Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: The Church Year

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

    Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time: Respect Life Sunday

    Today’s readings

    Today, I’d like to share a bit more of a sermon than a homily, reflecting more on a specific topic than on the readings themselves.  I do this because today is Respect Life Sunday, and I think it’s important to be aware of what the Church teaches on this very important issue.

    I would begin this reflection with these beautiful words from today’s second reading: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”  We can be so distracted by things that seem good that really aren’t all that good, things that seem important that are really just sweating the small stuff, and God would have us look instead at what is lovely, gracious, excellent and worthy of praise – in short, God would have us reflect on what he has created and know that this is the greatest gift, the most important thing we could be busied about.

    The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us: “The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God. This invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists, it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator.” (CCC, 27; cf. Gaudium et Spes 19.1)  Life is the greatest good we have because it is God who created life, every life, from the tiniest embryo to the elderly person in the final stages of life.  We reverence life, respect life, reaffirm life, because human life is the best thing there is on this whole big earth, the most magnificent of all God’s wonderful creation.

    The basis for the movement to respect life, of course, 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) 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. 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 everyone 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 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)

    The issues that present themselves under the heading of respecting life are many.  We are called to put aside racism and stereotyping, to reach out to the homeless, to advocate for health care for all people, to put an end – once and for all! – to abortion, capital punishment, war, terrorism and genocide, to recognize that euthanasia is not the same thing as mercy, to promote the strength of family life and the education of all young people, to provide food for those who hunger.  We Catholics must accept the totality of the Church’s teaching of respecting life, or we can never hope for a world that is beautiful or grace filled.

    We pro-life Catholics are called to go above and beyond what seems comfortable in order to defend life.  And so we must all ask ourselves, 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. 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.

    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.

  • Monday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    God’s salvation is radical.  Zechariah, in the first reading, is speaking to the broken Israel.  On account of its sins, it was taken into captivity and exiled to Babylon.  The fate they suffered was well deserved.  Generations had rejected the Lord’s covenant, had instead turned to the pagan gods worshipped by the people in the surrounding areas.  They had profaned the temple with the worship of foreign gods and every one of their kings led them to evil upon evil.  So why would the Lord ever care about them again?  Couldn’t he just throw up his hands and say, “I’m done”?

    But he doesn’t say that.  He’s not done.  He fully intends to restore the people, gathering them from the land of the rising sun and from the land of the setting sun, that is from the east to the west, and from the beginning to the end, everywhere over all the earth, in every time and place, and gather them back to himself, restoring Israel and making Jerusalem a holy city once again.

    All of this is a metaphor for our own need for salvation, of course.  How often have we as a culture rejected God’s covenant?  How much have we as individuals sinned?  How much have our leaders led us to the worship of foreign gods, like wealth and power?  We too have found evil upon evil and have rejected our God.  We would well deserve it if he threw up his hands in our midst and said to us, “I’m done.”

    But he doesn’t say that.  He’s not done.  He fully intends to gather us from wherever we have wandered, whenever we have fallen away.  No place is beyond the reach of our God who longs to bring us back to himself.  There is no place that we can go that is beyond God’s love.  It is never too late to experience salvation.  Nothing is impossible for our God who made us for himself.

    God’s salvation is radical.

  • The Twenty-sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time: The new translation of the Creed

    The Twenty-sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time: The new translation of the Creed

    Over the next several weeks, Father Steve, our deacons, and I will be preaching about the upcoming changes to the Mass.  As you know, we will begin using a new translation of the Roman Missal beginning the first Sunday of Advent this year, which is November 27.  We’ve already begun teaching and using the newly-translated musical parts of the Mass, but we can’t begin using the new prayers until November 27.  We can, however, teach them, which is what we’re doing now.  Over the past several months, Deacon Al and I have been writing about the changes to the Missal in our bulletin columns.

