, reality is cut off from us, the ties of affection strangled as a bloated willfulness consumes more and more of our lives.  Our existence is consumed by what we want next and what we are doing to get it.  Gradually we lose the capability to love, to give of ourselves, to even notice others around us, not to mention the movements of the Spirit.  It is the sin of Adam, and it is the sin of every man and woman, the original sin.  It is the sin that enslaves, that Christ came to destroy.  That is what he proclaims in our Gospel today.

Christ takes up the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and declares that he brings to fulfillment the promise God made to our fathers: he will give liberty to captives, sight to the blind, and let the oppressed go free.  His Spirit, the Holy Spirit, offers us the freedom of the sons and daughters of God, a freedom that cannot be found in this world, that cannot be found in our own will.

The Hebrew people were awakened once more to this truth by Ezra and Nehemiah as they heard God’s law read to them, we heard in our first reading.  They saw once more that their prosperity, that their liberty lay precisely in their faithfulness to the commands of the Lord who alone can give us the freedom that we desire as his sons and daughters.  “Amen, amen’ they cried upon hearing his commands: “I believe, I accept, I will follow.”  I want to be free.

We who follow Christ must be witnesses to this truth about freedom and slavery in our world.
Our readings manifest this point clearly to us: freedom, liberty is a blessing bestowed on us by God when we follow his will.
True freedom cannot be claimed for ourselves, it is the reward given to those who acknowledge God’s claim on them.

And what does that look like, concretely?  St. Paul understood the freedom of the sons and daughters of God better than most.  He had been a slave to his own will and then, through an incredible grace that we just celebrated this Friday during the feast of his conversion, he was set free.  He was liberated by his acceptance of the will of God.  It was as though a weight had been lifted from him.  He could  not proclaim loudly enough: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  Not my will, but his!  I am free!  So great was his love for Christ and the freedom that he had found in him that he even rejoiced over his struggles and persecutions because he saw them as opportunities to crucify his own will and live in complete dependence on the will of God that makes us free.

How many of us are mostly bamboozled on this one?  How many of us are obsessed with trying to get our will done.  Even when we pray, we are just asking God to do what we want.  To free us from the aspects of life that we don’t like.  If we desire true freedom, we should be asking God to free us from ourselves, not from our world.  Asking him to help us fully embrace his will, our place in his body, the Church.  Not to be like the foot that St. Paul speaks of in the second reading today, who says “Because I am not a hand, I am not part of the body.”  How many people say “Because I am not a priest or a sister, because I haven’t taken vows, I don’t have to be entirely obedient to God’s will?”  Baloney.  St. Paul knew.  You must follow God’s will if you want to be free.  If you want to be happy.  If you want to love.  There is no other authentic source of freedom, true freedom only comes from God.

Only in God are we offered the freedom to be authentic to who we are, to act in accord with who God made us to be.
Only in God are we offered the freedom to live in harmony with one another.  The freedom to love others as Christ has loved us, joyfully and generously.
Only in God are we offered the freedom to be in a profound union with Christ, who has made us members of his body.

Christ reveals to us that we will only be free when we freely accept God’s will and are faithful to it.  When we take our place as members of his body, his body that liberates us and allows us to be our true selves, to live in true communion with one another, and to live in true union with God.  You want to be free?  Than want God’s will.  Do you want God’s will?  Than you will be free.  We celebrated our parish’s patronal feast day, the Conversion of St. Paul, on Friday.  May God help us to follow in Paul’s footsteps: to desire more than anything to do God’s will, and so to be liberated by the Spirit of the Body of Christ.

A Non-Institutional Institution

Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, 2013

Imagine, if you will, a modern board room where the Board of Apostles is sitting down for the first meeting with Jesus to kick off their new endeavor, the salvation of the world.  They are batting around ideas as to how to kick things off.  Perhaps one suggests that Jesus should work the transfiguration miracle first: that would really demonstrate his glory and majesty.  “What about feeding of the 5000?” someone asks.  That would certainly impress people and show his impartiality and kindness.  Or raising Lazarus – show the people his power over death.  Maybe, someone suggests, Christ could journey to Rome, to the center of influence and commerce and there, in the Roman Forum, preach the Beatitudes, demonstrating the depth of his wisdom and his knowledge of the kingdom of God.

“No,” we can imagine Jesus saying, “I think for my first miracle I am going to invite you all home to a family wedding.  And after my mother asks me, I’m going to change water into wine.  That’s going to be my first miracle.”  A miracle performed as a favor for friends of the family that is completely unnecessary for anyone’s salvation.

How many times, as we reflect on the Gospels, are we reminded that God’s ways are not our ways and that his thoughts are not our thoughts?

We live in an era when even the most basic of human activities are increasingly becoming institutionalized and depersonalized.  We could speculate for a long time as to why this is the case, but everywhere around us we see that our lives involve less person to person interaction and more person to policy or person to institution interaction.  We hear often things like “I really sympathize with you, and if it were up to me, I would change things.  But there is this policy…  I can’t treat you any differently than anyone else… what if we did this for everyone?”

How many times people hide behind policies and institutions and organizational objectives and justify actions that they know are harming or making it impossible to help a person standing right in front of them?  The perceived good of the institution or the mission is placed ahead of the good of the person.  And how many of us fear not evil and violent men and women, but the cold impartiality of an institution that decides, that our job is no longer needed, that a medical procedure should not be covered, or that we have failed to meet requirements needed to move forward in our studies or career?

Now, some might ask, "Isn’t this the pot calling the kettle black?  After all, isn’t the Church a massive institution?"  And this is true in a sense – the Church does have many of the same characteristics as other earthly institutions.  But the Church has always fought against institutionalism, against making individual persons a means to a collective end.

