Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: The Church Year

  • St. Nicholas, Bishop

    St. Nicholas, Bishop

    Today’s readings

    nicholasWell, did you all put your shoes outside your door for St. Nicholas to fill? I was going to do that, but I have such big feet, I didn’t want Fr. Ted to trip over them and fall down the stairs! St. Nicholas day was never a big feast in my family, but I had a friend in seminary who used to dress up as St. Nicholas and give candy canes to everyone in the refectory at lunch. Now that took guts! Especially when he brought one to the Rector of the seminary who informed him that impersonating a bishop could disqualify one from receiving Holy Orders!

    But I have to admit that the legend of St. Nicholas – and that’s pretty much all we have is a legend, by the way – is compelling in a romantic sort of way. And just because it’s a legend doesn’t mean there isn’t truth to be found in it. One of the great stories about St. Nicholas is that he once helped a poor man who was unable to provide dowries for his three daughters. St. Nicholas helped him by tossing a bag of gold through the man’s window on three different occasions, enabling the man not to give his daughters up to prostitution to provide the dowry. St. Nicholas’s generosity was thus legendary, and evolved into the belief about Santa Claus, which itself is a turn of the Dutch name for St. Nicholas.

    Today’s Gospel encourages us to build our spiritual houses on the rock foundation of Jesus Christ. Those who hear the word and act on it, Jesus tells us, will enter the kingdom of heaven. The obligation of generosity and compassion to others was one that Jesus proclaimed with his very life, and one that he expects his followers to embrace. On this St. Nicholas day, it might be beautiful to reach out in hope and generosity to someone who least expects it. Because that’s just the way our Lord reaches out to us.

  • Wednesday of the First Week of Advent

    Wednesday of the First Week of Advent

    Today's readings

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

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

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

  • O Come, Divine Messiah

    O Come, Divine Messiah

    One of my favorite Advent carols.

  • First Sunday of Advent

    First Sunday of Advent

    Today’s readings

    advent1“He will come in glory to judge the living and the dead.” Does that sound familiar? Of course it does; it is from the first part of the Creed. Of that beautiful phrase, Pope Benedict says, “From the earliest times, the prospect of the Judgment has influenced Christians in their daily living as a criterion by which to order their present life, as a summons to their conscience, and at the same time as hope in God’s justice” (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 41). This is a case of an important principle of theology, lex orandi, lex credendi-that is, the law of prayer is the law of belief-more or less, my Latin is not all that great! Basically it means that when we pray week after week, “He will come in glory to judge the living and the dead,” that’s exactly what we believe. We believe in a time that Christ will come in judgment to bring to light all those things that have been in darkness, to right every wrong, and, as the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer taught us just last week, to usher in “a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Veni, Veni Emmanuel

    Veni, Veni Emmanuel

    Happy New Year. New year of grace, of course…

  • St. Andrew the Apostle

    St. Andrew the Apostle

    Today's readings | Today's saint
    [Mass for the school children.]

    Today we celebrate the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle.  Is anyone here named Andrew?  If so, this is your special feast day.  But it is also a feast day for all of us Christians because we are all called to do the same kinds of things that St. Andrew did in his life.

    The story we just heard about St. Andrew from the Gospel today is just one of the stories we have about him.  In another Gospel, St. Andrew is said to be a follower of St. John the Baptist.  One day, as Jesus was passing by, St. John the Baptist pointed Jesus out and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!”  Because of that, St. Andrew was interested in Jesus and, along with another of John’s disciples, went and followed Jesus.  When they caught up with him, Jesus said to them, “What are you looking for?”  Andrew said to him, “Master, where are you staying?”  Then Jesus said to them, “Come and see.”  So they went with him and stayed with him that day.

    The next day, Andrew went and got his brother St. Peter and told him all about Jesus.  St. Peter was interested in Jesus too, and Andrew introduced Peter to Jesus.  That’s how St. Peter, who was a great Apostle for Jesus, came to know Jesus in the first place.  It was because his brother St. Andrew introduced them.  Later, Peter and Andrew both came to be Apostles of Jesus as we hear in today’s Gospel story.

    How many of you have brothers or sisters (or both)?  Today St. Andrew’s life tells us how we should be with our brothers and sisters.  St. Andrew loved his brother Peter, and knew that Peter would want to know all about Jesus.  So Andrew brought him to see Jesus and a very special friendship was born.  That sounds nice, but it’s important to know that you too should bring your brothers, or sisters, or friends to see Jesus.

    How can you do that?  Well, Jesus isn’t walking around today, so it’s not like we can physically introduce someone to Jesus.  But we can bring them to Jesus by bringing them here for Sunday Mass, or by spending time with them, or by standing up for them if someone is picking on them or bullying them, or by helping them if they are having a problem with their school work, or by cheering for them when they’ve done something good, or lots of other ways.  Every time you let other people see Jesus working in you to do good things, you are bringing them to see Jesus.

