Category: Liturgy

Today’s readings

Lately for me, things just haven’t been right. Maybe you know what that’s like. For me, it’s been several things. On Monday morning a couple of weeks ago, we came into church to find my office and Fr. Ted’s office flooded, along with the welcome center and other parts of the building nearby. Since then, I haven’t been able to work in my office because I’m allergic to mold. So I’ve been working in my room at the rectory, which is fine until I need something from my office that is currently in more disarray than it usually is. I’ve felt somewhat like an itinerant worker with no place to call his own. But I have hope that it will all fall into place later this week when new carpeting is installed and I can breathe in my office again.

And one day a little over a week ago, I was checking my bank account online, only to find that some fictitious person made a large ATM withdrawal at a branch in Arlington Heights that I had never been to, let alone on the day in question. I had to spend a couple of hours on hold to get that sorted out, and the offending transaction was only credited this past Friday, and only then after another hour on hold and many prayers for patience. We’ve all had times like that when things just aren’t right.

But at some point in our lives we find that even this kind of thing is merely a drop in the bucket. At what point did you figure out a lot of things in this world just weren’t right? We could cite many examples: rising violence in our communities, declining respect for authority, terrorism, fear and war, poverty, hunger and homelessness, corruption in politics on every conceivable level, the proliferation of consumerism, greed, and overconsumption, pollution of the environment, and more. All it takes is a few minutes’ worth of the evening news to let us know that somewhere at the core, fundamentally, our world just isn’t right.

God knows it isn’t right. And he’s known for a long time. The whole Old Testament is filled with God’s lament of how things went wrong, and his attempts to bring it back. The fourth Eucharistic Prayer sums it up by saying to God, “Again and again you offered a covenant to man, and through the prophets taught him to hope for salvation.” But, as we well know from our studies of the Scriptures and its proclamation in the Liturgy, again and again humankind turned away from the covenant and away from the God of our salvation. Ever since the fall, things just haven’t been right.

That could certainly get depressing, and maybe it is a little depressing as we come to the end of the calendar year, here at the beginning of our Church year. What enthusiasm could we possible have to begin a new year when things haven’t been right and somehow seem to be getting worse? Well, St. Paul gives us the answer in today’s second reading from his letter to the Romans. Listen to his words again: “Whatever was written previously was written for our instruction, that by endurance and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”

What does he mean by endurance? Pope Benedict sheds some light on that in his current encyclical, Spe Salvi: “All serious and upright human conduct is hope in action. This is so first of all in the sense that we thereby strive to realize our lesser and greater hopes, to complete this or that task which is important for our onward journey, or we work towards a brighter and more humane world so as to open doors into the future” (Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 35). The endurance of which St. Paul speaks today is the endurance that keeps us moving on the journey to find a better life for ourselves in the short term, and a better life for our world in the long term. Every effort of ours can sanctify our world by making the work of God real in our lives and in our world. In a word, we are a people of hope who bring the hope of God’s life to birth through our acts of peace and justice and striving for the greater good of all creation.

But I think we have to confess that it would be very easy to give up on that kind of thing. Certainly at times it seems like our paltry efforts are a mere drop in the great bucket that is the neediness of our world. Maybe it seems like we dig just a little of the debris away, only to have the cave collapse around us. What good is our striving for peace and justice an the greater good in the face of the corruption, evil and sinfulness of our society? What can just one person do anyway? This is a natural, understandable sentiment to which His Holiness responds: “Only the great certitude of hope that my own life, and history in general, despite all failures, are held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives them their meaning and importance, only this kind of hope can then give the courage to act and to persevere” (Spe Salvi, 35).

Quite frankly, the hope that we Christians have has to be a defiant hope, a hope that is as in-your-face as the one voice of John the Baptist crying out in the desert to prepare the way of the Lord. I mean, how ludicrous was that? But John knew his call and clung to the hope of that call despite the fact that it was just him, dressed in camel’s hair and eating locusts and wild honey. The defiant hope to which we are called is a hope that is in action for justice no matter what, even if it’s just little old me against all that injustice, because ultimately it’s not just us who are at work anyway.