Look at what St. Paul teaches in our second reading today:  two things: the Holy Spirit gives gifts to people, not institutions.  And the Holy Spirit does not give out the same gifts according to the same measure.  He chooses different people to do different things according to different degrees.  All of these choices, says St. Paul, are not made by God in view of fairness, to make sure that everyone gets the same.
St. Paul does not say “There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same amount is given to each.”  He says “There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit.”  He does not say “There are different workings but they are of equal importance.”  He says “There are different workings but the same God who produces them in everyone.”  And why?  Because when God gives us gifts, St. Paul tells us, he does so in an entirely personal and generous way according to some benefit that he knows is needed,  not comparing one of us to the other.  He looks at each of us, he looks at how he made us, our choices, he looks at what we need, he looks at the whole matrix of relationships around us and at his whole plan of salvation and he knows what he will give us to accomplish his plan of salvation.  He doesn’t measure us one against another, trying to figure out who is more deserving.  No one is deserving.  Instead he builds us up together so that we complement one another and together are able to respond to his grace.  Think of how often Jesus makes this point in the Gospels: workers are all paid the same amount at the end of the day regardless of when they arrived at work, he tells us that to those to whom much is given more will be added, and that to those who have little even what they have will be taken away.

Christ insists again and again that God does not act according to some worldly and arbitrary measure of fairness, according to heavenly policies and norms, but according to each of us and how he wishes to love us and help us respond to his gift of salvation.

Jesus demonstrated this kind of love and goodness in his lifetime and in his first miracle.  He did not put out forms and conduct interviews to see who were the most needy or who were the most in error, who were being tormented by demons the most.  Nor did he collect resumes for the Apostles and compare them, selecting the most qualified.  He already knew all the people in front of him and he responded to who they were, who he had made them, giving them what was needed in order for them to respond to his plan of salvation.

And in the case of that first miracle, apparently what they needed was wine.  And lots of it.  Maybe we can hear a detractor saying “Do you know how many poor people hardly have enough to eat and here he is making wine out of water, and not just any old wine, but really good wine.”  Why?  Because that’s what was needed and that’s where he was and he loved those people.  His mother told him “They are out of wine.”  Well, what are you going to do, say no?  Talk about how ‘What if I did this for everyone, mom?’  No.  That’s what was needed, that’s what he could give and that’s what he gave.  And then he moved on to help others.

We all should take a lesson from this first miracle.  If God does not ration out his love, if he does not disdain to provide for the simple needs of those around him, if he is willing to be especially generous to those who are his family and friends and who ask him for favors – why shouldn’t we?   Is the sense that there needs to be impartiality and objectivity in all things so that we do not show favoritism keeping us from loving the person in front of us?  Is the idea that we need to be strategic and efficient in the efforts that we make so that we achieve the greatest result for the amount of resources that we commit keeping us from being generous in the opportunities that present themselves daily?

If Jesus was not impartial, why should we hold ourselves to the standard of impartiality?  No, we should not.  We should hold ourselves to the standard of the Holy Spirit, St. Paul tells us, to the Spirit who through prayer guides us and shows us how to respond to the people and circumstances of daily life with generosity and love.  How to love those who God has placed before us: our wives and husbands, our children and parents, our neighbors and friends, and friends of the family.  These were the people who Christ chose to bless with his first miracle, his friends and family.  Christ shows us that our efforts to follow him must begin in the same way: by generously giving ourselves to the personal and intimate circumstances of daily life.

We Are His

Homily for the Baptism of the Lord, 2013

Repent!  The end is near!  I think we can all picture the old guy with the scraggly beard holding up the sign on the side of the road, especially this past year, 2012.  How often Christianity is presented in threatening tones: Repent, of face eternal damnation!  As if Christ came to shame us and make us feel guilty.  As if it were only because of Jesus that there is such a thing as hell or sin or evil.

It is certainly true that in Christ the reality of sin and evil is revealed in all of its ugliness and brutality.  When one holds up a light in a room, one sees everything clearly, the good and the bad alike.  But as we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord, we are reminded that the message proclaimed by the Church to our world is incredibly and almost unbelievably positive.

The goodness of God’s will for us is made manifest in a particular way when Christ is baptized in the Jordan.  In his baptism, Christ immerses himself into the small and rather dirty Jordan river.  And he does so right along with thousands of other people, some of them very great and notorious sinners, who had come to be baptized by John.  And he does not distinguish himself, he does not separate himself.

In being baptized, Christ intensifies his identification with all of us.
He enters the river of human weakness and division, he enters the river of hatred and rivalry, he enters the river of indifference and deceit, and he immerses his whole self into these waters of our fallen human nature.  But as he rises out of the waters, something is new. The baptism of John was a baptism of repentance, a baptism that symbolized the desire of the sinner to repent and follow God’s will, it was not a manifestation of God’s will.

What we see in Christ is different.  His was not a baptism of repentance, but the manifestation of a new era of salvation.   Instead of baptism manifesting the sinner’s hope for mercy, in Christ baptism becomes the way that God adopts us into his life and shows us his favor.

It is critical that we who have been baptized in Christ realize that we have not received a baptism of repentance, the baptism of John.  We use ashes to symbolize our repentance, not water.  Instead, through water we now receive what John the Baptist called the baptism of the Holy Spirit and of fire, the baptism of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Ours is a baptism of adoption, through which St. Paul tells us that we now call God Abba, Father.  In practice, water is still poured over our heads, just as Christ was immersed into the waters of the Jordan.  But in Christ, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Adoption has entered the into the waters.  At the moment when water is poured over our heads, God the Father speaks to us the same words that he spoke to Christ, “You are my son, you are my daughter, this day I have begotten you.”  In baptism, it is not we who attempt to make a claim on God’s mercy, but the Triune God who makes a claim on our lives.  We are his.

Jesus later taught his disciples what this meant.  We have been given the glory, he said, that the Father has given the Son.  We are in Christ, and he is in us, we are his body.  And the love that the Father has for the Son, the Love that is God’s life, is now given to us who have been immersed into him in baptism.