    Today, Father Steve and I are both preaching about the Creed, which we proclaim as an assembly every Sunday and Solemnity.  The Creed is one of the symbols of our unity as a people.  It’s appropriate that before we come to the Altar together to receive Holy Communion, the most important manifestation of our unity, we take time to proclaim as one body what we believe to be the Truth.  And so, following the exhortations from Holy Scripture, we rise and proclaim our belief in one God, Father Son and Holy Spirit, and our belief in the Church and all that She professes to be true.

    Now, like many of the prayers that have become so familiar to us, I think we can find ourselves reciting the Creed without really thinking about it.  How often have we gotten to the end of the prayer, only to think that we don’t remember praying much of it as we went along?  I know that’s happened to me.  This is too bad, because the Creed didn’t just fall out of the sky: it was crafted over many years with many modifications and tweaks to get the language right.  Many arguments happened over the wording in ancient days, and some even gave their lives to defend the faith as professed in the Creed.  To this day, there are a few words in the Creed, with regard to the Holy Spirit, that remain a point of contention between us and the Orthodox Churches of the East.

    The full name of the Creed that we pray is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.  This is in reference to the belief that the Creed was crafted, or at least accepted by the Church Council of Nicaea in the year 325 and the Council of Constantinople in the year 381.  At these Councils, the Council Fathers attempted to finalize the wording of the Creed, which had been argued about for many years, in order to put the controversies to rest.

    So maybe it’s important enough for us to take a little more care in the way that we pray the Creed.  And rather than beat ourselves up over the way we may have prayed it in the past, maybe we can make a resolution as this new translation comes to us, to pray it more carefully, as carefully as we are able.  Toward that end, I’d like to take a little time today to look at the new translation of the Creed and point out what’s new and explain that a little bit.  So if you take out your Gather books, and open up to the front where we have the new Order of Mass inserted, I would ask you to turn to page ____.  Let’s look at the Creed there together.  I want to point out four new things in the creed.

    The first is right at the beginning.  Instead of saying, “of all that is seen and unseen,” we will be praying “of all things visible and invisible.”  So the issue here is that there is a difference between something being unseen and invisible.  Let me explain it to you this way:  you probably cannot see your house from here, so it is unseen.  But I think you’d agree that your house is certainly not invisible!  On the other hand, there certainly are some things that are invisible.  When I discussed this with the third graders last year, they came up with a list, including things like air, which is invisible, but certainly present.  What we are saying is that God created all things: seen, unseen, visible and invisible.

    The second issue is a bit tougher, because it’s a word we don’t use in other contexts.  And that comes about a quarter of the way down with the word “consubstantial.”  The words “consubstantial with the Father” replace the words “one in being with the Father.”  This wording is more in keeping with the Latin text of the Creed, and a more accurate translation.  “Consubstantial” is a translation of the Latin consubstantialem, which is a translation of the Greek word homoousion.  Think of homoousion as similar to homogenous, because that is the root word.  Basically it means “of the same substance.”  So what we’re saying is that the Father and the Son are of the same substance of each other.  That’s similar to “one in being,” but I think it goes a little deeper.  There is a sense in which all of us are “one in being” with each other, but we certainly are not of the same substance of each other, certainly not one and the same as each other.  But the Father and the Son are that closely related; they are not Father and Son in the same way as humans are, they are actually of the same substance!

    The next difference is about five lines down.  It says that Jesus “was incarnate of the Virgin Mary.”  This replaces the words saying that “he was born of the Virgin Mary…”  “Incarnate” means a little something deeper than just “born.”  It means taking flesh, being embodied in a human form.  Of course, this is what happens to our souls when we are born, but for Jesus, something deeper happened.  He wasn’t just born in a human way, he lowered himself, and became one of us.  It happened in a supernatural form of conception which was accomplished through the grace of the Holy Spirit.  His incarnation was so much more than a human birth.

    The last difference involves a word which might seem to be used in an odd sense, or in a sense we’re not used to.  That comes almost all the way down to the end, about four lines up.  It says, “I confess one baptism…” instead of “We acknowledge one baptism…”  Now when we say the word “confess,” it usually means we are about to tell the priest our sins, doesn’t it?  But the original sense of the word “confess” was something along the lines of “to give witness to.”  The profession of faith used to be called a confession of faith.  And when we “confess” in the Sacrament of Penance, we are giving witness to the goodness and mercy of God and in light of that, reflecting on how we have fallen short.  So the confession has more to do with who God is than what we have done.  So when we “confess one baptism,” we are giving witness to the fact that one baptism is enough: it binds us to Christ who in his mercy calls us to redemption and eternal life.

