Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Prayer

  • The Ascension of the Lord

    The Ascension of the Lord

    Today’s readings

    Can you imagine what was going through the disciples’ minds as they stood there watching the Ascension of the Lord?  Think about all that they’ve been through.  Three years following this Jesus whose words were compelling and whose miracles were amazing and whose way of life was uplifting.  But still, there was something about him that they just never seemed to get.  He said he was the Christ, the Anointed One, and so their strong cultural definition of the Messiah was something they projected onto Jesus, but time after time it just never fit.  Then he gets arrested, tried in a farce of a proceeding, put to death like a common criminal and buried for three days.  After that, he is no longer in the tomb, but has risen from the dead and appeared to them many times.  Now they’re gathered forty days later, and he promises the gift of the Holy Spirit.  They breathlessly ask the question that has always been on their minds, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”  They still don’t get it.

    And so Jesus promises them the Holy Spirit again, and ascends into the sky.  Can you imagine it?  It’s like a roller coaster of emotions for them.  Their heads had to be spinning, they had to be completely lost as to what to do now.  First he was dead and buried, then he came back, and now he’s gone again.  What on earth are they to do now?  Well, the two mysterious men dressed in white garments have all the advice they’re going to get: “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky?  This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”

    Which only leaves a whole lot more questions, and their basic questions still unanswered.  When will he return?  When will he restore the kingdom?  What is it the Holy Spirit is going to do for them?  Well, soon enough they find out, of course, and we’ll talk about that next week.  For now, it’s enough for us to see what this feast of the Ascension means for us.  I think it makes three points that we must be ready to fold into our faith life.

    First, Christ promises us that he will be with us always.  And that’s just what Jesus says to the disciples – and to us! – in the very last words of the very last verse of the very last chapter of Matthew’s Gospel: “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”  With that, of course, he ascends out of their sight, and so that must have been a confusing promise for the disciples to hear – at least right now.  But this is such an essential point of faith for us to get.  Just as the first disciples continued to know Christ’s presence in their gathering, in their worshipping, and in their serving, so we continue to know Christ’s presence in those same ways.

    We believe that Christ is present whenever we gather in his name.  He said as much to us in another place: “Wherever two or more are gathered in my name, I am there in their midst.” (Matthew 18:20)  We reverence the presence of Christ in one another and can feel him present among us as we pray.  The whole reason we gather is because Christ is present when we gather.

    We believe that Christ is present when we worship.  The Word of God, as it is proclaimed in the Church, is not just a nice story or an interesting precept for life.  We believe that God is present in the very proclaiming of the Word itself.  And so at times we may hear the Scriptures and experience a stirring in our heart that leads us to a new way of thinking or acting.  This is because Christ is present – in a sacramental way – in the proclamation of the Word.  And the Sacraments themselves make Christ present when we celebrate them in worship, and we experience that in a special way when we celebrate the Eucharist and receive the body and blood of our Lord in Communion.  Christ is present to us when we worship.

    We believe that Christ is present when we serve.  Deep down, we know that the really great things we do are never the result of our own efforts alone.  It’s the Holy Spirit who has prompted us to act or serve or move or speak in certain way.  That same Spirit gives us strength and talent and ability and energy we would never know on our own.  When we serve authentically, aware of the presence of the Holy Spirit, we know that Christ is present.  So it’s not us feeding the hungry, it’s Christ.  It’s not us proclaiming the Word, it’s Christ.  It’s not us teaching a religious education class, it’s Christ.  It’s not us doing any of this, it’s always Christ, whose hands and feet and lips we have become by the virtue of our baptism.  Christ is present when we serve in his name.

    Jesus promised to be with us always, and through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit among us, we find him present in our gathering, in our worshipping, and in our serving.  Jesus is with us in our ordinary and extraordinary moments.  Jesus is present in us just as surely as is the breath of life.  And today he promises that that presence will never end, that he will be with us to the end of time.

    The second application of the Ascension to our lives is that Jesus has gone to heaven to prepare a place for us.  Now, clearly he wasn’t returning to heaven to put a fresh coat of paint on the walls or polish the gold-covered streets.  He goes to heaven to pave the way, because we had lost the way, affected as we all are by original sin and by the sins of our life.  Since we did not know the way, he prepares it for us: opening the door, so to speak, and greeting us.  So we believers who have forged a relationship with our Lord can now look to him to see how to get to that heavenly reward.  All we have to do is follow, and we will find ourselves in that place God intended for us from the beginning.

