Our first reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians this morning could well have been written to all of us today, couldn’t it? He speaks of a crooked and perverse generation, and all we have to do is watch the news to see examples of that in our own day and age. And so his challenge to them is one that we should take on as well – to “shine like lights in the world,” holding on to the word of life. We do this by being people of prayer, people of service, people of witness, and above all, people of integrity. In what way is God calling you to shine like a light in this dark world?
Category: Liturgy
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Saturday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time
“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”This is the second time this week that we have heard these words. The first was on Sunday, in connection with the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple. Then, on Wednesday, we heard something very similar: “For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” If we miss the opportunity to grow in humility this week, then we are in serious trouble indeed!
Think about what Jesus is asking the guests of the leading Pharisee to do. He wasn’t just asking them to give their place to some other leading Pharisee, or someone socially more important than they were. No, he was asking them to do something far more difficult: the “more distinguished” one among them was one who was in need or marginalized, people we would have a hard time greeting, let alone giving them our place at the dinner table.
Think about going to a banquet and giving your honored place to someone homeless, an immigrant, a foster teenager – would you be so ready to even have dinner with these people? Think about actually moving over to give them the honored place! And Jesus has the audacity to ask us to do just that.
Jesus humbled himself to become something far less than what he was, so that we could become far more than we could ever be. He certainly has the right to ask us to do the same so that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.
So who is God going to call us to minister to in some deed of generosity or word of encouragement or act of forgiveness today? Will we be able to give our place to these people? Will we be humble enough to move over so that they can move up? If so, maybe we will find that God will exalt us all.
“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” -
Wednesday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time
What does it take for us to be known by God? After all, God forbid we’d be among those to whom he says: “I do not know where you are from.” I think the answer comes in that last verse of the reading: “For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” Which goes very much counter to our culture which encourages us to put “me first” – or even, “me only.” If we wish to enter the kingdom, we have to identify ourselves with those who are marginalized, who are last in the eyes of the world. For those are the ones who are first in the eyes of God.
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Tuesday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
The injunction for wives to be submissive to their husbands, given in our first reading, certainly offends our modern. That’s just not the kind of thing we say in this society –now. Yet this was the norm in the society in which St. Paul ministered. So that command would hardly have raised an eyebrow. What would have been shocking in St. Paul’s time was the reciprocal injunction to husbands to love their wives as they loved their own bodies. Indeed, St. Paul’s point was not to rile either husbands or wives, but more to promote the living of harmonious family relationships.
So how would it look now? Today, I think St. Paul would insist that husbands and wives would live as equal partners, showing mutual respect, and living the love of Christ in their relationship. St. Paul would certainly say that men and women should work together to foster families in which God’s love could be shown and made manifest in the world through them. The real point of this reading, we must remember, is that the love of husband and wife echoes the love between Christ and the Church.
May we all love one another as Christ loves his bride, the Church.
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Monday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time
“Loose lips sink ships.” That’s a saying that I learned somewhere in my early elementary school life. I don’t think I fully understood what it meant at the time – all I appreciated was that it told me to keep my mouth shut. But as I’ve lived and matured, I know very well that frivolous talk can be hurtful and even dangerous. Our gift of speech is an important one: through it we communicate with each other and it is the basis of our being able to work and live in society. But using speech in the wrong way can cause a whole host of problems. We’ve all probably been in the midst of that in some way at some time in our lives.
And so Saint Paul’s words to the Ephesians are probably good ones for us to hear today:
Immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be mentioned among you,
as is fitting among holy ones,
no obscenity or silly or suggestive talk, which is out of place
All of us, who are called to be God’s holy ones, have a very important responsibility to use our gift of speech wisely. We must not engage in idle, frivolous, or even obscene speech, because this is out of place for those who follow the Lord. But what I think is so important is what Saint Paul says needs to be on the lips of God’s holy ones – and that is thanksgiving.
Big deal, right, of course we can speak about thanksgiving. But the Greek word that is translated “thanksgiving” here is eucharistia – and we all know what that means. The Eucharist – which is our thanksgiving – is always to be on our lips. So that’s the lens by which we ought always to view the words we say: are our words Eucharist? Are they thanksgiving? Because those are the only words we need to be saying.
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The Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time
The thing is, you know, the Pharisee was quite right. His righteousness was beyond reproach. He has been innocent of greed, dishonesty and adultery. He has been more pious than even the law requires. Fasting was only required once a year, on the Day of Atonement, but he fasts twice a week. Tithes were only required to be paid on one’s earnings, but he pays them not only on his earnings, but also on all of his possessions, basically, he paid the tithe on his total net worth. He was probably quite right about his own righteousness, and he may well have been right about the failures of righteousness in the tax collector as well.
And, in those days, tax collectors were despicable human beings. They worked for the Romans, were in league with the foreign occupation. They were told what they had to collect, and whatever the collected over and above that was theirs to keep. Now certainly, they were entitled to some income, so a modest markup would have been understandable – that was how they were paid. But mostly the modest markup was far from modest, and bordered on extortion. The tax collector in our parable today does not deny that he has participated in those activities. He does not even pray about anything he has done except for one thing: he has sinned. “O God, be merciful to me a sinner,” he says.