    So that’s what’s new in the new translation of the Creed.  One of the more obvious changes, though is that instead of saying “we believe,” we will be saying, “I believe.”  In this way, I think we can see that we are not speaking for the others around us, but with all of us speaking together, we can hear what “we believe” and can truly become one body, one spirit in Christ.

  • Monday of the Twenty-fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Twenty-fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I love the little line in the gospel reading that says, “Take care, then, how you hear.”  It almost seems like a throw-away line, but really, I believe, it’s an essential instruction from Jesus.  We disciples are to take care how we hear.  Not what we hear, although that’s probably part of it, but how we hear.

    So how do we hear the words of the gospel?  Do we hear them as something that seems nice but doesn’t really affect us?  Do those words fly over our heads or go in one ear and out the other?  Do we hear them at Mass, and then live however it is we want, seeming to ignore what we’ve just heard?

    Or, do we really hear the Word of the Lord?  Does the gospel get into our head and our heart and stir things up?  Do the words of Jesus get our blood flowing and our imaginations racing?  Does hearing the gospel make us long for a better place, a more peaceful kingdom, a just society?

    Psalm 19 says, “your words, Lord, are spirit and life.”  We believe that the Word proclaimed is the actual presence of Christ.  We are not just hearing words about Jesus, we are hearing Jesus, we are experiencing the presence of God right here, right now, among us.  If we open the door of our ears and our hearts, we might just find God doing something amazing in us and through us.

    Take care, then, how you hear.

  • Monday of the Twenty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Twenty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s gospel reading gives me the opportunity to talk a bit about the new translation of the Roman Missal.  As you may know, we will begin using that translation at Mass beginning on the first Sunday of Advent this year, November 27th.  We have already begun using the sung parts of the Mass, with permission from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.  But the recited parts have to wait until November.

    One of those recited parts is the response to the priest’s invitation to adoration just before receiving Communion.  The new translation of that prayer is this:

    Behold the Lamb of God,
    behold him who takes away the sins of the world.
    Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.
    And the people’s response, also new, is this:

    Lord, I am not worthy
    that you should enter under my roof,
    but only say the word
    and my soul shall be healed.

    I think you can see the similarity here between this prayer and the confession of faith that the centurion makes in today’s gospel reading.  He had faith that Jesus could heal his servant and did not want to even trouble Jesus to come under his roof, unworthy as he was.

    When we receive the Eucharist, we do it confessing our own unworthiness, but also professing the same faith that that centurion had.  We know that we are unworthy, but we trust in the worthiness of our Savior, who transforms us completely and makes us worthy in the sight of God.

    God is calling us to become worthy by accepting his mercy and forgiveness.  What is the word that Jesus needs to speak to us today, so that our souls can be healed?

  • Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    The Liturgy in these past summer months has been teaching us how to be disciples of Jesus.  Today, the readings give us another tool for the disciple, and that tool is forgiveness.  These readings come on the heels of what we heard last week, which was about the way the Christian disciple resolves conflict.  Forgiveness is the natural conclusion to that discussion.

    In the Gospel, Peter wants the Lord to spell out the rule of thumb: how often must we forgive another person who has wronged us?  Peter offers what he thinks is magnanimous: seven times.  Seven times is a lot of forgiveness.  It was more than the law required, so Peter felt like he was catching on to what Jesus required in living the Gospel.  But that’s not what Jesus was going for: he wanted a much more forgiving heart from his disciples: not seven times, but seventy-seven times!  Even if we take that number literally, which we shouldn’t, that’s more forgiveness than we can begin to imagine.  But the number here is just to represent something bigger than ourselves: constant forgiveness.