“Comfort, give comfort to my people,” Isaiah proclaims, “Here comes with power the Lord God.” He comes not to condemn but to save us by adopting us in accord with his plan from the beginning, allowing us to share in the fullness of his love.

Christians must seek to do good and avoid evil, we must repent and be faithful to the Gospel.  But we do so not because we are motivated by fear or the desire to appease a God who we perceive to be just waiting on the sidelines to condemn us.  Instead, our striving to do good and avoid evil, if it is genuine, arises from the grateful recognition of the gift of faith that we have received.  Our desire to be holy is nothing less than the desire to be authentic, to live according to who we have been made in baptism, the beloved sons and daughters of God, called to live the fire of love through the grace of the Holy Spirit.

The baptism of John manifested repentance, the desire for mercy and divine favor.  The baptism of Christ reveals to us something profoundly new, that we would not have known on our own.  That God desires for us to dwell in him and to participate in his never-ending love.  So repentance  yes, sure that is part of the life of the Christian.  But more importantly, as we hear in the Psalm today: “O bless the Lord, my soul!”  He has immersed himself in our fallen world and through Christ made us his adopted children, with whom he is well pleased.

Christmas: Beautiful and Scary, Joyful and Overwhelming

Homily for Christmas, 2012


If you had to run out of the house in an emergency and could only bring one thing, most of us  have a crate or a box or a cabinet that we would make every effort to grab.  Inside perhaps we keep old pictures, important letters and correspondence, tokens of love and affection, maybe an old home movie on VHS, some legal documents.

I have one, tucked away in the rectory, and in that box I have 2 letters that were written by father.  He wrote them to me when I was a little baby and then tucked them away with the instructions that they be given to me on my 21st birthday.

I was just reading them again the other day.  And I’m not going to share with you what he wrote because some things like that you just don’t share, and because I am pretty confident that those of you who are parents can imagine the thoughts that he expressed in those letters, the sentiments of a new parent.

When you have a child, everything changes.  Your life takes an irreversible turn.  And the irony is that as you look upon this tiny little vulnerable baby, you realize just how vulnerable you have become.  The world suddenly becomes a strange and powerful mixture of incredible joys and great dangers.  Little outings and events that would have barely registered on the radar become great and arduous adventures.  A new and powerful motive and drive animates your life, bringing out the best and the worst in you, stretching your character, searching the limits of your capacity to give.  It is time that is beautiful and scary, joyful and overwhelming.

On Christmas day 2000 years ago Joseph and Mary became the mother and father of a new baby boy, Jesus.  And I’m sure that as they cared for him in those first days, their experience was much the same as that of every new parent, except that maybe it was even more intense because of their awareness that the child entrusted to them was God’s son, a child precious beyond imagining.

But the experience of Christmas, of welcoming Christ our child-Savior, did not end with Mary and Joseph in those first years of Jesus’ life.  From the very early years of the Church, Christians began to celebrate Christmas because they were profoundly aware that when the Word became flesh in this little child, he was not only entrusted to Mary and Joseph as their son, but to every man and woman who has been made in his image and likeness.

Indeed, that is what we celebrate on Christmas: that Christ has been entrusted to us, given to us, when we received the gift of the faith.  And this gift of God with us, Emmanuel, impacts those who receive him in faith in much the same way that he impacted the lives of his parents 2000 years ago.  When you have been given Christ, everything changes.  Your life takes an irreversible turn.  And the irony is that as you look upon this tiny little vulnerable baby, you realize just how vulnerable and dependent on God you have become.  The world suddenly becomes a strange and powerful mixture of incredible joys and great dangers.  Little outings and events that would have barely registered on the radar become great and arduous adventures.  A new and powerful motive and drive animates your life, bringing out the best and the worst in you, stretching your character, searching the limits of your capacity to give.  It is time that is beautiful and scary, joyful and overwhelming.

This is the life of faith, the life of those who have been entrusted with the gift of this little precious and vulnerable child, the gift of our Savior.

Yet how easily we can forget this basic truth of Christian faith, avoiding the reality of how God is entrusted to us in such humble and vulnerable way.   Instead of cherishing and protecting his life within us, we drag him with us into the darkness and the noise of our world, not thinking about how our choices affect our ability to care for him, affect his ability to live in us.  “Aww, he can handle it, he knows that I love him.”  He does know that, but that doesn’t change the fact that if we carry the precious gift of our faith carelessly and without attention, as if faith were bullet proof, as if it didn’t need to be fed and nurtured, guarded and protected – we can lose it.

Christmas reminds us that out of love for us God makes himself so incredibly vulnerable.  He does not force himself upon us, he does not impose his will.  He comes to us as a child, a child who can be loved and cherished or neglected, ignored, and even killed.  He places his very life in our hands in a way that helps us to be most free to place our lives in his.  So that our love for him can be pure and unselfish, spontaneous and generous.  He gives himself to us in an all or nothing move: all the chips are in on every one of us: we are given all of Christ: body and blood, soul and divinity, nothing withheld.

When you pick up a newborn infant it is scary and beautiful at the same time: and so it must be for those of us who have received Christ in faith: scary and beautiful.  Look at who we have been given, so intimately given, so profoundly given.  A savior so easily rejected, a Lord so easily scorned, a God so easily denied.  And yet also how easily loved!  How can we not tremble a bit as we hold him in our hands: a most precious treasure clothed in such weakness!

What if we wrote him a letter.  A letter not to be opened on his 21st birthday, but perhaps at the end of our earthly life, when we hope to be born into eternal life with him.  Maybe in that letter we would try to express, as my father did, the sentiments of one entrusted with the life of a little child:  we would tell him how precious he is, how much we love him, how much our lives are enriched because of him.  How much we love his mother and admire her.  How we hope we can nurture and protect him, we worry that we are not up to the task of keeping him safe in this dark and dangerous world.  But that more than anything wouldn’t we just write about how grateful we are, grateful that he has been given to us, entrusted to us: this little baby, our God, our Savior.

