Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Liturgy

  • The Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time: Respect Life Sunday

    The Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time: Respect Life Sunday

    Today’s readings

    How wonderful are the words we hear in today’s Gospel! “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” This raises important questions for us: how deep is our faith? What have we accomplished by faith? What has our witness to the faith looked like?  Has our tiny faith been powerful enough to move the deeply-rooted trees of ignorance and doubt that plague our world? On this Respect Life Sunday, we are particularly confronted with the issues of life and how we have given witness to the sanctity of life from conception to natural death.

    The basis for the movement to respect life, brothers and sisters, is the fifth commandment: You shall not kill (Ex 20:13). The Catechism is very specific: “Scripture specifies the prohibition contained in the fifth commandment: ‘Do not slay the innocent and the righteous.’ The deliberate murder of an innocent person is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human being, to the golden rule, and to the holiness of the Creator. The law forbidding it is universally valid: it obliges each and everyone, always and everywhere.” (CCC 2261) Those are strong words that are particularly striking.  They apply not just to Catholics, but to “each and everyone, always and everywhere.” It’s part of the natural law, a law that seems to be regularly ignored these days. And that would seem simple enough, don’t you think? God said not to kill another human being, and so refraining from doing so reverences his gift of life and obeys his commandment.

    But life isn’t that simple. Life is a deeply complex issue involving a right to life, a quality of life, a reverence for life, and sanctity of life.  So there’s more to it than we might catch at first glance: Jesus himself stirs up the waters of complexity with his own take on the commandment. In Matthew’s Gospel, he tells us: “You have heard that it was said to the men of old, “You shall not kill: and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment.” (Mt 5:21-22)

    Our Savior’s instruction on life calls us to make an examination of conscience. We may proclaim ourselves as exemplary witnesses to the sanctity of life because we have never murdered anyone nor participated in an abortion. And those are obviously good starts. But if we let it stop there, then the words of Jesus that I just quoted are our condemnation. The church teaches that true respect for life revolves around faithfulness to the spirit of the fifth commandment. The Catechism tells us, “Every human life, from the moment of conception until death, is sacred because the human person has been willed for its own sake in the image and likeness of the living and holy God.” (CCC 2319)

    And so we must all ask ourselves, brothers and sisters in Christ, are there lives that we have not treated as sacred? Have we harbored anger in our hearts against our brothers and sisters? What have we done to fight poverty, hunger and homelessness? Have we insisted that those who govern us treat war as morally repugnant, only to be used in the most severe cases and as a last resort? Have we engaged in stereotypes or harbored thoughts based on racism and prejudice? Have we insisted that legislators ban the production of human fetuses to be used as biological material? Have we been horrified that a nation with our resources still regularly executes its citizens as a way of fighting crime? Have we done everything in our power to be certain that no young woman should ever have to think of abortion as her only choice when she is facing hard times? Have we given adequate care to elder members of our family and our society so that they would not face their final days in loneliness, nor come to an early death for the sake of convenience? Have we avoided scandal so as to prevent others from being led to evil? Have we earnestly petitioned our legislators to make adequate health care available for all people?

    Every one of these issues is a life issue, brothers and sisters, and we who would be known to be respecters of life are on for every single one of them, bar none. The Church’s teaching on the right to life is not something that we can approach like we’re in a cafeteria. We must accept and reverence and live the whole of the teaching, or be held liable for every breach of it. If we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem. We have to be respecters of life with integrity, or we are not the strong witnesses to the sanctity of life that our world requires right now.  On this day of prayer for the sanctity of life, our prayer must perhaps be first for ourselves that we might live the Church’s teaching with absolute integrity in every moment of our lives.  We must take our tiny mustard-seed-sized faith and nourish it so that it will grow into a living witness of faith in action.

    Our God has known us and formed us from our mother’s womb, from that very first moment of conception. Our God will be with us and will sustain us until our dying breath. In life and in death, we belong to the Lord … Every part of our lives belongs to the Lord. Our call is a clear one. We must constantly and consistently bear witness to the sanctity of life at every stage. We must be people who lead the world to a whole new reality, in the presence of the One who has made all things new. We have heard the Lord’s teaching and the teaching of the Church in union with the Holy Spirit. Now we must respond as our Psalmist urges us: “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”

  • The Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time: It’s All About Mercy

    The Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time: It’s All About Mercy

    Today’s readings

    Mercy.  It’s all about mercy – thank God.