Both of these men were right in what they said about themselves. From an objective point of view, they have presented themselves honestly before God and everyone. So what’s the problem? Where has the Pharisee gone wrong and how did the tax collector end up justified?
It’s pretty easy to see what went wrong when we step back and look at the nature of their prayers. The Pharisee uses the word “I” four times. It’s all about him. The tax collector does not use the word “I” at all; he uses the word “me.” What’s the difference? Grammar lesson here: “I” is the subject, “me” is the object. So, for the Pharisee, it was all about what he had done through his own righteousness, and not about what God had done or could do. For the tax collector, it wasn’t about him at all. He acknowledges his sinfulness and asked God to have mercy. And that’s the second difference. The tax collector asks for something, namely mercy, and receives it: he goes home justified. The Pharisee asks for nothing, and that’s just what he gets: nothing.
So I think today’s Liturgy of the Word is asking us a very important question: have you been aware of your need for a Savior? Because sin is exhausting. Anyone who has struggled with sin, or a pattern of sin, in their lives can tell you that. Those who have been dragged down by any kind of addiction or who have tried to work on a character flaw or striven to expel any kind of vice from their lives often relate how exhausting the sin can be. Sin saps our spiritual energy, weakens our resolve to do good, and causes us to turn away in shame from family, friends, and all those whose spiritual companionship we need in order to grow as Christians. That’s just the way sin works.
But today’s Liturgy gives us very good news. Sirach says in today’s first reading that “The prayer of the lowly pierces the clouds; it does not rest till it reaches its goal, nor will it withdraw till the Most High responds, judges justly and affirms the right, and the Lord will not delay.” We see that very clearly in the parable in today’s Gospel. The lowly tax collector cannot even bring himself to raise his eyes to heaven. “O God, be merciful to me a sinner,” he says. It is the perfect Act of Contrition. He acknowledges his sin, he prays for God’s mercy. And God responds. He can go home justified.
Just like the Pharisee and the tax collector, we have come to this holy placed to pray today. What is our prayer like? Are there sins that have become a pattern for us? Do we have addictions that need to be worked out? Have we failed in some way in our daily life? What dark corners of our lives desperately need God’s light and God’s mercy? In what ways do we need a Savior? Have we asked for God’s mercy, or have we been like the Pharisee, asking for nothing and receiving exactly that?
Pray the tax collector’s prayer after me: “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”
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Friday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time
In our overly-litigious society, Jesus’ words that we are to make an effort to settle the matter on the way are a good call to refocus. This call shifts the emphasis from winning to healing, and it calls us to do some hard things. In order to settle the matter, we will have to communicate and be open to the fact that we may be in the wrong. If we are open to settling things the way Jesus would have us do it, we might find ourselves growing in maturity and faith, and becoming better people in the process.
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Thursday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time
Some people would say that Jesus was a peaceful man. And that is a basically true statement. But I think that we have to understand that peace wasn’t necessarily his primary interest, at least not peace in the way that we often see it.
Because sometimes I think we misread what peace is supposed to be. We might sell peace short and settle for the absence of conflict. Or even worse, we may settle for peace at any price, swallowing our disagreements and never coming close to true healing in our relationships. There are families in which never a harsh word would be said, but the underlying hostility is palpable. There are workplaces in which there are never any arguments, but there is also never any cooperative work done. Sometimes there are relationships where fear replaces love and respect.
And this is not the kind of peace that Jesus would bring us today. This is the One who came to set the earth on fire, and his methods for bringing us to peace might well cause division in the here and now. But there is never any resurrection if we don’t have the cross. And so there will never be any peace if we don’t confront what’s really happening. The fire has to be red hot and blazing to burn away all that is unhealthy if there is ever to be any new growth.
And so today we have to stop settling for a peace that really isn’t so peaceful. We may just have to have that hard conversation we’ve been trying to avoid. Of course, we do it with love for our brothers and sisters, but out of love we also don’t avoid it. Our words and actions must always be guided by the fire of the Holy Spirit, but we must never choose to neglect the Spirit’s guidance and instead just settle for something that is really not peace. We have to work for true healing in all of our relationships.
The Psalmist tells us today that “the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.” That goodness resides in all those people God has given us in our lives. This day, we are called to relish their goodness and work for lasting peace with all of them.
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The Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time [C]
Prayer is one of the most important elements of the Christian life, of the life of a disciple, and yet it is also, I think, one of the most difficult to master. When I’ve mastered it, I’ll let you know – although it might be from beyond the grave! Still, it’s something that we work at every day of our lives, and the working it out should be one of our greatest joys. In today’s Liturgy of the Word, we have just one element of prayer, and that is the element of persistence in prayer.
Now I’m going to be real careful here. Lots of people give some lousy advice about prayer: if you just pray hard enough and long enough, everything will eventually work out all right. I’m not going to tell you that, because things often don’t work out perfectly no matter how much we pray, and they almost never work out the way we’d like them to.