Was Incarnate of the Virgin Mary and Became Man

Homily for the 4th Sunday of Advent, 2012

(Well, I did have time to post this, so you get two homilies for one weekend this year!)


Today we have an opportunity to reflect on the Visitation, the beautiful encounter between Mary and Elizabeth that was marked by such joy and anticipation.

What faith these women had!  And what wisdom and generosity of heart!  As we hear in the Gospel today, Mary, though she had just found out that she was pregnant herself, traveled in haste to see her older cousin as soon as she heard that she was pregnant so that she could be of service to her.  At Mary’s arrival, Elizabeth cries out in a loud voice, spurred to speak by the baby John who has recognized Christ’s approach even in the mystery of the womb.  These were courageous and confident women, women of deep faith, women who God chose because he knew he could rely on them.  They were the first Christians, and they are examples to us all of how to live in and walk in union with God.  The Church has always held them in highest regard and earnestly sought their intercession.

This year AnneMarie and I have been guiding the high school youth ministry through a year focused on knowing and living the Sacred Scriptures.  Last week we explored the profound role of women in the Christian scriptures, and in the life of the Church.

A concern that AnneMarie and I share, along with many others, is that increasingly the Christian faith, and the Catholic Church in particular, is being portrayed as male dominated, chauvinistic, and anti-women.  While this theme has existed for some time in certain academic circles, increasingly today we see its widespread popularization in our culture.  Again and again the Da Vinci Code narrative presented as if it were based in reality: that the Church is headed up by a bunch of old men who have been suspicious of women or at least patronized them, and who have done everything in their power to keep them from gaining any authority in the Church.  This is why, many say, the Church still refuses to embrace a contemporary approach to the issues of gender and sexual ethics.  The celibate male clergy is viewed as a medieval weight around the neck of the Church, a hindrance to the spread of the Gospel, and even a sign of hypocrisy.

Now some may say, many Catholic women, in fact – look Father, we know that the Church changes slowly.  We used to believe that slavery was okay, now we don’t.  These things will change.  Women are patient.
But I don’t believe that this line of thinking works.  Especially for young women today.  And you know, it doesn’t work for me.  I wouldn’t want to be a part of an organization that was anti-woman, or scared of women.  No, the idea that the Catholic Church is discriminatory against women is entirely problematic, and it seems to me that one of the critical tasks for the Church today is to correct this false narrative.

And that is because the Church without women is nothing.  We see that in the Gospel today.  Where would we be without Mary and Elizabeth?  We are redeemed together as men and women in a complimentarity that intentional and is part of God’s plan.  Men and women factor equally into our Lord’s plan of redemption, and we must make sure that we continue to proclaim this good news of our faith in the modern world, not allowing the teachings of the Church to be distorted and misconstrued as anti-women.

In particular, we must insist that our male priesthood is not anti-woman or discriminatory.  And this insistence must be based on a correct understanding of the priesthood as an extension of the ministry of Christ among his people, as a continuation of the Incarnation, of God with us.  You see, what we believe about the priest is different than what other religions believe about their religious leaders.

For example, I think it would be sexist to not allow women to be protestant ministers or Jewish rabbis.  What?  Yes, I do.  Because a minister or a rabbi are not called upon to act in the person of Christ, they never speak the words of God become man in the first person like a priest does.  “This is my body.” “This is my blood.” “I absolve you from your sins.”  I know, when I say those words, that I am not speaking on my own behalf or even as myself, that it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me and is speaking through me.  I cannot change bread and wine into his body and blood.  I cannot forgive sins.  These are actions that only Jesus Christ can accomplish, not a mere man.

Now, some might say, well why can’t a woman speak in the person of Christ in the same way?  But think about that for a moment.  The fundamental reality about Jesus Christ that we celebrate on Christmas is that he is God in the flesh, in human flesh, which is by its nature, gendered flesh.  How can we remove gender from the equation, without undermining the incarnate reality of Christ who ministers among us as one who is fully human?  Gender is not like hair color or ethnicity or any other superficial attribute.  It is at the core of what defines the human person, as we know both biologically and theologically from Genesis: God made us male and female.  Human beings are created in a complimentarity.  Gender is not arbitrary.  It is laden with meaning and purpose.  When God became fully human in Christ he entered into a body that was fully gendered because it was and is fully human.  That’s not to say that the triune God is male: obviously not.  But the body of Christ, the body given to us in the sacraments, the body that speaks to us and heals us and forgives us and redeems us each day in the ministry of priests can be no other than the body of Jesus Christ, God become man.  To say that is not to be sexist.  It is just to acknowledge what happened, to be profoundly aware of just how enfleshed God became in Christ.  It was not some asexual spiritual being that Mary carried in her womb.  It was a little boy.

I don’t know why a boy and not a girl.  That’s what God chose.  And no, it was not because we would not have accepted him if he was a woman, because he could have made it so that we would: after all he spent over 2000 years preparing his people to receive his Son.  Surely he could have prepared a people to receive the Word become woman.  But he didn’t.  And we don’t know why.  He had to pick one of the two.  It was certainly not because men are better: women and men are equal before him.

And if the Word had become a woman we would have priestesses...  because we have a sacramental faith and a sacramental priesthood that continues to truly and really perpetuate in persona Christi capitis the life and ministry of not only the divinity but also the humanity of Jesus Christ.

Sometimes I wonder why the Word didn’t become a woman.  Women would probably be much better at running the Church.  Women are certainly more religious.  This is not just mere speculation: across all cultures and all religions it has been clearly demonstrated in numerous studies that women hold their beliefs more firmly, practice their faith more consistently, and give more of their time to their church, temple, mosque or synagogue.  I have speculated that if we didn’t have a male priesthood you’d never see men in Church.