    The parable that Jesus tells to illustrate the story is filled with interesting little details.  The servant in the story owes the master a huge amount of money.  Think of the biggest sum you can imagine someone adding and add a couple of zeroes to the end of it.  It’s that big.  He will never repay the master, no matter what efforts he puts forth.  So the master would be just in having him and everything he owned and everyone he cared about sold.  It still wouldn’t repay the debt, but it would be more than he would otherwise get.  But the servant pleads for mercy, and the master gives it.  In fact, he does more than he’s asked to do: he doesn’t just give the servant more time to pay, he forgives the entire loan!  That’s incredible mercy!

    On the way home, however, the servant encounters another servant who owes him a much smaller sum than he owed the master – like ten or twenty bucks.  But the servant has not learned to forgive as he has been forgiven: he hands the fellow servant over to be put into debtor’s prison until he can repay the loan.  But that in itself is a humorous little detail.  In prison, how is he going to repay the loan?  He can’t work, right?  So basically the fellow servant is condemned for the rest of his life.

    We don’t have to do a lot of math or theological thinking to see the injustice here.  The servant has been forgiven something he could never repay, no matter how much time he lived.  But he was unwilling to give that same forgiveness to his fellow servant; he was unwilling to give him even a little more time to repay the loan, which the other servant certainly could have done.  That kind of injustice is something that allows a person to condemn him or herself for the rest of eternity.  The disciple is expected to learn to forgive and is expected to forgive as he or she has been forgiven.  “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  We can’t just say that all the time; we actually have to do it.

    At this point, I could diverge a few different ways.  We could talk about sin, salvation and eternity.  But I think, given what today is, I’ll just stay a little basic.  Let’s stick with the theme that presents itself: forgiveness and our ability to forgive, be it once or seven times, or seventy-seven times.

    This call to a kind of heroic forgiveness takes on a new meaning today, the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks against our nation on September 11, 2001.  Rest assured, these readings were not “chosen” in some way for this day: we use a three-year cycle of readings and so these readings just so happened to come up today.  But I wonder, of course, if God didn’t give us these readings for today on purpose.  I think maybe we are being invited to be more forgiving, even considering the huge debt that is owed to us, in terms of the wrong that was done to us.

    I don’t think anyone would say our world is significantly more forgiving today than it was ten years ago.  We still have conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in many other places.  In fact, I’ve read that as many as a third of the nations of the world are currently involved in some sort of conflict.  In fact, a military response to what happened to us ten years ago may be what justice demands.  And we owe a great debt to those who are fighting to keep our nation safe.  But I don’t think we can stop with that.  We will never find the ultimate answer to terrorism and injustice in human endeavor.  We have to reach for something of more divine origin, and that something, I think, is the forgiveness that Jesus calls us to in today’s gospel.

    And it starts with us.  We have been forgiven so much by God.  So how willing have we then been to forgive others?  Our reflection today might take us to the people or institutions that have wronged us in some way.  Can we forgive them?  Can we at least ask God for the grace to be forgiving?  I always tell people that forgiveness is a journey.  We might not be ready to forgive right now, but we can ask for the grace to be ready.  Jesus didn’t say it would be easy, did he?

    Because every time we forgive someone, every time we let go of an injustice that has been done to us, the world is that much more peaceful.  We may well always have war and the threat of terrorism with us.  But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.  That doesn’t mean we have to participate in it.  If we choose to forgive others, maybe our own corner of the world can be more just, more merciful.  And if we all did that, think of how our world could be significantly changed.

    In 2008, Pope Benedict visited the site of Ground Zero in New York.  This was the prayer he prayed there:

    O God of love, compassion, and healing,
    look on us, people of many different faiths and traditions,
    who gather today at this site,
    the scene of incredible violence and pain….

    God of understanding,
    overwhelmed by the magnitude of this tragedy,
    we seek your light and guidance
    as we confront such terrible events.
    Grant that those whose lives were spared
    may live so that the lives lost here
    may not have been lost in vain.
    Comfort and console us,
    strengthen us in hope,
    and give us the wisdom and courage
    to work tirelessly for a world
    where true peace and love reign
    among nations and in the hearts of all.