    Maybe at some point in your life you’ve heard that little accusatory voice in your head, or maybe even in your ears from someone else.  It might have said something like, “You’re a sinner, how can you sit there in church?”  “Don’t tell me how to live my life; you’re worse than I am!”  “How can you even ask God to forgive you after everything you’ve done?”  That little voice might come from someone we know, or maybe it’s just that nagging voice in the back of your head.  The premise of the voice is correct.  We are sinners.  There is no denying that.  Saint Paul makes it very clear in today’s second reading: “Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners,” he says.  “Of these I am the foremost.”  That’s true of all of us, certainly.  But at a very fundamental level, the conclusion of the voice is dead wrong.  The voice is the voice of the Accuser, of the devil.  Because we are never unworthy of mercy, we are never far from God’s love. 

    Jesus knows this is hard for us to accept, so in today’s Gospel, he tells us three stories.  Each of these stories is intended to shock us into seeing how radical God’s mercy really is.  Now, honestly, to all of us who are far removed from the culture and everyday life of people in Jesus’ day, we might not get how shocking they are, until we really think about it. 

    In the first story, he asks a ludicrous question: “What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it?”  The answer to that question is exactly zero!  Because if he leaves the other ninety-nine behind to go after the lost one, where will the other ninety-nine be?  Well, they’d probably be in ninety-nine different places!  They’ll all be gone.  So better to cut your losses and keep the other ninety-nine together and hope you spot the lost one along the way.  That’s how most shepherds probably would have done it.  But God is better than the prudent shepherd.  He will relentlessly pursue us when we wander astray and become lost and will not rest until he has us – all of us – back in the fold.

    The second story isn’t quite as crazy, but it’s still a little out there.  “What woman having ten coins and losing one would not light a lamp and sweep the house, searching carefully until she finds it?”  On this one, it kind of depends.  Specifically, it depends upon the value of the coin.  If it’s a small coin, it will probably cost more to buy oil for the lamp than the coin is worth, so better to wait until the sun comes up, and then sweep the house.  One coin doesn’t matter so much that it can’t wait until the light of day.  But God is not like that.  Finding the lost one among us is extremely urgent, and we are always worth the lamp oil.

    Then we have the wonderful, very familiar parable of the prodigal son, which I prefer to call the parable of the very forgiving Father.  Because I think the main character here is the father, and not the son, not either of the sons.  Look at how forgiving the father is:  First, he grants the younger son’s request to receive his inheritance before his father was even dead – which is so presumptuous that it really feels hurtful.  Kind of like saying, “Hey dad, I can’t wait until you’re dead, give me my inheritance now, please.”  But the father gives him the inheritance without ill-will.  Secondly, the father reaches out to the younger son on his return, running out to meet him, and before he can even finish his little prepared speech, lavishes gifts on him and throws a party. 

    There is a tendency, I think, for us to put ourselves into the story, which is not a bad thing to do.  But let’s look at these two sons.  First of all, I’ll just say it, it’s not like one was sinful and the other wasn’t – no – they are both sinful.  The younger son’s sin is easy to see.  But the older son, with his underlying resentment and refusal to take part in the joy of his Father, is sinful too.  It’s worth noting that the Father comes out of the house to see both sons.  The Father meets both of them where they are.  That’s significant because a good Jewish father in those days wouldn’t come out to meet anyone – they would come to him, and it better be on their knees.  But the Father meets them where they are and urgently, lovingly, pleads with them to join the feast.

    So, both sons are sinful.  But remember, this is a parable, and so the characters themselves are significant.  They all symbolize somebody.  We know who the Father symbolizes.  But the sons symbolize people – more specifically groups of people – too.  The younger son was for Jesus symbolic of the non-believer sinners – all those tax collectors and prostitutes and other gentile sinners Jesus was criticized for hanging around.  The older son symbolizes the people who should have known better: the religious leaders – the Pharisees and scribes.  In this parable, Jesus is making the point that the sinners are getting in to the banquet of God’s kingdom before the religious leaders, because the sinners are recognizing their sinfulness, and turning back to the Father, who longs to meet them more than half way.  The religious leaders think they are perfect and beyond all that repenting stuff, so they are missing out.

    So again, it’s good to put ourselves in the story.  Which son are we, really?  Have we been like the younger son and messed up so badly that we are unworthy of the love of the Father, and deserve to be treated like a common servant?  Or are we like the older son, and do we miss the love and mercy of God in pursuit of trying to look good in everyone else’s eyes?  Maybe sometimes we are like one of the sons, and other times we are like the other.  But the point is, that we often sin.

    Our response, then, has to be like the younger son’s.  We have to be willing to turn back to the Father and be embraced in his mercy and love and forgiveness.  We can’t be like the older son and refuse to be forgiven, insisting on our own righteousness.  The stakes are too high for us to do that: we would be missing out on the banquet of eternal life to which Jesus Christ came to bring us.

    And where does that bring us if not to the sacrament of Penance?  We have heard the voices in our head or the voices of others.  We have sinned, we are not worthy of the Father’s love.  But he wants to love us anyway.  All we have to do is turn back, by going to confession and being forgiven of our sins.  We have fallen; we have failed; we have sinned, but the antidote to that poison is the great healing river of God’s mercy. 

    I don’t think we can adequately reflect on God’s mercy without recalling the horrible event that happened in our nation twenty-one years ago today.  On that horrible morning, terror was unleashed on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, on the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania.  Those of us old enough to remember definitely remember how we felt on that horrible day.  Fear, anger, sadness, overwhelming grief.  How could something like that happen, and what kind of monsters could unleash such evil?  It’s really hard to see how mercy can apply to people like that.

    Honestly, I don’t know how you deal with the justice of that situation.  There are some questions that we’ll never be able to answer on this side of the life of heaven.  But we do know that we have been called to mercy: mercy for ourselves and mercy for others.  Anger and fear serve no useful purpose and lead to nothing good.   But while we hold people accountable for the horrible things they have done, we trust God to give mercy to all of us, because dwelling on anger and fear harm us more than others.  We pray for those who have been hurt by the horrors of that day.  We pray for the conversion of those who live only to inflict evil.  And we pray that God’s mercy will change all of us, making the world a place where things like 9-11 never happen again.

    Very interestingly, the readings we have today were the readings for that Sunday right after 9-11.  That wasn’t a coincidence; God’s mercy is always intentional.

    It’s all about mercy.  Thank God.

  • Saturday of the Twenty-third Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Twenty-third Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ but not do what I command?”

    Those words have to be among those that cut deepest in scripture.  Because we are all comfortable coming to Mass and calling on the Lord, aren’t we?  We are very wont to call on the Lord for help in time of need.  We are willing to turn to him when things are rough, or at least blame the Lord when things are rough.  But are we willing to do what the Lord commands?

    Maybe if we did, we would see him at our side in rough times.  Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t have that pang of guilt that we experienced when this Gospel was read.

    Because following what the Lord commands helps us to build our house on the rock foundation of God’s grace.  Built on that rock foundation, the house of our spiritual lives doesn’t topple when times are rough.  The storms never batter that house so badly that we can’t hear the Lord’s voice of peace.

    Today’s Liturgy of the Word calls us all to make a good examination of conscience, to listen to our Lord calling us and commanding us, and then to act on those words.

  • The Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    For those of us who would be disciples of our Lord, we have to be willing to ruthlessly destroy everything that gets in the way of our discipleship.

    Jesus tells us some things about discipleship today that, quite honestly, I think might make a person think twice about becoming a disciple.  The first two come right at the beginning of the gospel reading: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.  Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”  And then, right at the end, he says: “Anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.”  He’s pretty clear: if we’re not willing to do these things, then we cannot be his disciples.

    How does that make you feel? Are you willing to literally hate those closest to you for the sake of the Gospel?  Would you take up your cross, knowing what happened to him when he did it, and come after him?  Think of the things that you have that you love: are you willing to renounce them in order to follow Christ?  Today’s Gospel is incredibly challenging, to say the least.  Maybe I should say it’s incredibly unsettling.  Maybe we are totally willing to be Jesus’ followers, but are we ready to pay the price?

    And that’s the point of the parables he tells.  Who is going to build a building without first calculating how much it would cost to build it to be certain there is adequate funding?  Most of us have probably passed by some commercial buildings that started going up, only to be later abandoned, or that took quite a bit of time to build, possibly because the funding dried up.  So we’re not unfamiliar with the metaphor here.  Or if you were a military leader going into battle, wouldn’t you gather intelligence to estimate what the adversary is bringing to the battle to be sure that you can be victorious?  Bringing it down a notch, think of a coach scouting out the other team to see how they play.

    In any of these situations, it is absolutely necessary to calculate the cost.  Not to do so would be foolish.  The same is true of discipleship.  There is a cost to discipleship.  Those first disciples, almost without exception, paid for it at the cost of their lives.  Preaching in the name of Jesus was a dangerous thing to do, but they calculated the cost and realized it was worth it, and they did die.  Praise God for their faithfulness to the mission despite the cost; had they not been faithful we probably would not have the faith.

    For us modern disciples, should we choose to follow him, there will be a cost too.  We might not have to pay for it with our lives.  But there will be a cross to bear.  We might have relationships that get in the way.  We might have things that we own that tie us too closely to the world and get in the way of our relationship with Christ. Those will have to go.  That is the cost for us, and today we’re being asked if we are willing to pay it.

    So how far do we take this? Do we really have to hate our families? Do we have to sell everything we own? Do we have to take up the cross in such a way that we become doormats for those whose views are different from ours? How much of the cost do we ourselves really need to pay?

    We certainly know that Jesus – who loved his mother and father very much – did not mean that we were to alienate ourselves from our families.  But there may be relationships in our lives that are obstacles to the Gospel. Maybe we’d gossip less if we didn’t hang out with people who brought that out of us.  That would certainly help us to be better disciples.  Maybe we’re in friendships or casual relationships that lead us to drink too much, or see the wrong kind of movies, or that draw us away from the healthy relationships we have.  Those relationships have to end if we are to follow Christ more fully. Anything that gets in the way of our relationship with God and our ability to follow him in whatever way he’s called us has to go right now.  Ruthlessly put an end to it now, because otherwise we give up the life to which we are called, the life that is better than even these things that we might enjoy very much.

    Our Liturgy of the Word today reminds us that following the Gospel on our own terms is not possible. The call to discipleship is one that calls us to step out of our comfort zone, leave behind whatever ties us to the world and separates us from God, and follow our Savior wherever he leads us. So if our only sacrifice for the sake of the Kingdom of God is maybe getting out of bed and coming to Church on Sunday, then Jesus is telling us today that’s not enough.  It is a good start, but we have to reflect with wisdom on those things that are getting in the way, because it’s time we gave them up.

    For those of us who would be disciples of our Lord, we have to be willing to ruthlessly destroy everything that gets in the way of our discipleship.  As we present our gifts today, God gives us the gift of wisdom.  How we live our lives this week will be the test of the way we’ve put that gift into action.

  • The Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Every now and then it’s a good idea to reflect on virtues.  Virtues don’t get enough play in our society these days.  More often, we hear of taking care of ourselves, doing whatever makes us happy, that kind of thing. The virtues definitely counsel against that kind of self-absorption, but frankly, the virtues lead to greater happiness in the long run.

    You’ve heard of the deadly sins. They are those sins that can really get at us time and time again in our lives and turn us away from God. They are things like lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. But for each of those deadly sins, there is also a life-giving virtue. Today, our readings focus on humility, which is the life-giving virtue that is the antidote to pride. Of the seven deadly sins, pride is usually considered to be the original and the most serious of the sins. Pride was the sin that caused the angel Lucifer to fall from grace. Pride was the sin that caused our first parents to reach for the forbidden fruit that was beyond them, all in an attempt to know everything God does. A good examination of conscience would probably convince all of us that we indulge in pride from time to time, and sometimes even pervasively, in our own lives. It’s what causes us to compare ourselves to others, to try to solve all our problems in ways that don’t include God, to be angry when everything does not go the way we would have it. Pride is the deadly sin that often-times is the gateway to other sins like judging others, self-righteousness, and sarcasm. Pride, as the saying goes, and as Lucifer found out, doth indeed go before the fall, and when that happens in a person’s life, if it doesn’t break them in a way that convinces them of their need for God, will very often send them into a tailspin of despair. Pride is a particularly ugly thing.

    Humility, then, can be the answer to that particularly pernicious sin.  The wisdom writer Sirach, in our first reading, advises us to conduct our affairs with humility: “Humble yourself the more, the greater you are,  and you will find favor with God.”  But when we think about humility, maybe we associate that with a kind of “wimpiness.” When you think about humble people, perhaps you imagine breast-beating, pious souls who allow themselves to be the doormats for the more aggressive and ambitious.  Humble people, we tend to think, don’t buck the system, they just say their prayers, accept whatever life throws at them, and, when they are inflicted with pain and suffering, they just “offer it up.” (Not that offering up our sufferings is a bad thing, mind you.)

    But Jesus described himself as “humble of heart,” and I dare say we wouldn’t think of him as such a pushover.  He, of all people, took every occasion to buck the system and chastise the rich and powerful.  He never just let things go or avoided confrontation.  Confrontation was at the core of what he came to do.  But he was indeed humble, humbling himself to become human like the rest of us, when he could easily have clung to his glory as God.  He was strong enough to call us all, in the strongest of terms, to examine our lives and reform our attitudes, but humble enough to die for our sins.

    And so it is this humble Jesus who speaks up and challenges his hearers to adopt lives of humility in today’s gospel reading.  One wonders why the “leading Pharisee” even invited Jesus to the banquet.  If we’ve been paying attention to the story so far, we know that the Pharisee had ulterior motives; he was certainly looking to catch Jesus in an embarrassing situation.  But Jesus isn’t playing along with all that.  In fact, one can certainly taste the disgust he has for what he sees going on at the banquet.

    In our day, banquets are usually put together with thoughtfulness and with a mind toward making one’s guests feel comfortable.  If you’ve been involved in a wedding, you know that the hosts try to seat people with those of like mind, with people who might have common experiences.  It’s enough to drive a host to distraction, sometimes, because it is such hard work. But in Jesus’ day, the customs were even more rigid.  People were seated in terms of their importance, and at this banquet, Jesus watched people try to assert how important they were by the places they took at table.  This was all an exercise in pride, and it seems that Jesus was repulsed by it.  So he tells them the parable that exhorts them to humble themselves and take the lowest place instead: far better to be asked to come to a more important place than to be sent down to a lower place and face embarrassment.

    But there was another aspect of pride taking place here as well.  The “leading Pharisee” had obviously invited people who were important enough to repay the favor some day – with one obvious exception – Jesus was decidedly not in a position to do so, at least not in this life.  So he tells his host a parable also, exhorting him to humble himself and invite not those who are in a position to repay his generosity, but instead he should invite “he poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind” – and know that because they cannot repay him, he would be repaid at the banquet of the righteous in heaven.

    We don’t know how the guests or the host responded to Jesus’ exhortation to practice humility.  We do, however, know that Jesus modeled it in his own life.  Indeed, he was not asking them to do something he was unwilling to do himself.  When he said, “For every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted” he was in a way foreshadowing what would happen to him.  Humbling himself to take up our cross – our cross – he would be exalted in the glory of the resurrection.

    The good news is that glory can be ours too, if we would humble ourselves and lay down our lives for others.  If we stop treating the people in our lives as stepping-stones to something better, we might reach something better than we can find on our own.  If we humble ourselves to feed the poor and needy, to reach out to the marginalized and forgotten, we might be more open to the grace our Lord has in store for us in the kingdom of heaven.

    Life has a way of teaching us humility, which is sometimes hard, but it’s good if we accept it.  As you might know, my mother has been ill with various things over the last couple of years.  Lately, she has needed more help at home, and my sisters and I have been taking turns to be there for her and with her so that she is safe and comfortable at home.  As you can imagine, Mom, who has always been the one who helped us figure everything out in our lives, had to embrace the humility of letting her children care for her.  She is totally in her right frame of mind, it’s just that her body is betraying her, and that’s hard for a person who has always been strong.  But I have seen her accept the help we have offered in love, and it’s had an impact on me, I who also have a tendency to want to take care of everything myself.  Just ask my staff!  This humility that we have been learning through all of this has helped me to love my mother, my sisters, myself, and God so much more.  There is grace in embracing humility, and Jesus promises us that today.

    For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
    but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

  • The Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I think it’s easy to be dismayed at where the world is these days.  Political candidates and politicians on both sides of the aisle are disappointing at best.  The pro-abortion vitriol is vicious and hateful.  Violence in our cities, schools, and public spaces is constant.  Public sin and our own private sin beat us down all the time.  This is most definitely a time of persecution. So it could well be that we are tempted to despair, to shake our heads and try to avoid hearing about it all.

    But we are called to live differently as Christian disciples.  Despair is not an option for us; we have the hope of the Gospel, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the promise of eternity.  So the question that we have is, how do we live through all the sadness of the world around us, not to mention the sadness in our own lives, while we wait for all those promises to be fulfilled?  The virtue that gets us through that is called fortitude, something we don’t talk about often enough, but something that has real value for our spiritual lives.

    The Church’s Catechism tells us that “Fortitude is the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life. The virtue of fortitude enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions. It disposes one even to renounce and sacrifice his life in defense of a just cause.” (CCC, 1808) Jesus puts it even more succinctly in today’s Gospel: “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” He wants us to be a people on fire, a people who will not waver in our pursuit of living the Gospel, a people who will not back down in the face of obstacles or even oppression, a people who live their faith joyfully and with firm conviction that our God is trustworthy and faithful. The Christian believer is called to exercise the virtue of fortitude because nothing else is worthy of our God.

    The author of the letter to the Hebrews speaks of fortitude today.  Speaking of Jesus, “the leader and perfecter of our faith,” he says:

    For the sake of the joy that lay before him
    he endured the cross, despising its shame,
    and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God.
    Consider how he endured such opposition from sinners,
    in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart.
    In your struggle against sin
    you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood.

    Resisting the opposition in our society and in our lives to the point of shedding blood is the kind of fortitude that we as disciples need to live in our lives.  It’s a tall order!

    Nobody says fortitude is easy. Jesus himself was very realistic about this, and warns us today that fortitude in living the Christian life can be a very divisive way of life. The disciple can and will run into all sorts of oppression, and can even lead to broken relationships with those who are close to us. If that Gospel calls upon us to take an unpopular position, and speak up on behalf of the poor, the alien, the prisoner, or a pro-life issue, we may find that even some of our friends or family cannot go there with us. Being a Christian can make us feel like foreigners in our own land. And we are foreigners, because for those of us who are first of all citizens of God’s kingdom, Jesus’ vision and values come first. All because Jesus has come to set a blazing fire on the earth and that fire, to some extent, already burns in us.

    Today’s reading from the letter to the Hebrews makes it clear that we aren’t running the race alone. We have at our disposal the support and encouragement of a “great cloud of witnesses” which the Church calls the Communion of Saints. They may be the official saints of the Church, or other saintly people we have known or do know who intercede for us in our struggle of faith.  These are men and women who have suffered much and overcome much in pursuit of the kingdom of God. This great cloud of witnesses cheers us on, is an example for us, and is part of God’s way of helping us to live lives marked by fortitude.  If we didn’t have the example of that great cloud of witnesses, the call to fortitude would surely be insurmountable.

    Very often on the journey of discipleship, we may find that the oppression and division that the Gospel causes casts us down.  Think about the loved ones you have called to live the faith, come to Mass, make good decisions, and have rejected that call.  Like poor Jeremiah in today’s first reading, maybe we find that we have been thrown into a cistern of despair or hopelessness. All that sadness I mentioned in the beginning of my homily can be like that. Fortitude is the virtue that helps us in the midst of all that, to wait with faithfulness on someone like Ebed-melech the Cushite to come to our rescue and draw us up out of the pit.

    The truth is, today’s Liturgy of the Word can come across as very negative. Who wants to hear about being cast into a cistern? Are we eager to find that we are going to be in angry division with people close to us? The temptation to let all of this go in one ear and out the other, remaining instead in the comfort of our luke-warmness is almost overwhelming. But that’s just not good enough. We can’t live that way and still call ourselves disciples. It is not enough to love God in our heads. We need to be on fire, actively living the graces of baptism that we have received – to live with fortitude, integrity, conviction, fervor, and burning zeal. We have to be willing to live in the shadow of the cross, where we resolve all our divisions and live the baptism that promotes Gospel peace.

  • Thursday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s readings speak to us about remaining in relationship with God.  In the first reading, Nahum prophesies that Israel’s subjection to Nineveh will not stand.  God will deliver them and watch over them, but notice the command he gives them to fulfill:

    Celebrate your feasts, O Judah,
    fulfill your vows!
    For nevermore shall you be invaded
    by the scoundrel; he is completely destroyed.

    So the freedom they receive is a freedom to worship and serve God, fulfilling their vows.

    Jesus, of course, takes it several steps further.  “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”  Following the law was the first step, but it was pretty basic.  Even if the people obeyed it – which they often did not – it was still a matter of will mostly, and not heart.  Jesus calls us to make the same sacrifice he did: lay down our lives for one another out of love.

    “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  And isn’t that the truth, really?  When we get so caught up in ourselves and our own pettiness, how quickly life slips away and we wonder what it all meant.  But when we lose our lives following Christ and loving God and neighbor with reckless abandon, well, then we have really found something.

    God loved us first and best, and always seeks covenant with us.  He gives us freedom to choose relationship with him.  How willing are we this day to lose our lives relentlessly spending the love we have received from our God with others?

  • Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s Gospel reading is one of my favorites.  Truthfully, though, it always makes me a little uncomfortable.  Which is what it’s supposed to do.  This Gospel wants us to get out of the boat, too.

    We can tend to give Saint Peter a lot of grief over this incident.  If he was able to walk on the water for a few steps, why couldn’t he finish the journey?  What we see happen here is that while he has his eyes on Jesus, he can accomplish what seems impossible: he walks on water.  But when he gets distracted by the storm and the wind and the waves, he begins to sink into the water.

    Our spiritual journeys are a lot like that, I think.  It takes courage to get out of the boat, but the boat is not where Jesus is.  We won’t get to him unless we make that leap of faith and step out of the comfort of our boats – whatever those boats may be.  And we do fine while we have our eyes on Jesus, but the minute we get distracted by the storms raging all around us, we begin to sink into the ocean of despair that surrounds us.

    When that happens, we can be depressed about our progress.  We can be very hard on ourselves for falling yet again.  But we have to understand that Peter, and we, are not the biggest losers in this whole incident.  There were eleven guys who never had the courage or the faith to get out of the boat in the first place.  And so, like Peter, we can reach up to our Lord and let him pull us out of the swirling waters once again.

    For those of us who take the leap of faith with Peter today, we may be of “little faith,” we may even doubt sometimes, but even our “little faith” is something, and Jesus can do a whole lot with that.

  • The Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    At first glance, it all seems so simple, doesn’t it? “Go and do likewise.” Easy enough. But when a command like “go and do likewise” comes at the end of one of Jesus’ parables, we really ought to suspect it’s going to stretch us a little bit, and today is no exception.

    So let’s take a step back and look at today’s first reading to get some background for what’s happening in today’s Gospel. Moses is exhorting the people to keep the commandments of God. But which ones? The Ten Commandments? Perhaps. But the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus give the fullness of the Jewish law. There you can read over six hundred laws pertaining to everything from hospitality to the treatment of slaves, and then some. I often think the people had to be overwhelmed when they thought about that many laws. They may even have been fearful that they would have accidentally broken one of those laws in the course of daily life. But Moses is telling them that they don’t have to be reaching to find the laws they need to follow. Those laws aren’t remote or mysterious. They don’t have to cross the sea or search the sky. Because the law they need to follow is very near to them: on their lips and in their heart. They have only to carry it out.

    This is almost exactly the same thing Jesus is saying in the Gospel today. The scholar of the law who approaches Jesus today isn’t really seeking further knowledge. Rather, he is showing off and testing Jesus to see what he would say. He wants to know what it takes to inherit eternal life. Which is the right question, but for the wrong reason. In other words, he really isn’t concerned about his salvation – he probably thinks that a scholar of the law like him has that all wrapped up anyway – instead he is trying to trap Jesus and make him look foolish. 

    As Jesus often does, he answers the question with a question: “What is written in the law?” The scholar feels on good, solid, comfortable ground with that question, and responds correctly for a good Jew in that time and place: Love God with everything that you are, and love your neighbor. Loving God and neighbor, as Jesus tells us elsewhere, is the Law and the Prophets all wrapped up in a quick little elevator speech. So Jesus commends him, and says that if he does this he will live. But the man wants to justify himself a little more, and so he asks, “Who is my neighbor?” And this is the ten-thousand-dollar question of the day.

    There are a few Greek words that translate to “neighbor” for us.  The Greek word for “neighbor” in this particular parable means something a little more than a person living near you.  The word for  “neighbor” here is something a little higher. This word is almost a verb. It’s not just someone nearby, but instead the dynamic of coming near to another, of approaching and drawing close.

    I think we all have an idea in mind when we hear the word “neighbor.” I remember the neighborhood where I grew up, the neighborhood in which my mother continues to live. I had friends who went to school with me, and even to our Church. When we were growing up, we would spend hot summer nights together outside, playing “kick the can” and other kids’ games. Later, we attended our youth group together. Our parents kept an eye not just on their own kids, but on all the kids in the neighborhood. When my sister was little, she used to like to climb trees, and as soon as she did, the neighbor would call to let my mother know so she wouldn’t fall out of the tree and break her neck, which thankfully never happened. When someone had an illness or death in the family, there would be food brought to the house. If there was work to be done, someone would always lend a hand. We were neighbors to each other.

    But again, as nice as this picture of “neighbor” is, Jesus is calling us to go deeper. He is asking us to step outside ourselves, and to see a person in need and respond, no matter where that person is, no matter his or her race, color or creed. This is a real challenge in every time and place.  The person in need is always our neighbor. Listen to that statement again, because it’s crucial to what we’re hearing today and I don’t want you to leave this holy place without coming to understand it: the person in need is always, always, always our neighbor.

    Before we come down too hard on the priest and the Levite in the story, let’s give them a bit of a break. In telling the story, Jesus doesn’t condemn the priest and the Levite.  They were doing what people in their position would probably do, because they had to be concerned about remaining ritually pure so that they could lead worship. But Jesus says to them that they cannot be so concerned about the finer points of the law that they miss responding to the needs of a neighbor among them.

    And we have to hear that too. Because we too can get so caught up in our own laws that we end up as self-righteous as that scholar of the law. We may claim to respect life if we have never been involved in an abortion. And that’s a great start, but respecting life also demands that we care for the poor and needy, that we care for the health of every person, that we honor our elderly brothers and sisters, and that we repent of our racism and refuse to honor stereotypes that are an affront to human dignity. We may claim to honor the sixth commandment if we have never committed adultery. But honoring that commandment also means that we live pure lives and strive always to purify our hearts. It means we don’t take part in off-color jokes and that we refrain from watching television or movies, or visiting internet sites that lead us down the wrong path. We may claim to be thankful for our daily bread when we say grace before meals. But being thankful for our blessings means also that we share them with those who are hungry. Because Jesus is leading us to a deeper reality today, we can no longer get caught up in the self-righteousness that the scholar of the law brings to his encounter with Jesus.

    The person in need is always our neighbor. We don’t need to search far and wide to figure out what to do for that person. We have only to see the generous and self-giving response of the Samaritan in today’s Gospel and, as Jesus commands us, to “go and do likewise.” The Law and the Prophets are as near to us as that.

  • Saturday of the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I think it’s amazing to let your imagination wander to this vision that the prophet Isaiah had in today’s first reading.  Looking upon God in all God’s glory would be awe-inspiring, perhaps even terrifying.  Seeing that, Isaiah is inspired to do a kind of examination of conscience, where he sees how sinful and unclean he is, living among people who are sinful and unclean, and realizing that having seen God’s greatness, he is doomed.

    It’s a useful reflection for us disciples, I think.  Because sometimes I think we are overly familiar with God, and don’t remember his greatness and power and glory.  God is our intimate friend and loving redeemer, but he is also the creator of all the universe who holds all of us and everything in being by his own power.

    So I get why Isaiah felt like he was doomed.  But God will not have that; he has chosen Isaiah for the task of prophecy to the nations.  So he purifies Isaiah’s lips and asks who he should send.  And purified of his wickedness, Isaiah is able to say, “Here I am, send me!”

    We too have been purified by Holy Baptism, and in that ritual the minister touches the lips and ears of the infant, opening them to the praise and glory of God.  Not by a burning ember from the altar, but by the sacrifice of Our Lord, we have been purged of sin and called to holiness and ministry.  Today and every day, we are asked by our awesome God, “Whom shall I send?  Who will go for us?”