Look at Mary and Elizabeth today.  How beautiful their faith is, how noble their virtue.  How much they inspire us.  We need them.  The Church has always been profoundly aware that God’s plan of salvation is equally at work in men and women.  A male priesthood does not contradict this knowledge, any more than Christ’s being a man contradicts it.  Every priest, every Christian, is carried for 9 months in his or her mother’s womb, just like St. John  the Baptist and our Lord.  How could we think that God did not smile upon women?  How could we not see him at work in them, and their profound dignity and equality before him?  Our Church insists that we always treasure and reverence and follow the women of faith, like Mary and Elizabeth, who animate and uphold the her.  As we prepare to celebrate Christ’s birth, let us make sure that we tell the world of our respect and love for his mother and for so many other women who God has chosen to be integral to his loving plan of salvation.

What a Plan...

Homily from the 4th Sunday of Advent, 2009

(Note: I gave this homily 3 years ago and decided to publish it for the weekend because I am not sure that I will have a chance to post this year's with Christmas following so quickly.)

My sister is just about 6 months pregnant, so we’ve begun in earnest what I call the “torment the baby” stage.  My brother was the perpetrator this past week when I was home to help decorate the tree – trying to feel the baby move: “Hey, he just kicked!”  “Wait, is that his head… or his foot?”  My sister gets right into it too, poking around –  that poor kid is going to be scarred for life:
I thought we were supposed to be playing classical music and stuff.

Pregnancy – it is a fascinating and beautiful time: for men, anyway.
It’s so incredible, so mysterious how life begins and then gradually takes shape inside the womb.
When a woman is pregnant it can’t help but be a time of great hope and expectation and yet also a time of anxiety and challenge.

And isn’t it also a time of premonition and intuition?
How many of you mothers out there could say that you noticed things during pregnancy about your child that were later confirmed after you gave birth?

 Every pregnancy is different and unique because each child is, and even while in the womb each child  establish a relationship with his or her mother that is distinct from any other relationship.
From the very moment of conception our mother’s lives were changed: some of us made our mothers more nauseous, some less; some gave their mothers incredible appetites, some not as much; some of us helped them put on lots of weight, or maybe not as much – the patters of sleep, the chemical fluctuations, the whole thing: none of that was random or by chance: a baby begins to influence his or her mother’s life from day 1, from the moment of conception.

We often, I think, focus on the pain and trauma involved in giving birth and we forget about the 9 months that precede it – 9 months that every mother experiences differently: some suffer through and others seem to go along un-phased.  But no matter what child and his or her mother live the journey of pregnancy together, it is unarguable that a completely unique and intimate bond exists between them.

Mary was no different.  She carried our Lord for 9 months – and perhaps you could say that during that time no human being was ever closer to God.  A microscopic membrane in the placenta was the only thing that separated her blood and his – he breathed through her, he ate through her, he drank through her.

Sometimes Mary has been referred to as Mediatrix of all Graces: and to some the title is controversial – but perhaps they forgot those nine months, when she, like every human mother, was her child’s mediatrix with the world – the vessel through which he interacted with reality.  Jesus lived 33 years and 9 months –
and the first 9 months he lived were no less real than those that followed, they were no less a part of his mission, even if they were lived in secrecy.

In today’s gospel we hear of the graced encounter between two holy, pregnant women, Mary and Elizabeth – women who carry within them this great secret that is about to be revealed.
And the gospel shows them both to be intimately aware and connected to their sons.  Already at this early date, before either child had taken a breath, their mothers knew the treasure they carried within them – they knew the joy, the blessing that eagerly waited in Mary’s womb to be unleashed on this earth at Jesus’ birth.

And the babies were not oblivious either.  John leapt when he sensed Jesus’ approach.  I have no idea what that would feel like – to have a baby leap in your womb – very weird.  It’s a level of intimacy that no man can understand, a bond he cannot fathom.  And yet we must try, because we know that God wants to be that close to us…

Because when, through the complex web time and space, the Lord brought forth human beings from the clay and decided that the female should carry her child for 9 months before giving birth, he was thinking of Mary.  And he was thinking of those nine months that he would dwell within the womb of his own creature – of the nine months that he would listen to her heart beat and hear her gentle voice speak to him in the darkness.  And he was thinking about how he would spend 33 years working to extend that closeness he would have with his mother to all of humanity – how he would eventually give his life over for all, pour himself out to the last drop so that he could become food – food that would allow him to dwell with us and make us pregnant with his life, so that we too could give birth to his kingdom in the world.

What a plan – what a way to redeem us – he must have had a hard time waiting for Christmas.

Gaudete?

Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Advent, 2012

It is hard to even comprehend the horrible tragedy that occurred in Newtown Friday.  Certainly we must all pray for the families and the whole community that is wracked with unfathomable pain and suffering in the face of such a horrendous and senseless act of violence and hatred.

I think many of us have wondered what could ever cause someone to do something so profoundly evil.  How could a human being be so messed up, so horribly disturbed, and obviously so profoundly miserable?

This is Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, the Sunday characterized by hopeful expectation and rejoicing as the date of our Lord’s birth draws so near.  The theme seems so out of place in the wake of such a horrible atrocity committed against the innocent, almost inappropriate.

Certainly this is not the time for joking and revelry.  But there is room today, and I think the need, to reflect on the sources of joy and misery.

Where does joy come from?  While I am and have been for the most part pretty happy, there are a few times that stick in my mind as high points.   Certainly there have been joyful moments as a seminarian and priest, but as I was reflecting on our readings I was thinking about a particular happy time when I was 19: when I found out that a girl I was infatuated with liked me too.  I was working one of the more unpleasant jobs I have had: huddled in a dark room washing printing screens with a power washer all day by myself.  But those chemicals could not wipe the smile off my face – for days.  That she actually liked me seemed like a miracle from heaven, and every time I thought about it again, I would just smile.  She likes me.  Smile.