  • The Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today again, we see Saint Peter sinking into the waves after walking on the water.  Just last week, Peter eloquently professed his faith.  After Jesus asking who they said he was, Peter replies, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  But just a few short verses later, in today’s Gospel, he rebukes Jesus for talking about his impending demise.  He has once again taken his eyes off of Jesus and gotten too caught up in the storm.  “Get behind me, Satan,” Jesus says to him, “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

    Which is what Saint Paul is warning the Romans, and us, to avoid in today’s second reading: “Do not conform yourselves to this age,” he writes, “but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.”  So I think the challenge for us today is one of renewing our minds so that we can know and participate in God’s will.

    This is not something, I am convinced, that we do once and for all.  Because we are often tempted, as Peter was, to look somewhere else than at God’s will.  There are plenty of distractions out there: bad television, impure relationships, and so much more.  We have to constantly be on guard against these temptations, as Jesus was.  When Peter tempted him to forget about the cross, Jesus reminded him that we have to think as God does, not as human beings do.

    Learning to think this way takes some work.  It takes prayer, it takes discernment, it takes getting advice from wise and trusted people, it takes a complete openness to God’s will.  The question for us is always this: are we thinking as God does, or as human beings do?

    What would it look like if all of our decisions in life were evaluated in this way?  What would our workplaces be like?  What would our schools and communities be like?  What would our homes and families be like?  Part of our reflection on these wonderful readings might be to do a little “holy dreaming” as to how this would play out in our lives, and what might be accomplished if we did it.  That kind of “holy dreaming” is a great part of a vibrant prayer life.

    The Psalmist sums it all up for us in his prayer: “My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord, my God.”  During this week, may we all drink deeply of the well that is God’s life.

  • Friday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    So today we have a Pharisee who is a scholar of the law engaging Jesus in conversation.  I think it’s important for us to know that this scholar wasn’t really interested in Jesus’ point of view, he didn’t expect to learn anything from Jesus.  Instead he was looking for Jesus to say something incongruent with their way of thinking so that they could brand him as a heretic and get rid of him.  That’s what the Pharisees did in those days.

    But Jesus knows that.  So what he gives this scholar, and all those who were listening in, was a very fair summary of the law and the prophets: love God and neighbor.  And he does it in a way that is familiar to them.  He quotes one of their most famous rules of life: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  Every Jew memorized that as the greatest and first commandment, so his addition of loving neighbor wasn’t going that far beyond what they had been taught.  And now they have nothing to say to him.

    But what is important here is that these words are for us.  All of our life needs to be centered around love.  If love is what summed up the law and the prophets, it is certainly what sums up the Gospel.  We too are called to love God who loved us first and loves us best.  We too are called to put that love into action by loving others, every person we come in contact with.  Some are easy to love, others not so much.  But we are called to love them anyway.

    How will we love others today?

  • Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time [A]

    Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time [A]

    Today’s readings

    Today’s readings are challenging ones for us.  Certainly we hear a challenge to be welcoming: God’s house is a house of prayer for all peoples, Isaiah tells us.  But I don’t think these readings are just a spot check of our desire to be a welcoming community.  Instead, I think the readings go a little deeper.  And I refer especially to the Gospel.  In that story, it wasn’t really all about whether or not Jesus was welcoming; it was about the Canaanite woman’s faith.  This is what I think Jesus wants us to reflect on in today’s Liturgy of the Word.

    As we have been reading from Matthew’s Gospel this year, we have seen various levels of faith: “lacking faith” as seen in the Jewish community, most particularly in the Pharisees and Sadducees, “little faith” as seen in the disciples, and particularly in the Twelve, and “great faith” as seen in surprising places, like in the Canaanite woman today. We’re all on different places in our faith life, and I think today’s Scriptures give us time for a quick summer check-up to see where we are in that spectrum.

    Throughout our Gospel readings this past year, Jesus has run up against the religious leaders and even some of the Jewish people, those he was sent to save first, and found them seriously lacking in faith.  They have heard him preach and seen his mighty deeds just like everyone else, but could not square it with what they believed, so they refused to believe in him.  They thought he words were scandalous and his wondrous deeds were black magic.  It’s almost as if they wouldn’t recognize a miracle if one came up and bit them in the … behind.