    And the third application of this feast in our lives is that the Christian Mission has been entrusted to our hands.  Christ has ascended into heaven, he has returned to the Father.  So on this feast of the Ascension of the Lord, we can be like the disciples, standing there staring blankly into the heavens, or we can start to live our lives with the expectation of the Lord’s return, as the disciples were told by the two men dressed in white.  Now it’s time for us to take up the Cross, to preach the Word in our words and actions, and to witness to the joy of Christ’s presence among us.  If people are ever going to come to know Christ, if they are ever going to be challenged to grow in their faith, if they are ever going to know that there is something greater than themselves, most likely they’re going to come to know all of that in us.  We have to be transparent in our living so that people won’t be caught up on us, but will come through us to see Jesus, to see the Father, to experience the Spirit.  We are the ones commanded to “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…” As Cardinal George is fond of saying, the Church does not have a mission … the mission has a Church, and we the Church have to take up that mission and run with it.  It is entrusted to us now.

    And so today, in the words of the Psalmist, God mounts his throne to shouts of joy.  We are joyous in living our life as Christians, assured of God’s abiding presence until the end of time, looking forward to our heavenly reward, and living the mission for all to see.  A blare of trumpets for the Lord!

     

  • Sixth Sunday of Easter [A]

    Sixth Sunday of Easter [A]

    Today’s readings

    I have been wanting to preach about hope for a while now.  There are a couple of reasons for that.  First, I don’t think we know what hope is, or at least, I don’t think we think much about what hope is.  The world, our society, gives us an idea of what hope is, and of course, it’s not the right idea, not the complete idea.  And second, I think there is a general lack of hope in the world right now: I think this world could use some hope, and the ironic thing is that it’s there for the taking, if we know what it is and where to look.  So it’s fortunate that our scriptures today give us a look at hope, and tell us where we can find it and what we must do with it.

    So the dictionary defines “hope” as “the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best.”  And I think that’s a good place to start.  When we commonly refer to “hope,” we usually mean something like: “I hope it will be sunny today” or “I hope I get that promotion I applied for.”  When we say those things, there’s often a certain tone of uncertainty, which implies that the hope isn’t real hope, or that there’s no hope, but we’re just waiting for a lucky break.

    Real hope doesn’t have that sort of uncertainty.  Real hope means that we want something, and we know it can be attained or realized.  It means that we know there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and no, it’s not the headlight of an oncoming train!  Real hope implies a sense of certainty, even amidst seemingly overwhelming odds.

    And so, I think a lot of people might agree that we don’t have much hope in the world today.  Just tune in to the news to see that in action: wars, skirmishes and unrest in many parts of the world; bizarre weather and killer tornadoes in many places of our country this spring; cataclysmic natural disasters over the past few years that have left whole countries reeling.  Closer to home, we could cite high unemployment, rising prices on everything from gas to food, foreclosures on homes and failures of businesses, and so much more.  It doesn’t take much looking around to feel like there’s no hope of hope anywhere.

    So the problem, I think, is in what or where that we place our hope.  Often we place our hope in ourselves or our own efforts, only to find ourselves at some point over our heads.  Or maybe we place our hope in other people in our lives, only at some point to be disappointed.  We sometimes place our hope in Oprah or Doctor Phil or their ilk, only to find out that their pep-talks at some point ring hollow and their philosophies are shallow.  You can’t find much hope in sources like these, or if you do, you might find that hope to be short-lived.

    I think you know where I’m going to say we ought to put our hope.  Obviously, we have to hope in God, because the hope that he brings is an immovable rock that isn’t subject to the failures of human flesh and human reason.  What God teaches us in Christ provides a hope that cannot be overcome by changing fads and a desire for better television ratings.  If we want real hope, the only place we need to look, the only one we should look to, is God.

    Now, I say this, knowing full well that some of you have prayed over and over and over for something to change, only to be disappointed after you say “Amen.”  And there’s no way I’m going to tell you that all you have to do is pray and everything will work out all right.  God doesn’t promise us perfect happiness in this life, and so often we are going to go through periods of sorrow and disappointment.  That’s the unfortunate news of life in this passing world.  The sorrow and disappointment are not God’s will for us, they are by-products of sin – our own sin or the sin of others – and those things grieve God very much.