    St. Andrew was an Apostle of Jesus.  He did his work by preaching the Gospel and introducing people to Jesus.  You can do the very same thing if you let other people see Jesus working in you.  You can sure let everyone know who Jesus is by saying “Come and see” and letting them know that Jesus works in your life every day.

     

  • Wednesday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Wednesday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Two are being asked to speak on behalf of their faith today. The first is Daniel, who was asked by King Belshazzar to interpret the handwriting on the wall. (You’ve heard that expression “I can read the writing on the wall” … well this is where that expression comes from.) Daniel doesn’t have good news for the king. In fact, the news is so bad that the other wise people the king called on first were either unable or unwilling to interpret it or say it out loud to the king. No one wants to be the bearer of bad tidings, but Daniel knew what he had to say and did so with courage, rejecting the king’s offer of great gifts in the process.

    The second one to be asked to speak on behalf of their faith today is you. Well, us, really. In today’s Gospel, we are told very clearly that we are going to have to give testimony before both the rich and the powerful, and those who know us. We’re not going to have terribly good news to give them, well, it is Good News, but not the kind of news they are going to want to hear. We will indeed be hated for the news we must bring, but we dare not think of clever ways to couch our words or turn a phrase to avoid that hatred. The Holy Spirit will tell us what we must say when we must say it, and we are called upon to trust that.

    And, really, this kind of thing is not exactly first nature to us. How often do we avoid the discussion of religion with social contacts so that we will not give offense? Witnessing to our faith with our words can be extremely difficult, so much so that we might even miss the opportunity to speak against something that is clearly wrong. Today’s readings tell us that the disciple doesn’t have that option. We must speak the truth in love, according to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, when the time arrives. That’s the only way to save our life for eternity.

  • Monday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    You know, every time we hear this story about the widow’s mite, the story is equated with the call to stewardship. That’s the classic explanation of the text. And there’s nothing wrong with that explanation. I might even go so far as to preach it that way myself on occasion. But honestly, I don’t think the story about the widow’s mite is about stewardship at all. Yes, it’s about treasure and giving and all of that. But what kind of treasure? Giving what?

    I think to get the accurate picture of what’s going on here, we have to ask why the Church would give us this little vignette at the end of the Church year, in the very last week of Ordinary Time. That’s the question I found myself asking when I looked at today’s readings. Well, first of all, it’s near the end of Luke’s Gospel so that may have something to do with it. But I think there’s a reason Luke put it at the end also. I mean, in the very next chapter we are going to be led into Christ’s passion and death, so why pause this late in the game to talk about charitable giving?

    Obviously, the widow’s mite means something else than giving of one’s earthly wealth. Here at the end of the Church year, we are being invited to look back on our lives this past year and see what we have given. How much of ourselves have we poured out for the life of faith? What have we given of ourselves in service? What has our prayer life been like? Have we trusted Jesus to forgive our sins by approaching the Sacrament of Penance? Have we resolved to walk with Christ in good times and in bad? In short, have we poured out everything we have, every last cent, every widow’s mite, for our life with Christ? Or have we held something back, giving merely of our surplus wealth?

    In this last week of the Church year, we have to hear the widow telling us that there is something worth giving everything for, and that something is our relationship with Christ.

  • Our Lord Jesus Christ the King

    Our Lord Jesus Christ the King

    Today’s readings

    ChristTheKingI have to admit that this solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King is a funny feast with which to end our Church year. First of all, we Americans don’t get the whole king thing. The monarchical top-down method of government is not what we have had as our heritage for over two centuries, so the idea of kingship is pretty foreign to us. Secondly, and I’m speaking objectively here, even if we had a king, the king we are presented with in the Liturgy of the Word today, and over the last couple of Sundays has not really been the kind of king we might want to follow. Over the last couple of Sundays, Jesus has warned us that we will have suffering in the world, so we know we cannot rely on our king to make that suffering go away. And today, here is our king, hanging on a cross between two hardened criminals. That one of them thinks to ask Jesus to remember him when he comes into his kingdom is almost laughable, but, well, there it is. There is our king. This feast leaves us on the very last Sunday of the Church year with more questions than it can ever possibly answer.

    But only if we’ve been napping this entire liturgical year. Because Jesus has been very clear from the beginning as to what kind of king he would be and what his kingdom might look like.

    A king who has been pre-ordained from birth would arrive with great fanfare and be born amidst opulence. But to the casual observer that wasn’t true of Jesus. Oh, we know that he was foretold by an angel and that kings bowed down to worship him and shower him with gifts. We know all the prophecies that pointed to his birth. We know of Herod’s jealousy that led to the slaughter of the innocents. We know that stuff. But to the average person in first century Palestine, well, his birth went pretty much unnoticed.

    And even when people started noticing his ministry when he came of age, they were pretty disappointed. “Who do you say that I am?” is the question Jesus asks Peter. Peter acknowledges that he is the anointed one, the Christ. But right on the heels of that very revelation, Jesus emphasizes that the Anointed One must suffer and die in order to bring his kingship to birth. Peter’s reaction is predictable. Oh no, Lord, that can’t be right. Don’t even say such a thing! But Jesus is the one who came not to be served but to serve, and identifies himself right from the beginning as the Suffering Servant of which Isaiah speaks.