In a recent talk given about the New Evangelization, Archbishop DiNoia remarked that the great revelation of Christianity to our world is this: that God loves us.  No other theistic religion has understood this truth about God as profoundly as we do.  Other religions teach about a God who is a disinterested force in the world, perhaps a pure or good kind of force, but one who is for the most part unaffected by our little lives that pass by so quickly.

What we hear in our readings today is nothing short of the greatest revolution in the understanding of God that has ever occurred in the history of the human race.  Something no human being would ever have dared to dream, that we still can hardly get our minds around, was being announced by the prophets who speak to us through in the readings today.

Shout for joy, O daughter Zion!  The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a mighty savior; he will rejoice over you with gladness, and renew you in his love.

The creator of the universe who is all-powerful and all-knowing and the source of all goodness and life: this God, they said, had made all things and holds them in existence with one end in mind: to love us. He wills our good personally, each of us, he knows us and seeks our benefit, constantly is at work to draw us into his own love so that we can find the peace and joy we long for.

When I was 19 I was overwhelmed with happiness because a girl liked me too.  That revelation changed my world for the better, at least for a few months until she dumped me.  It was a young experience of affection and it was good for then – but how it pales in comparison to the love of God that we know in Christ.

If we really took to heart the words of the prophets, if we really thought for some time about what it is that they are announcing to us today – I can’t help but think that there would be very few flat or discouraged expressions in this church.  We might not be jumping up and down – but the knowledge of the love of God that we carried within us, of his love for us, that he has chosen us to be his own… it would just warm us right up from top to bottom all day long like a nice cup of tea on a cold day.  He loves me – God does.  He has chosen me for his own, he gives his life to me and feeds me and forgives me and walks beside me.  Of all the things that have characterized the saints over the years, it has been a deep and abiding sense of peace and well-being, a profound and mysterious source of joy animated them and could be seen by all who knew them.

Many of us have, at different times in our lives, been able to get a momentary glimpse into this joy and peace that the saints live: in those rare moments when we have been clear-headed enough, have been able to stop for a moment and experience God loving us.  But most of the time we are entirely oblivious.  Why?

St. Paul at one point told his people they were bewitched.
We live in a fallen world, a world that wants to be the center of the universe, that doesn’t want our universe to revolve around God.  A jealous world.  All day long distractions, anxieties tug at us, like false suitors trying to keep us from our true love.  And how often we just go with them, we don’t respond to God’s invitation to love him, we ignore his love and instead become increasingly preoccupied with the passing things of this world.  And they enslave us.

I think it is safe to say that the young man who committed such evil in Newtown was entirely bewitched, was overcome by darkness.  We have to pray for him and for his family.  Fortunately it is not often that evil gets such a firm hold on a person.  But it is always lurking, this world is always tugging at us, trying to make us forget who loves us and who we belong to and the purpose of our lives.  The evil one, St. Peter says, prowls like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.

Gaudete is a command.  Not to put on a happy face or throw a party, but more in the sense that we who have heard the good news of Christ’s coming must hold fast to him.  Must hold fast to this incredible revelation of God’s goodness we have received in faith and be witnesses of it to our children and to a world that is often overcome in darkness.  The Lord knows and loves us.  He does not remained silent or distant, uncaring.  No, he comes to be with us, he works for the good of his people, for our good.  Gaudete.  Hold on to this knowledge of God’s immeasurable love, treasure it, protect it, today and always.

This Little Babe

Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent, 2012

When I was younger, from the time I was 9 until I was 14 or so, I was a member of a boy choir in the Portland area.  Christmas was always a busy time of year with all the concert engagements: we learned and sang so many Christmas songs and carols over the years.  And as I reflected on the readings for this 2nd Sunday of Advent, I was thinking back to a particular piece we used to sing by Benjamin Britten in his Ceremony of Carols called ‘This Little Babe.’

‘This Little Babe’ is a song about the Christ child unlike any I have heard.  Benjamin Britten set the music to a poem written by the English Jesuit priest and martyr saint: Fr. Robert Southwell, who was martyred for his faith in the English Catholic persecution of the 16th century.

The melody written by Benjamin Britten is very difficult to sing, and it fits well with Fr. Southwell’s poem, which I might call a Christmas battle hymn.  I’m not going to sing it because when I used to sing it I was a soprano, but I will read the poem to you as best I can:

This little Babe so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake,
Though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmèd wise
The gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field,
His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries,
His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns Cold and Need,
And feeble Flesh his warrior’s steed.

His camp is pitchèd in a stall,
His bulwark but a broken wall;
The crib his trench, haystalks his stakes;
Of shepherds he his muster makes;
And thus, as sure his foe to wound,
The angels’ trumps alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight;
Stick to the tents that he hath pight.
Within his crib is surest ward:
This little Babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,
Then flit not from this heavenly Boy.

Fr. Southwell, a young priest, saw in the meek and humble nativity scene nothing short of a mighty Lord come to rescue his people.  It is such an odd combination of thoughts: Of a baby being your guard.  His cries being battering shots.  Looks from weeping eyes his arrows.  His enemies foiled with joy.

Yet how very Christian: how much the sentiments of this poem resonate with the beatitudes and with so much of the teaching of our Lord, who shows us that it is in weakness that God is strong, that his work of redemption is most visibly and powerfully manifest in those who seem most vulnerable in the eyes of this world.

The nativity scenes are starting to go up in preparation for Christmas.  As we look upon the figures, and upon the little child in their midst, it is important to reflect on what we are seeing.  What Fr. Southwell’s poem makes so clear is that this little babe is our savior, is our redeemer.  And so looking upon him in the manger should elicit in us more than a vague sentimentalism as we see this cute baby and think about shepherds and angels singing.  This child is God with us, the Lord Jesus Christ who frees us from sin and death, who preserves our lives from the grave, who rescues us from darkness.  The shepherds and magi came to adore him, not to pinch his cheeks.  Yes, I’m sure he was a cute, cuddly baby; I’m sure Jesus and Mary snuggled a lot.  But we must remember that his cuddling, his snuggling was a cosmic act that shook this world to its foundations.

“Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” John the Baptist carries out Isaiah’s prophecy in the Gospel today.  And the prophet Baruch speaks to us words of great expectation, telling us that our day of liberation is at hand, that our slavery is almost at an end, that we are favored by God.  They do not speak of superficial salvation, a vague sense of well-being in our Savior’s presence.  No, they talk about valley’s being leveled, mountains made low, highways prepared: about our world being completely converted and renewed and redeemed.

How you and I prepare to welcome a child who is our divine savior must be different from how we would prepare to welcome a child who has no power to save us.  You don’t just get the crib ready, get the house in good order – or in our case undertake the customary preparations like putting up the tree, buying the presents, baking the cookies.  These things are all well and good, but today the prophets urge us to allow the gravity, the immensity of who we prepare to welcome to sink in.  To step back a bit in the midst of this chaotic season: to make the time to open our hearts to the renewing work of the Holy Spirit who approaches us to  prepare a way for the Lord to enter, to level some of the valleys and smooth some of the mountains so that a straight highway can be prepared for him.

Our Catholic faith teaches us that this is best accomplished through intensified prayer and a good confession during Advent, and especially through many works of service, generosity, and friendship.  These spiritual efforts to prepare for Christ need not be arduous tasks – but preparations carried out with excitement and joy because Our Lord comes to meet us, to redeem us and free us.  Really: are any of these spiritual preparations more arduous than Christmas shopping?  But they do take a conscious effort, a bit of trust and courage, and sometimes a friendly nudge from your priest.

Where do you need the salvation this little child brings in your life this year?  Where are you bound, what keeps you tied up, what causes you anxiety and fear?  What areas of your life need to be revitalized and renewed and softened by this little one who comes to dwell with us?
The Christ child looks little, he looks meek: it is hard some days to imagine that he has the power to free us from our sins and anxieties, to convert us and sanctify us and make us his own.

At the time Fr. Southwell penned the lines of his poem, his life was in constant danger and he very well may have been in prison.  In the face of such violent persecution he urged his own soul to trust in this little babe:

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight;
Stick to the tents that he hath pight.
Within his crib is surest ward:
This little Babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,
Then flit not from this heavenly Boy.

Let us ask today for the grace that St. Fr. Southwell was given: the grace to recognize in this little babe our Lord come with power to save us.  And to prepare to meet him, deliberately setting aside time during the next few weeks to open our hearts to his redemptive work so that our he can rest with us, and our hearts can rest with him, our child Savior, comfortably and peacefully on Christmas day.

Holy and Free

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, 2012

An anniversary passed by with rather little fanfare this past weekend in diocese across the United States and English speaking Catholic world.  The one year anniversary of using the new translation for Mass.  I was thinking about this last weekend as I prayed the Opening Prayer for the first Sunday of Advent, which was the first prayer of the new translation – and I was remembering how awkward it sounded to me last year as I looked it over in preparation for that weekend.

After having made it through a year praying with the new translation, which is painstakingly and sometimes painfully faithful to the original Latin texts of the Missal, I think we can nonetheless look back on many prayers that have been rendered in an incredibly beautiful and profound way, even if they have sounded a bit strange and foreign to the ear. I think I’ve said graciously more in this past year than I did in all of the previous years of my life combined.  We’ve all had to adjust to some new vocabulary.

The prayers and texts for this feast, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, are no exception in that the vocabulary can be a bit jarring to the modern ear.  The prayers today are filled with rarely heard words and terms: Immaculate, Virgin, prevenient grace, stain of sin, fullness of grace, beautiful bride without spot or wrinkle, most pure virgin, advocate of grace, model of holiness.
Chances are these are not words that would have shown up with great frequency in the New York Times this week.  But it is not only the words, is it?  The very meaning of these words, the perspective of these words, I think we would have to admit is foreign.

To speak positively of being someone being full of grace, immaculate, without spot or wrinkle, of being a virgin most pure in our day and age is truly counter cultural, isn’t it?  More than most other Catholic teachings, these beliefs that we profess about Mary as we celebrate her Immaculate Conception today reveal that increasingly our culture and our Church not only don’t speak the same way, but we do not see the world the same way.

And one of the principle areas where this divergence is becoming apparent is in relation to how we see freedom and fulfillment in relation to holiness and sin.  So often today, one hears sentiments expressed that seem to imply that virtue and holiness is a sign of immaturity and that a certain amount of sin is actually healthy and a positive sign of being an adult.  There is actually a suspicion of anyone who looks too perfect, as if they must be hiding something or repressed because they were not allowed to experience life.

In a homily on the feast of the immaculate conception, our Holy Father expressed the problem so well when he said “Precisely on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we have a lurking suspicion that a person who does not sin must really be basically boring and that something is missing from his life: the dramatic dimension of being autonomous; that the freedom to say no, to descend into the shadows of sin and to want to do things on one's own is part of being truly human; that only then can we make the most of all the vastness and depth of our being men and women, of being truly ourselves; that we should put this freedom to the test, even in opposition to God, in order to become, in reality, fully ourselves.”

“In a word,” the Pope said, “we think that evil is basically good, we think that we need it, at least a little, in order to experience the fullness of being. We think that a little bargaining with evil, keeping for oneself a little freedom against God, is basically a good thing, perhaps even necessary.”

How spot on the pope is about this – we can see signs of this mentality everywhere around us.  This glorification of having ‘experienced life’ or ‘lived it up,’ while covering over the horrendous casualties that have been inflicted along the way.