    But even in those times of grief, God still gives us hope, if we turn to him.  The hope that he offers is the knowledge that no matter how bad things get, we don’t go through them alone, that God is there for us, walking with us through the sorrow and pain and never giving up on us.

    Some of my friends are going through vocational issues or other dark times in their lives right now.  Recently, they told me about the hope that they find in their relationship with God, and that’s a hope that inspires me.  The hope that we Christians have is based on our faith in God and his undying love for us.  This is a hope that can never die, a hope that provides a light in the darkest times of our lives.

    As I mentioned, today’s readings give us a foundation for this hope.  In the second reading, Peter awakens our hope of forgiveness.  He says, “For Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the sake of the unrighteous, that he might lead you to God.  Put to death in the flesh, he was brought to life in the Spirit.”  Even our sinfulness is no match for God’s mercy.  Because of Christ’s death and resurrection we have hope of eternal life in God’s kingdom.  Because God loved us so much, he gave his only Son for our salvation, and now we have hope of forgiveness, hope for God’s presence in our lives.

    In the Gospel, Jesus tells us that we can hope in him because we will always have his presence.  Even though he ascended to the right hand of the Father, as we’ll celebrate next week, he is with us always.  “And I will ask the Father,” he says, “and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth…”  We receive that Holy Spirit sacramentally in Baptism and Confirmation, and we live in his Spirit every day.  The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives gives us the hope that we are never alone, even in our darkest hours; that the Spirit intercedes for us and guides us through life.

    We disciples have to be convinced of that hope; we have to take comfort in the hope that never passes from us, in the abiding presence of God who wants nothing more than to be with us.  We have to reflect that hope into our sometimes hopeless world.  As our second reading reminds us, “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.  Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope…” The reason for our hope is Christ.  We find our hope in the cross and resurrection.  We experience our hope in the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit.  We spread that hope in our hopeless world by being Christ to others, living as disciples of Jesus when the whole world would rather drag us down.  Even when life is difficult, we can live with a certain sense of joy, because above all, we are disciples of hope.

     

  • Monday of the Fifth Week of Easter

    Monday of the Fifth Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    Today’s readings are a reminder that we disciples have to be discerning.  It is important for us to discern what the truth is so that we can be led to the one who is Truth itself.  The Gentiles, who worshiped idols, didn’t have the context of monotheism – that there is one God – to help them.  Paul and Barnabbas did their best to catechize them, but there was much work to be done to overcome something that had been for the Greeks so culturally ingrained.  The Gentiles didn’t have a context of God working through human beings, so they naturally mistook Paul and Barnabas for gods.

    And in today’s Gospel, Jesus spells out how one can discern who is a true disciple.  The true disciple, claiming that he or she loves God, will be one who keeps God’s commandments.  If the disciple truly loves God, keeping God’s commandments would be second nature for that person.  But if one were to see someone claiming to love God and be his disciple but not obeying God’s commandments, one could conclude that person is not a true disciple.

    Discernment is important for us, because we want authenticity in our worship and in our belief and understanding.  Discernment is a gift of the Holy Spirit.  We cultivate that gift by prayer and study of the Holy Scriptures.  That is how we come to know the One who is Truth itself, how we will be filled with the Holy Spirit and come to know the truth.

     

  • The Fifth Sunday of Easter [A]

    The Fifth Sunday of Easter [A]

    Today’s readings

    I can see by your attendance here today that you were not caught up in the rapture last night.

    I bring this up not so much to poke fun at those who mistakenly predict the end of days, but rather to use this occasion to talk about exactly what we Catholics believe about the end times.  I think at some level all of us want to know when the end is coming and what it will look like.  We don’t get a clear roadmap of that, for reasons I’ll discuss later, but we do have some theology around the issue.

    Whenever we want to know what we believe about something, the first places we should look are in the scriptures and in the Liturgy.  So I’ll start with the Liturgy, and point out the scriptures along the way.  The Nicene-Constantinople Creed, which we pray each Sunday and Solemnity, includes two statements of belief about the end of time.  The first comes at the end of what we believe about Jesus Christ.  It says:

    He will come again in glory
    to judge the living and the dead
    and his kingdom will have no end.

    The second statement comes at the very end of the Creed, in the part that summarizes our belief about the Church, the sacraments and eternal life:

    … and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
    and the life of the world to come.