    This wasn’t the kind of thing the Jews were expecting, of course. They had long been expecting an Anointed One, but never one like this. Their whole picture of a Messiah had been one of political greatness and military strength, one who would restore the sovereignty of Israel and reestablish Jerusalem as the great political and religious city that it had once been. That was the Messiah they were looking for, but what they got was one who was so much of a suffering servant that he ended up on a cross. Pilate’s inscription, “This is the king of the Jews” was sarcastic and completely offensive to them, which of course is exactly what he intended.

    So it’s easy to see why the Jews might not have noticed that this one was their king. It’s easy enough to even see why they would have chosen to ignore his kingship. But we can’t miss it: we have heard the Word proclaimed all year long and we know that this is the way that God chose to save the world. There are times, of course, when we could do with a bit more opulence and certainly a lot less suffering. But Jesus is the king of our reality, not of our fantasy, and so he is not ashamed to herald the cross as the gateway to the kingdom and the instrument of our salvation.

    Because we are a people who need a king like this. We might want a king to give us greatness and rest from our enemies, but that’s not real. What’s real is our suffering, whether it’s illness, or grief, or job dissatisfaction, or personal troubles, or family strife, or broken relationships, or any other calamity. Suffering happens, and that’s why Jesus chose the image of the Suffering Servant as the motif of his kingship. St. Paul says today in our second reading from his letter to the Colossians that “in him all things hold together.” Even when the world seems to be falling apart for us, we can trust in the Suffering Servant to walk with us and hold everything together.

    And he holds it all together with a strength we could not possibly imagine, opening the way to a kingdom that goes beyond all our imaginings. I want you to listen very closely to the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer today because it describes a kingdom we all have to be hungry for: “a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.” That’s a kingdom of mind-boggling greatness, brothers and sisters in Christ, a kingdom no other ruler could ever hope to promise you.

    On our baptism day, we were anointed with the sacred Chrism oil, an oil that has almost the same name as Christ, which means “Anointed One.” If you’ve been to a baptism or Confirmation recently, you’ll know that the Chrism oil is the only one of the three holy oils to have a fragrance, because it is intended to be the fragrance of Christ. Just as Christ himself was anointed priest, prophet and king, so we too were anointed in that same way. What this means for us today is that just as Christ had to suffer, so we too will have to suffer in this life. But just as Christ was intended for the glory of the Kingdom, so we too have that same destiny, if we but join our lives to his and follow his way.

    That means, of course, we have to go down the ugly way, through the gateway of the cross. In this Kingdom there is no glory without passing through the way of suffering. There is no cheap and easy grace. But there is grace, a grace that walks with us through the hard times and leads us to the joy of the kingdom of truth and life, the kingdom of holiness and grace, the kingdom of justice, love and peace. Our home here on earth is but a temporary dwelling. Our true home is in that kingdom.

    The religious leaders in Jesus day never figured this out. They couldn’t, or perhaps wouldn’t fathom it. But the good thief realized all of this at the very last minute, practically as he was taking his dying breath. His last words of prayer might be our very own words today. “Jesus remember me,” he says, “when you come into your kingdom.”

  • Friday of the Twenty-third Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twenty-third Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Well, with Thanksgiving yesterday, we’ve taken a bit of a break from the readings we have had all week from the book of Maccabees. Today we rejoin the story but it seems things are quite different. On Monday, we heard about King Antiochus Epiphanes and his repulsive plan to blot out the Jewish way of life, with all of its traditions and laws, and with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in favor of making alliance with the Gentiles and observing their base way of life and worshiping their many gods. On Tuesday and Wednesday, upright Jews are choosing death rather than give in to the demands that they eat pork and offer sacrifice to these gods. And today, there is great rejoicing. So what have we missed?

    What we missed was Thursday’s story about Mattathias and his sons, brave men who were filled with zeal for the law and for God. They put to death those who gave in to the demands of the Gentiles and they waged war on their oppressors. They were so successful that Judas and his brothers are able to celebrate victory today. Today, right on the heels of Thanksgiving, we see a thanksgiving celebration of another kind.

    All week long, the message we were getting was that there is something more. Maybe eating a little pork, or tossing a few grains of incense on a coal in worship of an alien god would save one’s life, but upright Jews like Eleazar, and the Maccabean brothers insisted that that life was not a life worth living. The something more to life is our relationship with God, and living without God is not really living at all. Living without God divorces us from who we are and forces us to live in a vacuum.

    Today we can celebrate that our identity as children of God is worth fighting for, or even dying for. We give thanks with Judas and his brothers that God has called us to be his children, that he will not abandon us, and that he gives us the grace not to abandon him and abandon who we are. God is faithful and sovereign and if we persevere, we can rededicate the Temple of our lives to the God who made us and gave us life.