So why even bother praying? Well, hang in there, we’ll get to that.We have a wonderful image of prayer in our first reading. I invite you to raise your arms with me if you’re able, and leave them raised until you can’t any more. This is what Moses had to do to keep the Hebrew army in a winning position against Amelek and his warriors. The minute Moses lowered his hands to rest, things went ill for the Hebrews, but as long as his hands were raised, things went okay.
Now, again, I proceed cautiously here, because I don’t think things always work out perfectly as long as we pray. But there’s an element of this analogy that is very important, I think. And that element is that sometimes it’s hard to be persistent in prayer. Sometimes you get tired. Maybe your arms are not yet weary, but they might soon get there.
I can think of a few times in my life when I’ve grown weary of praying. One of them was in my late thirties when I was trying, once again, and once and for all, to figure out what God wanted me to do with my life. I prayed and prayed and prayed, and it didn’t seem like God was answering at all. I finally grew weary of prayer and told God that he should give me a big challenge and whatever it was, I would do it. Then one day, the day of the Easter Vigil that year, I got a letter in the mail from a friend and it made everything crystal clear. Six months later I was in seminary.
Sometimes in our weariness we have to let go of what we think we would like God to do for us and just let God be God. But how are your arms doing? Are you weary yet? Well if so, you’re in good company. Moses found that to really be persistent in prayer, he needed friends – Aaron and Hur – to hold him up. That’s true for all of us, I think. There comes a point when we need to admit that we need friends to hold us in prayer, to take some of the burden of prayer when persistence has become difficult. If you haven’t already, you can put your arms down now.
I honestly don’t really know what to make of the gospel reading. I mean, are we really supposed to think that God is an unjust judge who has no respect for anyone? Obviously not. I think that we’re supposed to see in this little parable that if even an unjust judge – one who neither fears God nor respects any person – if even that judge will eventually give in to the widow pleading for just judgment, well then how much more will our God who is infinitely just and doesn’t just respect us but loves us beyond all imagining, how much more will he pour out his blessings of justice on all of us?
Which isn’t to say that he will definitely answer our prayers the way we want them answered. Those persistent prayers will be answered in God’s way, in God’s time. He may say “no” or he may even allow something evil in order to make something good of it. We may have to bear the burden of disease or the sadness of the death of a loved one, in order that we might be healed in other ways, that we might come to know God’s love in the midst of our burdens.
When we persist in prayer, sometimes it the change that happens is not the situation, but ourselves. We may grow in grace in some way that we would not otherwise experience or even expect. We may grow in our capacity to love, or in our awareness of the needs of others, or in our ability to be steadfast in the midst of chaos. All of these give honor and glory to God, which after all, brothers and sisters, is our ultimate purpose in life.
So let’s get back to that question that I asked at the beginning of the homily. Why even bother praying if we’re not going to get what we want. I think we pray for three reasons. First, we pray to grow in our relationship with God who is our friend. As in any relationship, we open ourselves up to conversation, watching for God’s response, accepting God’s will and his desire that we grow in love for him.
Second, I think we pray because God genuinely cares about us. If we are to grow in love, we have to know that he is open to us and desires that we communicate our needs, our hopes, our fears, our deepest longings to him. It’s not that he doesn’t know these things already, but the process of expressing them in prayer helps us to know those needs in deeper ways and helps us to be aware of God’s action in our lives.
Third, I think we pray because that’s how we grow in holiness. The more that we bind ourselves to God by receiving his mercy and grace and knowing his love for us in prayer, the more we become new people, new creations.
The Psalmist reminds us today that “Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Every prayer may not be answered in our time and in the way that we’d like. But by persisting in prayer, we will eventually and always become something better.
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Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time
“Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”
I love that there were short verses for the psalm today, and we got to repeat this refrain from the Psalmist over and over. If you think about it, and if you really enter into it, it becomes a kind of mantra, a way to center ourselves and open ourselves up to the Lord in this Eucharistic celebration.
“Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”
Because we are all in need of the Lord’s mercy, aren’t we? Whether it is sinfulness, addiction, illness or infirmity, anxiety, worry about a family member, uncertainty about a job or the economy as a whole, we all have to realize that so much of the time we are in desperate need of the Lord’s love and mercy.
“Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”
And we come to the point that we know that the only thing that can help us is the Lord’s mercy. We may have tried so many times on our own to cure ourselves or make the pain go away or focus on the positive or not cause waves, we know that of ourselves, ultimately, we are unable to fix the things that really vex us. Sin takes hold, circumstances beyond our control confound us, powerlessness causes frustration. And then, all of a sudden, we remember the One we were trying to hide from, or with whom we didn’t want to bother with our troubles. But in the face of our own powerlessness, we must turn to the one whose power can overcome all.
“Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”
And so that powerlessness eventually, inevitably intersects with the loving power of our merciful God, who desires so much more for us than we would settle for. And then we really do let God’s mercy come to us. Because it was always there in the first place; never withheld. We had just to let it come to us, had to be open to it, had to be in the place where we could receive it and come to the point where we could acknowledge our need for it and our gratitude for receiving it. And when we at last arrive there, and that mercy comes to us, how overwhelmed we can be, how transformed, how loved we can feel, how cared for. God’s mercy is always there, we have just to let it come to us.
“Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”
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