This active, defiant hope to which we are called is summed up by Pope Benedict. He ways: “We can open ourselves and the world and allow God to enter: we can open ourselves to truth, to love, to what is good… We can free our life and the world from the poisons and contaminations that could destroy the present and the future. We can uncover the sources of creation and keep them unsullied, and in this way we can make a right use of creation, which comes to us as a gift, according to its intrinsic requirements and ultimate purpose. This makes sense even if outwardly we achieve nothing or seem powerless in the face of overwhelming hostile forces. So on the one hand, our actions engender hope for us and for others; but at the same time, it is the great hope based upon God’s promises that gives us courage and directs our action in good times and bad” (Spe Salvi, 35, emphasis mine).

I love the song, “On That Holy Mountain” that we sometimes sing here at St. Raphael’s. Today’s first reading reminded me of some of its lyrics:

The poor shall receive from the rich on that holy mountain.
The sick and the lame shall be healed on that holy mountain.
The wicked shall be slain by God’s breath on that holy mountain, on that holy mountain, on that holy mountain of the Lord.

No harm or ruin on that holy mountain.
That sacred day shall be filled with knowledge.
There shall be peace led by all the children on that holy mountain, on that holy mountain, on that holy mountain of the Lord. (“On That Holy Mountain,” Joe Mattingly)

Sometimes the world and our lives can seem quite seriously wrong. But we Christians have the defiant hope that one day, all things will be made right – that peace and justice will be achieved once and for all – on that holy mountain of the Lord.

Today's readings

As we look forward in hope during these Advent days, we find that we can hope in our God who will provide for our needs. I know that I've always been inspired by people who so completely trust in the Lord that they don't worry about what they will have today or tomorrow. That's what the Lord instructs us to do in the Gospels, of course, but I know that I find it so hard to live that way. Maybe that's because I'm an inherent worrier, a pastoral skill that I am convinced I picked up from my parents!

The disciples were worried, too, in today's Gospel. With all these people so strongly attracted to Jesus and his healing ministry, they wondered where they'd get food enough to feed them all. But Jesus takes the seven loaves and a few fish that they had and makes enough to feed the multitudes and have seven baskets left over.

We can be worrier-disciples in our lives. And some of that is healthy, but not when it gets in the way of our trusting in Jesus. This is Jesus, after all, who can feed the multitudes, walk on water, and rise triumphant over death. There isn't a care in the world that we have that he can't provide for. He is the one of whom the Prophet speaks in the first reading today, the one who can provide rich food and choice wines, all while destroying death forever. We can rejoice with the Psalmist that in Christ, we will live in the house of the Lord all the days of our lives.

Today’s readings

“He will come in glory to judge the living and the dead.” Does that sound familiar? Of course it does; it is from the first part of the Creed. Of that beautiful phrase, Pope Benedict says, “From the earliest times, the prospect of the Judgment has influenced Christians in their daily living as a criterion by which to order their present life, as a summons to their conscience, and at the same time as hope in God’s justice” (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 41). This is a case of an important principle of theology, lex orandi, lex credendi-that is, the law of prayer is the law of belief-more or less, my Latin is not all that great! Basically it means that when we pray week after week, “He will come in glory to judge the living and the dead,” that’s exactly what we believe. We believe in a time that Christ will come in judgment to bring to light all those things that have been in darkness, to right every wrong, and, as the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer taught us just last week, to usher in “a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.”

So who cares? Who even believes that any more? And if we believe it, who’s to say we look forward to it with hopeful expectation? The words Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel are pretty ominous: “Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” The kind of dark, fearful vision of the Judgment day has inspired many ages of Christians, particularly Catholics, to look forward to that day with all the eager expectation of having a root canal without an anesthetic!