    We have also seen Peter’s faith on display.  He is kind of the spokesman for the rest of the disciples, often putting into words what they may have been too chicken to express.  In last weekend’s Gospel, Peter was able to walk on the water when he had his eyes fixed on Jesus, but began to sink when he looked at the storm-tossed waves. Jesus pulled him out of the waves, saying “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”  The disciples are those men of little faith, who were with him all the time, but often missing the point.  And Jesus often seems to be frustrated with their little faith and slow understanding.

    In today’s Gospel, though, we have “great faith” and from a surprising source.  The woman is a Canaanite, a member of the race of people who lived in the Promised Land until God gave it over to the Jews.  She is an outsider, who risked her life to cross into enemy territory.  She knows enough to give her daughter’s situation to Jesus.  And she is persistent enough to keep asking even though she is initially rebuffed.  The disciples find her so irritating, they want Jesus to send her away.  But he recognizes in her what he has been thirsting to find all along: great faith.  And with that great faith, she was able to return to her daughter, freed from the demon, healed from the inside out.

    So we have been able to see in Matthew’s Gospel over these past months, the range of faith.  From the lack of faith of the Jews and religious leaders of the time, to the little, almost fledgling faith of the disciples, to the surprisingly great faith of the Canaanite woman.  This begs the question in us, I think, of where we are in the journey of faith.  Have we yet to begin, or worse, have we chosen not to begin?  Do we hope our mere physical presence at Mass will be good enough?  Do we hear the word of God but refuse to let it sink in, to travel from our brain into our hearts?  Have we heard the Gospel but been very lax about living it?  Do we come to Mass only to leave this holy place and become a very different person in the parking lot, or in our homes, businesses and schools in the week ahead?  Do we find ourselves as lacking in faith as the Pharisees and Sadducees?

    Or are we tentative in our faith?  Are we among those who want to believe, but are afraid to take a leap of faith, afraid to walk on that choppy water?  Are we discouraged by what seems to be a lack of response to our prayers?  Are we angry with God because of something that happened – or didn’t happen – in the past?  Do we think it’s okay to miss Mass because we have other things to do?  Have we not gone to confession in a long time because we think our sins are too big, or because we think we don’t really sin that much?  Are we hesitant to pray about something because we think it’s too big for God to handle, or too little to bother him about?  Have we been looking for excuses to avoid something we know is God’s call in our life?  Have we been of “little faith?”

    Maybe we have found ourselves in one or the other of those places in the faith journey at different points in our lives.  I know I have.  But maybe too – I hope – we have found ourselves on more solid faithful ground.  Maybe we have taken a leap of faith and found ourselves blessed beyond our wildest imaginings.  Maybe we have answered God’s call and found grace to do the things we never thought we could.  Maybe we have given a problem or situation over to God and found out that in God’s time, healing came in unexpected ways.  Maybe we have been surprised by our faith from time to time and heard God say, “Great is your faith!”

    Like I said, I think many of us are in all of these places at different times of our lives.  And that’s okay as long as we make a little progress all the time, as long as we eventually find our faith taking us places we never thought we would go.  The life of faith is full of surprises, most of them good, some of them challenging or possibly even disheartening.  But when we approach it all in faith, all of it will work out for good in God’s own time.  When we give our lives to God, when we take the leap we know God is calling us to take, when we get out of our boat, we might just find ourselves walking on water, or feeding thousands, blessing others and sometimes saying just the thing someone else needs to hear.  All of this is God working through us, of course, all of it is because we have trusted God in some significant way.  In those moments, may we hear what Jesus said to the Canaanite woman: “Great is your faith!”

  • The Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time [A]

    The Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time [A]

    Todays’ readings

    I think that today’s readings are readings that call us to hope.  The hope that we have is the presence of our God, even when things are falling apart – even when the wind and the rain and the earthquakes and fire threaten us, God is there.  I thought of that a lot this week.  A former parishioner’s house burned down after it was struck by lightening in one of the freakish storms we’ve been having.  A parishioner’s brother died saving a young man from drowning.  I visited one of my own relatives in the hospital today, and she was so agitated, so afraid she might die.  Even the most faithful among us has to ask, where is God in all this?