And that is why this feast, and why Mary, is such a challenge to our culture.  She models for us an entirely different image of what it means to become fully human and to be free.  She shows us that freedom comes not from being able to disobey God, but from being able to follow him.  She shows us that we are most ourselves not when we give in to our lesser desires, but when we strive for the greater.  She shows us that living in a  purity of heart, mind and body is to live without restriction, without anxiety, without fear.  That the person who turns to God does not become smaller but greater, that, as the pope says later in his homily “the person who puts herself in God's hands does not distance themselves from others, withdrawing into her private salvation; on the contrary, it is only then that her heart truly awakens and she becomes a sensitive, hence, benevolent and open person.  The closer a person is to God, the closer she is to people.”

And so we need this feast more than ever.  Our country, our culture needs to hear words like Immaculate, Virgin most pure.  But not just the words.  We desperately in our day need to be reminded that sin does not make us more human, but less.  That to be pure and virtuous is to be free from slavery and open to those around us, capable of loving them.

So today may the words of this feast not just ring strangely in our ears, but may they begin to enter and transform our hearts, patterning them after the heart of Mary, who made no tolerance for sin but was rooted in her desire to be holy – to be always and as completely as possible united with her Son.

To You, O Lord, I Lift Up My Soul

Homily for the 1st Sunday of Advent, 2012

On Friday night of this week I attended a performance of Handel’s Messiah at Boston Symphony Hall with a group of 25 high school students and chaperones during a parish youth ministry trip to Boston.  The symphony hall is beautiful and the whole atmosphere, especially as we are getting closer to Christmas was warm and inviting.  Taking it all in: the hundreds of people of all ages listening intently, the musicians, the beautiful space; for those few hours the rest of the world fell away for a moment and there was a sense of peace and of wellbeing, a sense of great hope.  In fact, so hopeful and peaceful that a few of the kids soon found themselves dozing.

Our responsorial psalm for today, this first Sunday of Advent, refers to our efforts during these days of preparation for Christmas: “To You O Lord, I lift up my soul.”  As we anticipate the Lord’s coming, we are instructed to raise our hearts, our minds to God, to lift up our souls in hope.  Christ, in the Gospel reading tells us that as we anticipate the Lord’s coming we should “stand erect and raise our heads.”  Not to run from the things to come, but to face the future with hope and confidence.  For we know by faith of the goodness of God and we know the goodness of the future he has in store for us.  In fact, in his encyclical Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict noted that a distinguishing mark of Christians is the fact that they have a future.  That even though we do not know the details of what awaits us we know in general terms that our lives will not end in emptiness, but that the Lord will come to meet us.  Christ is our hope, he reveals not only the past to us, but he is present with us leading us into a future of peace.

How important it is for men and women of faith to be witnesses to this hope, especially in our world, a world that is so full of superficial and false hopes and dreams.  We also see a lot of that around this time of year, don’t we – a state of mind, that unlike true hope, which is rooted in the knowledge and anticipation of God’s goodness, is instead rooted in the fulfillment of our every individual want and desire.  The ‘Make a wish’ kind of hallmark hope.  Instead of hoping, of lifting up our souls, in God, we are continually asked to lift them up to ourselves, so that we can see what we really want, or what others really want, and then try to make it happen.  And instead of God’s desires and the future that he has in store for us: we reflect on our desires and the desires of those around us; who wants what, who wishes for what.

But these wishes and wants and desires, when they take control of our minds – whether they be our own or even those of others around us, are bound to disappoint.  Because we are not capable of providing for what we truly need, and nor is anyone other than God.  Even if our every wish were granted this Christmas: if the kids all received every present they wanted, if the sweaters all fit, the electronics all worked, and none of the Christmas cookies burned: we would still be wanting, there would still be something left that we desired – if not right on Christmas day, on the next day certainly when we are trying to find the apps for the electronics and the diet for our waistlines.  These things are not bad, exchanging presents isn’t bad, Christmas cookies certainly aren’t bad – but we Christians must be careful not to allow wants and desires and dreams about passing things to supplant the real hope of Christmas: our savior Jesus Christ.

If Christmas is just about wishes being granted or fairytales coming true, then it will cease to be a season of hope, but instead will become more and more a season of disappointment and bitterness and resentment.  Passing things, earthly things, disappoint.  In Christ alone do we find our peace, our joy, our reason for hope.  But how easy it is to get carried away with the tinsel or start freaking out when we run out of butter or when the item we were going to get for someone is stuck in a warehouse somewhere in Kalamazoo.

And that is why in our readings we hear that holding on to hope is an act of perseverance and persistence.  You have to work to stand erect and raise your heads – you don’t just naturally end up that way.  St. Paul tells us to strengthen our hearts. How can we lift up our hearts, our souls, to God if they are wallowing in earthly things, if they are attached to everything around us?  If they are obsessed with earthly desires and wants that are bound to disappoint if they haven’t already.

These days of Advent urge us to leave behind the false hopes of this world and to persevere in clinging to the true source of hope that is found in our faith in Jesus Christ who is our savior and redeemer.  To stand erect, waiting for him, lifting our souls to him, asking him to instill in us a renewed sense of anticipation for his action in our lives, a renewed trust in his goodness and mercy.  To keep watch, our eyes fixed on him, disciplining our minds and urging them toward higher things, toward spiritual things.  Our Lord tells us to be vigilant at all times, vigilant in placing our hope squarely on his shoulders, not letting it be carried away by the lesser dreams and desires of this life that are bound to disappoint.  To keep our eyes fixed on our Lord, who comes to save us.

One of the great Aria’s of Handel’s Messiah takes up the inspired words of Isaiah and Matthew’s gospel, reminding us of the true source of our hope: "Come unto him, all ye that labor, come unto him all ye that are heavy laden, and he will give you rest.  Take his yoke upon you and learn of Him, for He is meek and lowly of heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls."