“Can you drink the chalice that I am going to drink?” That’s a loaded question if ever there was one. But just like James and John, all of us Christian disciples will indeed drink of Jesus’ chalice. And just like James and John, we will have to accept all that comes with it. Yes, we will get a place in the kingdom, but yes, it will also mean for us that we will get hardship, suffering, and grief. We must drink the chalice if we would have the reward that Jesus came to give. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.
Category: Lent
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Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent
A phylactery was a black leather box that was worn on the arm or the forehead, containing scriptural verses. Maybe the modern equivalent would be a “WWJD” bracelet, or a cross worn around the neck, or even a t-shirt or sweatshirt with a Scriptural verse on it. These are wonderful reminders of who we are called to be, except when we ignore them. We cannot advertise to be one person when in fact we are someone else. We cannot be like the Pharisees who preach but do not practice. Our works must be works of justice, reaching out to those in need, living in right relationship with everyone, or our words are just hollow.
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Monday of the Second Week of Lent
Aren’t the Lenten readings challenging? But this is what it means to be a disciple. We have to be willing to have our whole world turned upside-down; to do something completely against our nature; to let God take control of the life we want so much to control.
“For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” I don’t know about you, but that scares the heck out of me. Because there are plenty of times when it just about kills me to give someone a break. The measure I sometimes use ends up being a bar set pretty high, and I would sure hate to have to leap over that bar myself. But that’s what Jesus is saying will be our measure.
Because the measure of compassion is the compassion of God himself. That is our model, that’s what we’re to strive for, that’s how we are to treat each other. But when we do that, it means we can’t judge others. It means that we have to see them as God does, which is to say that we have to see the Jesus in them and to see the goodness in them. And that’s hard to do when that person has just cut you off in traffic, or has gossiped about you to your neighbors, or has crossed you in some other way. But even then, we are called to stop judging others and show them the compassion of God.
Lord, do not deal with us according to our sins. That is the prayer of the Psalmist today. We are given the promise of forgiveness, but we are also warned that if we do not forgive others, we will not be forgiven either. The measure with which we measure will in turn be measured out to us. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to look really hard for a small ruler today.
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Second Sunday of Lent
I think that two words sum up what we are being told today in our Liturgy of the Word: WAKE UP. There is a lot of waking up going on: Abram falls into a deep trance and is enveloped in terrifying darkness, he then wakes up to see God ratifying the covenant. The disciples on the mountain have fallen asleep as Jesus prayed, and they wake up to see our Transfigured Lord conversing with Moses and Isaiah – symbols of the Law and the Prophets.
We too are called to wake up. We too have once been enveloped in a terrifying darkness. The light of the Gospel and the joy of the sacraments banishes that darkness, if we but move forward in faith. The problem is that so many times we get dragged back into that darkness. It’s so easy to return to sinful ways, bad habits, patterns of brokenness, the shame of addiction. We want what we don’t need. We seek easy answers rather than work through the tough times. We make Gods out of success, and money, and pleasure, rather than honor the God who compassions us through failure, poverty and pain. We see to all our own creature comforts with little regard for the poor, oppressed and marginalized. We return over and over and over again to the terrifying darkness of sin in thought, word, and deed. Lent reminds us that we cannot survive living that way. We must confess our sins and wake up to be children of light.
Waking up to the call of God in our lives, we are called to be light to others. We have to be willing then to inconvenience ourselves for the sake of the Kingdom of God. God’s compassion has been poured out on us so that we can then be compassionate to others. That compassion demands that we have concern for every person God puts in our path, that we take time out of our busy and hectic schedules to listen to a hurting coworker or look in on a sick neighbor. God’s love has been poured out on us so that we can love as he has loved us. That love demands that we discipline children with patience, that we honor and respect our parents, that we go the extra mile to share the gifts we have been given. We must wake up to live as God’s people.
We are a people who have been given so much. God has reached out to us in great love and mercy and has taken the initiative to form a covenant with us, first with the sacrifice of Abraham, and in the last days through the blood of Jesus, poured out on the altar of the Cross. We deserve none of this, because we as a people and as individuals have turned away from God over and over again. But over and over again, God has sung to our spirit, giving us grace, and called us to be sons and daughters of light. But we have to wake up and receive it.
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Saturday of the First Week of Lent
Today’s readings
Well, how far are we supposed to take that? Love our enemies? Pray for those who persecute us? I mean, that’s real easy to hear until we actually think about it, isn’t it? Those people who gossip about us, cut us off in traffic, make a ruckus in our neighborhoods until all hours of the night, tell off-color jokes in social situations – well it’s nice to hold onto a grudge against them, isn’t it? And are we supposed to be forgiving of terrorists, and all those people who hate us and our way of life?
Yes, we are. We are if we want to be called children of our heavenly Father. And who doesn’t want that? Who knows: maybe when we stop letting them irritate us and instead begin to pray for them and even forgive them, maybe then we will start seeing them in a new light. They might not change, but we will, and we need to be concerned about our relationship with God.
Who do I need to forgive today?
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Tuesday of the First Week of Lent
The prophet Isaiah and Jesus speak today about the great power of words. Isaiah speaks specifically of the power of God’s word, a word that will not return empty but will go out and accomplish the purpose for which God sent it. We see the word that the prophet speaks of here, of course as the Word – with a capital “W.” That Word is Jesus Christ who comes to accomplish the salvation of the world, the purpose of God ever since the world’s creation.
The prayer that Jesus gives us today, the classic prayer that echoes in our hearts in good times and in bad, is a prayer with a specific purpose in mind. That prayer, if we pray it rightly, recognizes that God’s holiness will bring about a Kingdom where his will will be done in all of creation. It begs God’s forgiveness and begs also that we too would become a forgiving and merciful people, just as God is merciful to us. Finally, it asks for help with temptation and evil, something with which we struggle every day.
Today’s readings are a plea that God’s will would finally be done. That his Word would go forth and accomplish God’s purpose. That his will would be done on earth as in heaven. As we pray those familiar words, they can often go past us without catching our attention. But we are called to pray them today that God’s will would be accomplished in every place, starting with in our own lives.
Because to God belongs the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.
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First Sunday of Lent
Perhaps the greatest sin of modern times, maybe of all time, is that we sometimes forget who we are. Politicians forget that they are elected officials, given the trust of the people they serve, and so they become embroiled in a scandal or sell themselves to special interest groups. Church leaders forget that they are ordained by God for holiness and so they give in to keeping up appearances, and bring scandal to the Church. But it’s not just these people; all of us fall to this temptation at one time or another – maybe several times – in our lives. Young people forget that they have been raised in good Christian, loving homes, and in their quest to define themselves, turn away from the values they have been taught. Adults forget that they are vocationally called to love their spouse and their children and so get caught up in their careers to the detriment of their family. Think of any problem we have or any scandal that has been endured and deep at the core of it, I think it stems from forgetting who we are.
Forgetting who we are changes everything for the worse. It makes solving problems or ending scandal seem insurmountable, because we have to constantly cook up new solutions to new problems, because we’ve gone in a new direction on a road that never should have been traveled. That was the scandal of Eden, and the scandal of the Tower of Babel, among others. Once we’ve forgotten who we are and acted impetuously, it’s hard to un-ring the bell.
One of the consequences of forgetting who we are is that we forget who God is too. We no longer look to God to be our Savior, because we instead would like to solve things on our own. Perhaps we are embarrassed to come to God because we are deep in a problem of our own making. We see this all the time in our lives: who of us wants to go to a parent or boss or authority figure – or anyone, really – and tell them that we thought we had all the answers but now we’ve messed up and we can’t fix it and we desperately need their help? If that’s true then we’re all the more reluctant to go to God, aren’t we?
This forgetting who we are, and forgetting who God is, is the spiritual problem that our readings are trying to address today. Moses meets the people on the occasion of the harvest sacrifice, and challenges them not to make the sacrifice an empty, rote repetition of a familiar ritual. They are to remember that their ancestors were wandering people who ended up in slavery in Egypt, only to be delivered by God and brought to a land flowing with milk and honey. And it is for that reason that they are to joyfully offer the sacrifice.
St. Paul exhorts the Romans to remember who Jesus was and to remember his saving sacrifice and glorious resurrection. They are to remember that this faith in Christ gives them hope of eternity and that, calling on the Lord, they can find salvation.
But it is the familiar story of Christ being tempted in the desert that speaks to us most clearly of the temptation to forget who we are and who God is. The devil would like nothing more than for Jesus to forget who he was and why he was here. He would have Jesus forget that real hunger is not satisfied by mere bread, but must be satisfied by God’s word. He would have Jesus forget that there is only one God and that real glory comes from obedience to God’s command and from living according to God’s call. He would have Jesus forget that life itself is God’s gift and that we must cherish it as much as God does.
But Jesus won’t forget. He refuses to turn stones into bread, remembering that God will take care of all his real hunger. He refuses to worship Satan and gain every kingdom of the world, remembering that he belongs to God’s kingdom. He refuses to throw away his life in a pathetic attempt to test God, remembering that God is trustworthy and that he doesn’t need to prove it.
The way that we remember who we are as a Church is through Liturgy. In the Liturgy of the Word, we hear the stories of faith handed down from generation to generation. These are the stories of our ancestors, whether from the Old Testament or the New. In the Liturgy of the Eucharist, we re-present the story of Christ’s Passion and death, and as we do that, it becomes new for us once again. There’s a part of every Eucharistic Prayer that recalls Jesus’ suffering and death, resurrection and ascension into heaven. This is called the anamnesis, which is translated as recollection, or remembering, but is perhaps best rendered as a re-presentation. Because our remembering as a Church isn’t just some kind of fond reminiscence, it’s not just a recalling of some events that happened hundreds of years ago, no … our anamnesis is a re-presentation of Christ’s passion and death and resurrection, the whole Paschal event that saved us and made us the people that we are. In this anamnesis we remember that our God is madly in love with us, and that through his Son Jesus, gives himself to us completely, refusing to live in eternity without us, loving us into salvation, and making us a people of grace. When we as a Church gather to remember, we are there, right in and among that saving sacrifice that made us God’s own people once again.
And so we come to this holy place on this holy day to remember that we are a holy people, made holy by our God. We remember who we are and who God is. We rely on the Spirit’s help to reject the temptations of Satan that would call us to forget who we are and instead become a people of our own making. We have come again to another Lent. Lent is a time of conversion. For the people in our Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults – RCIA – it is a time of conversion from one way of life to another. For the rest of us, Lent is a time of continued re-conversion. Our Church teaches us that conversion is a life-long process. In conversion, we see who our God is more clearly and we see ourselves in a new, and truer light – indeed we see who we really are before God.
That is life in God as it was always meant to be. Remembering our God, remembering who we are, we have promise of being set on high, as the Psalmist proclaims today. This Lent can lead us to new heights in our relationship with God. Praise God for the joy of remembering, praise God for the joy of Lent.
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Friday after Ash Wednesday
A lot of people say they aren’t giving up something for Lent, they’re just going to try to do something nice for people. When it’s that vague, I often think that means they’re doing nothing at all for Lent, which is sad. But, I usually tell people it doesn’t just have to be one or the other. Indeed, today’s Liturgy of the Word tells us that it should actually be both.
Fasting is important because it helps us to see how blessed we are. It is important because it helps us to realize that there is nothing that we hunger for that God can’t provide. Fasting teaches us, once again, that God is God and we are not. This is important for all of us independent-minded modern-day Americans. We like to be in charge, in control, and the fact is that whatever control we do have is an illusion. God is in control of all things, even when it seems like we are in chaos. Fasting teaches us that we can do without the things we’ve given up, and that God can provide for us in much richer ways. Fasting is absolutely essential to having an inspiring, life-changing Lent, and I absolutely think that people should give things up for Lent.
But giving something up for Lent does not excuse us from the obligation to love our neighbor. This falls under the general heading of almsgiving, and along with fasting and prayer, it is one of the traditional ways of preparing our hearts for Easter during Lent. We might be more mindful of the poor, contributing to food pantries or homeless shelters or relief organizations. We might reach out by actually serving in some capacity, like Feed My Starving Children, or spending an hour at PADS. We also might give the people closest to us in our lives a larger portion of the love that has been God’s gift to us.
Today’s first reading reminds us that fasting to put on a big show is a sham. Fasting to bring ourselves closer to God includes the obligation of almsgiving and prayer. Together, these three facets of discipleship make us stronger Christians and give us a greater share of the grace that is promised to the sons and daughters of God.
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Monday of Holy Week
Well, it’s time to get it right. The end is almost in sight, and to be confused now about who Jesus was and why he came is just not acceptable. No, he didn’t come for accolades or to lead huge revivals or stadium events. He came to suffer and die, and Mary has figured that out. Judas is disillusioned because he thought following the Messiah would mean fame and, most importantly, fortune for him. But he didn’t come for that. He came to be the covenant of light and salvation for all of us. His death would be required, but would not be the end of the story.
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Tuesday of Holy Week
“And it was night.” In John’s Gospel, sentences like that are not given merely to tell the time of day. John’s Gospel is filled with images of light and darkness, light of course representing Christ and darkness representing evil. To say “And it was night” for John means that this was the hour that darkness would take its best shot at the light. And it will be very dark, leading to Jesus’ suffering and death. But in the end, no darkness can overcome the light of Christ. These are the days when we move somberly to the Cross, but in our moving toward it, we know that it is not the end of the story. It will not be night forever. The light will break into the darkness, leading us all to glorious day.
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