And, to be sure, there is something fearful about that day. The awesome power of God, on display in all God’s glory, will shine light into every dark corner of our world and of our lives, and surely much of it, perhaps even most of it, will be found wanting when compared to the greatness of God. A popular Christian song paints a picture of how it might be to stand in that presence:

Surrounded by Your glory, what will my heart feel
Will I dance for you Jesus or in awe of you be still
Will I stand in your presence or to my knees will I fall
Will I sing hallelujah, will I be able to speak at all
I can only imagine. (Mercy Me, “I Can Only Imagine”)

We don’t like to think about such things normally. In some ways there’s a certain kind of apathy. If it’s not going to happen in the next ten minutes, then why do I have to worry about it? And the Church in recent times has been pretty lousy about teaching about the Judgment. We want to soft-pedal it so as not to scare people unnecessarily. We don’t talk about sin any more, we don’t want to clutter your hectic lives with Holy Days of Obligation and all those other pesky rules, and we’ve even renamed the gift of the Spirit from “Fear of the Lord” to “Wonder and Awe in God’s Presence.” We should apologize for that, because we’ve done you a disservice. You might as well cultivate a certain fear of the Lord now, because you will need it on that great Judgment Day. You absolutely will fear the Lord then; I guarantee it.

Well, Father Pat, what other good news do you have for us? Well, there are two sources of Good News I want to share with you today. The first comes from Scripture, the second comes from our Pope. Advent is a time of hope. Though the Judgment may inspire Fear of the Lord, that fear is the first stage of wisdom. Today’s first reading gives us hope to deal with that great and awesome day: “Come, let us climb the LORD’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.” We have not been left to deal with the time of Judgment without an anchor of hope. That anchor is the Church, the Lord’s mountain, that provides instruction in the ways of God and a kind of roadmap to follow in God’s ways. Because, let’s face it, our ultimate goal is to come through the Judgment Day and be in God’s presence for all eternity. God has given us the Church to show us how to get there.

And that gift of the Church is wonderful, but we must humble ourselves and slow ourselves down to take advantage of it. We absolutely have to stop thinking we know what’s best for our lives-both our temporal as well as our spiritual lives. Because the Church has two millennia worth of saints who have wrestled with the truth and been victorious over the world by joining themselves to Christ. We need to open our minds and hearts to the wisdom of a Church that is governed by the Holy Spirit and possesses a Truth that is eternal, irrefutable and able to bring us to salvation. Maybe this Advent that means that we will humble ourselves and come to the Sacrament of Penance for the first time in many years. Or maybe in the coming year we won’t miss Sunday Mass in favor of a soccer game, an opportunity to golf, or a really important project at work. Because as important and wonderful as these things may be, soccer, golf and work will not get you to heaven. They just won’t.

The second source of Good News is from Pope Benedict. I quoted him at the beginning of this homily, and that quote was from his new encyclical “Spe Salvi,” released just this past Friday. It’s a teaching on the theology of hope, a beautiful theme for Advent, and so I’ll be preaching on it all Advent long. “Faith in Christ,” His Holiness tells us, “has never looked merely backwards or merely upwards, but always also forwards to the hour of justice that the Lord repeatedly proclaimed. This looking ahead has given Christianity its importance for the present moment” (Spe Salvi, 41). Pope Benedict’s point throughout the encyclical is that we will not find hope in ourselves, in science, in politics, in soccer, golf or work. We won’t find hope in Oprah or Dr. Phil or anyone else. The only real hope we have is Jesus Christ, and he is all the hope we will ever need.

Even before Christ’s birth, the prophet Isaiah was able to look forward to this time of great hope. Centuries before Jesus was ever born, Isaiah foresaw a time when nations would “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.” Those are words of hope that we desperately need in our world right now. At a time when violence is on the rise, and abortion clinics are built in our backyard, at a time when many of our country’s physical and monetary resources are being consumed by a difficult war, at a time when personal morality and responsibility are at an all-time low, we so need to hope in “a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.”

Take all those challenges, as well as difficulties in our own lives, and maybe these are all much scarier and more brutal than the Day of Judgment could ever be, especially when we have joined ourselves to Christ. Maybe the hope that Jesus brings this Advent and every day of our lives helps us to look forward with eager expectation to that Judgment Day when everything will finally be made right. It’s no wonder that even that fearful Day of the Lord cannot keep the Psalmist from singing, “Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord.”