    I think Elijah can relate to us when we’re feeling this way.  The back story on our first reading is that Elijah has just come from soundly defeating all of the pagan “prophets” of Baal, which was very embarrassing to King Ahab and especially to Queen Jezebel, who vowed to take Elijah’s life in retaliation.  So he has been hiding out in a cave, not for protection from inclement weather, but for protection from those who sought his life.  In the midst of this, God asks Elijah why he is here.  Elijah explains that the people of Israel have been unfaithful and have turned away from God, not listening to Elijah’s preaching, and they have put all the other legitimate prophets to death.  Elijah alone is left.

    So God says that he will be “passing by” which in biblical language means that God will be doing a “God thing.”  God will be revealing his presence.  And so we have the story: there is a mighty wind, an earthquake and even fire.  But Elijah only recognizes the Lord’s presence in the tiny whispering sound.  The text says that the Lord was not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire.  I’m not sure I agree with that.  I do think that God is with us even in calamity, but wherever we experience his presence is where he is for us.  For Elijah, he needed the peace of the tiny whisper.  But we might need reassurance in the earthquake or the fire.

    Our gospel reading today I think proves that God is where we need him.  Jesus has just fed the multitudes, as you may remember from last week’s gospel.  After that, he takes some time alone to pray, and is so filled with the Spirit that he actually walks on water.  Again, here is Jesus “passing by” the disciples on the boat.  He reassures them that it is him, and Peter, the impetuous one, immediately asks if he can come out and walk on the water too.  Jesus says, “come.”

    For a while, he does okay. He’s making progress, walking toward Jesus. But then he stops looking at Jesus and starts looking at the storm: “But when he saw how strong the wind was he became frightened; and, beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’” Do you see that? While he’s looking at Jesus, he is able to walk toward him, but as soon as he takes his eyes off Jesus in favor of looking at the storm, he sinks. “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” Jesus asks him, pulling Peter out of the water.

    So we might be tempted to criticize Peter for his lack of faith.  But we should remember that he, at least, had enough faith to get out of the boat.  The other eleven did not.  He got out of the boat because that’s where Jesus was – out there on the water.  Was Jesus present for him when the wind and the waves threatened to take his life?  Absolutely.  God is present for us when we are in the middle of the storm.

    Let’s try a little prayer experiment.  I’m going to ask you to close your eyes, but you have to promise not to fall asleep!  I want you to think about a crisis you’ve been in recently, or even one that’s still going on.  It might be little or big, but bring that to mind.  That crisis is the waves in the story.  Now you get to be Peter.  You’re on the boat, that safe refuge that is leading you to the place that Jesus has in mind for you.  Only on the voyage, your crisis begins a storm that tosses you around so badly that you can’t even see your destination anymore, and you fear for your life.  But you see Jesus on the water.

    You call out to him and he calls back for you to come to him.  You think about it for a minute, but you realize you have to give it a shot.  So you get out of the boat, that safe refuge that gives you some comfort even in the storm, and you start to walk toward Jesus across the stormy sea.  And you do okay for a while, but then you wonder if your prayers will ever be answered, or if there is any hope for your situation at all.  You feel the wind pushing at you and notice that the waves of your crisis are a lot uglier than you thought they were.  And you begin to sink into them, despairing that there is no hope for your situation.  And Jesus reaches out his hand to you, pulling you up out of the stormy sea.  The storm is still raging, but with Jesus’ help, you get back into the boat, and the waves calm down, and you continue the journey to the place where Jesus wants you to be, having made just a little bit of progress, confident that he is with you even in the storm.

    Whether we are experiencing wind, waves, earthquakes or fire, we can be confident that our Lord is with us.  We might still have to experience all those things, but we can go through them with hope that comes from the presence of our God, who is with us in our darkest times, whispering to us, or calling out to us from the water.