    So the Creed gives us five pieces of information about the end times.  First, Jesus will come again in glory.  In our Gospel today, Jesus tells us: “I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be…”  In his glorious return, Jesus will make manifest his kingdom in heaven and on earth, and all those who have believed in him will be taken to himself.

    Second, Jesus will judge the living and the dead.  Recall the scripture about the sheep and the goats, Matthew 25:31-46, in which those who have ministered to Christ made manifest in the poor and lowly of the world will inherit eternal life, and those who have failed to do so inherit eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  We believe that it is our responsibility to live the Gospel and a failure to do so manifests a rejection of Christ that is a choice to live in torment, distanced from God in eternity just as was done in life.

    Third, we believe that when Christ returns, his kingdom will be everlasting.  The devil may well appear to hold sway in our own time, and all it takes is a glance at the news to confirm this.  But when Christ returns, all will be made new, as we read in the book of Revelation, chapter 21 (1-4): “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The former heaven and the former earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.  I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband…”

    Fourth, there will be a resurrection of the dead.  We believe that because of the death and resurrection of Christ, death is not the end for us.  Those who die before Christ returns will be raised up to participate in the new, everlasting kingdom.  Saint Paul tells us in his first letter to the Thessalonians (4:13-14), “We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.  For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep.”

    And finally, we believe in eternal life.  In today’s gospel, Jesus says: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.  If there were not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?”  So we know that heaven is a place where we are to go, once we have been purified by death, and possibly purgatory (but that’s another whole homily!).  Eternal life is a life of joy in heaven forever.

    Getting back to the news of the last few days, in which Harold Camping of FamilyRadio.com predicted a rapture and the beginning of the end yesterday at 6pm local time, I would like to say two things.  First, you’ll notice that I didn’t discuss in the five points I just made a belief in the rapture.  That’s because there isn’t such a thing.  Those who believe in a rapture claim that prior to the great tribulations which will precede the end times, those who have believed in Christ will be taken up, leaving everyone else “left behind.”  That belief led to a whole series of popular books in the last decade.  While the tribulations that precede the end were foretold by Jesus, a rapture was not.  It wasn’t until the 1800s that some American fundamentalists really defined and pushed that belief.  The Catholic Church has never acknowledged a rapture, it has never been revealed in Scripture or authentic Tradition, so we can dismiss it.

    Second, a lot of people waste a lot of time trying to calculate the end of it all.  Mr. Camping calculated that May 21st would be the end.  I won’t get into how he got there, because I think the failure of it dictates that it not be given much attention, and if you really want to know, there’s a lot on the internet you can find about that.  I will say that he previously predicted that the end would come in 1994, based on the same information, and claimed it didn’t come to pass due to a mathematical error on his part.

    What I have to say about this is based on what Jesus tells us in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 24, verse 36: “But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.”  I think that’s pretty clear: nobody gets that big picture except God the Father, so it’s extremely presumptuous to think we could ever figure it out.  Shame on us if we waste our time trying.

    So what do we do with all this?  Should we be prepared for the end of the world?  I would say absolutely yes, and always.  Going back to First Thessalonians (5:2), Saint Paul tells us, “For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief at night.”  Since we don’t know when the end will come, but are positive that there will indeed be an end, we need to be always prepared.  That preparation should be that we continue to nurture our relationship with God by participating regularly in the sacraments, and immersing ourselves in prayer and reading of the sacred scriptures.  It also includes living the Gospel: finding Christ in the poor and needy and extending ourselves to lighten their load.  It means proclaiming the word by the lives that we lead and the words that we speak.  It means bringing everyone we can find with us to the kingdom.

    There’s a lot at stake in our Scriptures today.  There is a world that needs to know Jesus so that they too can know the Father and experience the joy of a real home.  There is a world that needs to know the touch of Jesus so that they can be healed and strengthened for life’s journey.  There is a world that needs to hear the Word of Jesus so that they can come to the way, the truth and the life.  It’s on us now, none of us can be passive observers or consumers only.  As St. Peter says today, we “are ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that [we] may announce the praises’ of him who called [us] out of darkness into his wonderful light.”  We are not home yet, but we can get there through our Jesus, our way, our truth, and our life.

    As Saint Benedict says, “And may He bring us all together to life everlasting.” (Rule of St. Benedict, 72)

     

  • Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter

    Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    Mass for the school children:

    One of the most important things we can ever learn is that God loves us very much.  God created us because of love: if he didn’t love us, he never would have made us, because God never makes anything that he doesn’t love.  God is love, and so God can’t do anything other than love us.

    Unfortunately, we can sometimes do something other than love God.  He gave us free will, and sometimes that’s a problem.  Sometimes that’s a challenge.  God freely chose to love us, and so he wants us to freely choose to love him.  But, because we have free will, sometimes we don’t do that.  There are lots of things out there that we often choose to love instead: we might love things, choosing to care about the nice things we own rather than about other people or about our relationship with God.  We might even choose to do things that turn us away from God, like following the crowd and doing things we shouldn’t, like bullying others, that kind of thing.

    And the problem is, it’s easy to get distracted from God’s love.  There are lots of people that try to get us to go the wrong way.  It might be a commercial that convinces us that we have to have something we really don’t need.  It could be someone who is trying to get us to try drugs or alcohol.  It could be a person who tells us we’re ugly, or dumb, or just not a good person.  All these voices are wrong, but we hear them so often, it’s hard sometimes to find God in all the confusion.

    But there is a way.  And that’s what today’s Gospel is all about.  Because God loves us, he wants us to find our way back to him.  He wants us to hear that he is still there, that he still loves us, even among all those voices who confuse us sometimes.  He made us out of love, and he wants us to return to him one day and share eternal life with him.  And when life confuses us and tries to convince us that we aren’t worthy of God’s love, he gives us Jesus.  Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.  He is the one way back to the Father.

    And that’s good news, because we know Jesus, don’t we?  We know that we can find him in our lives and especially here at Mass.  We can be with Jesus as we hear the words of the readings, and as we come to receive him in Holy Communion.  We don’t need all kinds of useless “stuff.”  We don’t need drugs or alcohol or anything else.  We are not ugly or dumb or unlovable.  We are made by God who makes all things good and makes all of us out of love.  All we need is Jesus who wants more than anything for us to know that God loves us.  Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.  Don’t ever forget that.  Don’t ever take your eyes off Jesus.

     

  • Monday of the Fourth Week of Easter

    Monday of the Fourth Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    When God made the human person, he put into him and her a hunger and a thirst that could only be filled up with God.  God made us for himself, because he is Love itself and Love must always have an object of that love.  As Saint Augustine said well, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”  The Psalmist also says that today in his words:

    As the hind longs for the running waters,
    so my soul longs for you, O God.
    Athirst is my soul for God, the living God.
    When shall I go and behold the face of God?

    Given that all people are created with this spiritual hunger, it should not have come as a huge shock to the circumcised believers that many Gentiles were turning to follow Christ.  Christ showed us the most perfect way to the Father, the only One who can fill up all the longings of the human heart.  Every conversion story is a return of the soul to our God; a filling up of the heart with what it really lacks.

    We try to fill up our lives with all kinds of things.  We turn on the television to drown out the silence.  We seek refuge in food and drink and career and even darker things.  But all of this is nothing more than a misguided attempt to fill up our lives with things that do not matter.  We can only fill ourselves up with what we truly long for: God himself.

     

  • Monday of the Third Week of Easter

    Monday of the Third Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    So they drag Saint Stephen before the Sanhedrin, and make all sorts of false claims against him.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  In fact, Stephen is in good company.  He is brought to the same place where his Lord Jesus, and later Peter and the apostles, have gone before him.  And just like all of them, even with all the lies and accusations flying around him, he is at peace.  The source of his peace, is of course, his Lord who has gone before him, that same Lord who now fills him, as the first line of the reading says, with “grace and power.”  The peace that fills the martyrs is remarkable, and indicates that they have indeed been called to that kind of witness and are empowered to withstand it by their God.

    We too, will be tested in this life because of our faith.  We too, can rely on that same grace and power if we unite ourselves to our Risen Lord.  Maybe we won’t be called on to actually give up our lives, but we will are all called at one time or another to suffer in some way when we authentically give witness to our faith.  Like Stephen and the martyrs, that is our calling, and we can rely on the help of the Lord to get us through it.

     

  • The Third Sunday of Easter [A]

    The Third Sunday of Easter [A]

    Today’s readings

    It is always interesting to me, in this story of the appearance of Jesus on the road to Emmaus, how the one thing that got through to them was the breaking of the bread.  He spent a long time walking with them, interpreting the Scriptures and recollecting all the things that had happened on the way.  But they never knew it was Jesus until he broke bread with them.

    Because of this, the early Christian community quickly took on a Eucharistic identity.  They gathered often and took part in the breaking of the bread, and it is in this act of worship that they found the icon of who they were.  “Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus had commanded them, and through appearances like this one on the road to Emmaus, they quickly began to see how important this actually was.  And because the early Christian Community found its own identity in the breaking of the bread, it is not terribly surprising, I think, that we find ourselves to be a Eucharistic people.

    Listen to the part of the Gospel where he reveals himself to them once again: “And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them.”  There are four specific verbs here: took, blessed, broke, gave.  First Jesus takes bread, receives our offerings, uses what we have to bring to the table.  Then he blesses that bread: as wanting as our gifts may be, Jesus blesses them anyway and gives them a character that they could never have on their own, or as a result of our own poor efforts.  Then he breaks it: just as his own body was broken for us on the cross, so he breaks the bread of our offerings so that it can be a sacrifice given for many.  Finally he gives it: our bread, our offerings, are now completely transformed, filled up with whatever they may lack, blessed and made available to many, and now given for our own sanctification and salvation.  The gifts we have given, which ultimately came from God, are now given to us once again, only this time with more blessing than they ever had.

    This weekend we have been celebrating First Holy Communion with our second graders.  I always love celebrating that with them, and I always tell them that this is not their last Holy Communion, but just the first of many, and every single one of those Holy Communions will be special for them.  Maybe you can remember your own First Holy Communion, the people that were with you, the special clothes you wore, how you felt getting to receive the Lord for the very first time.  Sometimes maybe we get a little lax: we don’t receive Communion with as much zeal as we did that first time.  So maybe it’s a good thing for us to do today as we receive Communion: remember our first time, and the joy of it, and experience that joy once again.

    This story of the journey to Emmaus is an important one for us to hear with fresh ears.  Because this story reminds us what Holy Communion is all about.  Just as those disciples came to recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread, so it will be for us.  Filled with the grace of today’s Holy Communion, maybe we can recognize our Lord with fresh eyes and truly see him in our brothers and sisters.  Maybe you will see our Lord in the faces of the needy when you come to serve them.  Maybe you will see him in the faces of your children as you teach them and correct them and love them into the kingdom of God.  Maybe you will see him in the face of a coworker or friend who is going through a difficult time.  As we love those people the Lord puts in our paths, maybe we can see our Lord among us in a new way.

    God has given us wonderful gifts.  We have been blessed in so many ways.  And so we need to offer him our best: our faithful attendance at Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, our reverent care for the people in our lives and those who are in need, our joyful preaching of the Gospel by living lives of integrity and honesty.  Jesus takes all these gifts from us, grateful for the love with which we offer them.  He blesses these gifts and perfects them when they are flawed.  He breaks those gifts so that they can be given for many, and the gives them to us to receive new life and even more blessing.

    We are a Eucharistic people.  So we gather over and over to find our identity once again.  We offer our gifts: bread and wine, our experiences, our sorrows and joys, our loving and our living, our successes and failures, who we are and who we were meant to be.  Jesus takes all this, blesses it, breaks it and offers it back redeemed and sanctified and made whole and holy.  Every time we gather for the Eucharist, we not only recognize our Lord in the breaking of the bread, but also we recognize our true selves, the ones we were created to be.

    With those first disciples, we find our hearts burning within us as we hear these wonderful stories of Sacred Scripture, and we come here again and again so that we may receive our Lord and recognize him in the breaking of the bread.

     

  • Monday of the Second Week of Easter

    Monday of the Second Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    One of the great things about being Catholic, I think, is the celebration of Easter.  We do it up right, and keep doing it for fifty days!  In fact, just yesterday we completed our celebration of Easter Day, which lasts for eight full days.  It certainly makes sense to us that the joy of our salvation should be celebrated with great festivity, and we shouldn’t be so eager to toss the lilies out of the church (even if I am allergic to them)!

    Today we begin the second phase of our Easter celebration.  Having completed the Octave of Easter, we now begin the preparation for the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the first Apostles, and later to each Christian.  We have in our Gospel today the emergence of the interesting figure of Nicodemus.  He was a Jew, and one of the Pharisees.  But he found Jesus and his message compelling, so a few times in John’s Gospel we get to hear from him.  Even though the rest of the Pharisees flat out rejected Jesus, Nicodemus knew that Jesus couldn’t be ignored.  There was something to this Jesus, and he wanted to get to the bottom of it.  We don’t know if Nicodemus ever fully, publicly accepted Jesus, but he took many steps on the way.

    Today Nicodemus and Jesus speak about being born again, born of the Spirit.  This for us is a process of accepting the Gospel in faith, and receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit and then living as a people reborn.  Although we can point to our Confirmation day, and even the day of our Baptism as days when we received the Holy Spirit, the process of accepting the Gospel in faith and living as a people reborn in the Spirit is one that takes the rest of our lives.  What we celebrate with joy today is that we are on that journey.  Because of the Resurrection of Our Lord and his gift of the Holy Spirit, we can now live according to the Spirit’s direction in our lives, confident that that Holy Spirit will give us the gifts and courage to do what we are called to do.  The Apostles did that in today’s first reading, and now we must do the same.

     

  • The Second Sunday of Easter

    The Second Sunday of Easter

    Today’s readings

    I really feel like we are inappropriately harsh on poor Saint Thomas.  Sure, he had the benefit of seeing and knowing Jesus during his life, but still, neither he nor any of the other disciples had a guidebook of what was to happen after Jesus’ death, so how can we blame him for not believing this incredible story?  Today is the feast day for those of us who sometimes question things, and the apostle, Saint Thomas, is our patron saint.  I think, rather than disparage Saint Thomas, we might do better to just come to the Lord in our humility and say “My Lord and my God!”

    Because I’m sure we can all think of at least one time when we were reluctant to believe something, or had our faith tested, only to have Jesus stand before us and say, “Peace be with you.”  I remember the time that it became apparent to me that the Lord was calling me to go to seminary after so many years being out of school.  I had a long list of reasons why that wouldn’t work, why it couldn’t be done at this stage of my life, why anyone would be a better choice than me.  And I never got a direct answer to any of that.  Never.  In some ways, all I got was Jesus standing in the midst of my questioning and saying to me “Peace be with you.”  And six months later I was in seminary.

    You’ve had that same kind of experience at some point in your life, I’d bet.  Maybe it was in college when you started really questioning your faith and felt like everything anyone had ever told you was a lie.  Or maybe it was the time you were called to do something at Church, or even take a turn in your career, and couldn’t possibly believe that you were qualified to do that.  Maybe it was the time it suddenly dawned on you that you were a parent, and had no idea how you could ever raise a child.  It could even have been the time when you completely changed your career – as I did – and weren’t totally sure that was God’s will for you.

    Like Thomas, we want evidence, hard facts, a good hard look at the big picture, before we’re ready to jump in.  We want to “see the mark of the nails in his hands and put our fingers into the nailmarks and put our hands into his side.”  That’s the kind of people we are, but that’s not faith.  Some people say that seeing is believing, but faith tells us that believing is seeing.  “Blessed are they,” Jesus says, “who have not seen but still believe.”  We sometimes first have to make an act of faith, a leap of faith if you will, before we can really see what God is doing in our lives.  And that’s the hard part, that’s the part that we, like Thomas, are reluctant to do.

    Jesus makes three invitations to us today.  The first is to believe.  Believe with all your heart and mind and soul.  Believe first, and leave the seeing to later.  Trust that God is with you, walking with you, guiding you, willing the best for you.  Be ready to make that leap of faith, because that’s what it takes for us to see God’s will.  What God has in store for us is so much better than our puny plans for our lives.  Be blessed by not seeing but still believing.

    The second invitation is to touch.  “Put your finger here and see my hands,” Jesus says to Thomas, “and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”  He makes that same invitation to us every time we walk up to receive Holy Communion.  What a gift it is to be able to share in Christ’s wounds, to be bound up in his Passion, to live the resurrection and to be nourished by his very body and blood.  Just like Thomas, we’re invited to touch so that we too might believe.  That’s why coming to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day is so important.

    The third invitation is to live a new day. The Gospel tells us that Jesus first came to the Apostles on the evening of the “first day of the week.”  That detail isn’t there so that we know what day it is or can mark our calendars.  In the Gospel, the “first day of the week” refers to the new day that Jesus is bringing about – a new day of faith, a new day of trust in God’s divine mercy, a new day of being caught up in God’s life.  We are invited to that new day every time we gather for worship.

    We have doubts, periodically and sometimes persistently.  But God does not abandon us in our doubt.  Just like Thomas, he comes to us in the midst of our uncertainty and says to us: “Do not be unbelieving, but believe.”  “Peace be with you.”