The Catholic notion of salvation is not a private thing; it’s not just “me and Jesus.” We are to come together to salvation because that is God’s will: that all be saved. Today’s Scriptures speak of conciliation, repentance, and the responsibility of the Church to lead people to reconciliation with God and community. We are responsible for one another, and if we don’t bring people back to Christ and back to the Church, we will ultimately have to answer for it. Where two or more are gathered in the name of Jesus, he is with them. And I don’t know about you, but that’s where I want to be.
Category: Prayer
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The Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
I had supper with a friend this week. During the course of our conversation over dinner, he explained his conviction that most people, perhaps even some people who come to Mass every Sunday, don’t really have faith anymore. He thinks our society has lost the conviction that our faith is radical, real, and life-changing. And that is because, he says, if we really did believe that the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ, we wouldn’t have a vocations crisis, because parents would be eager to encourage their sons to become priests so that we would never go without the Eucharist. I’m still mulling over the implications of what he said.
But whether he’s right or not, today’s Scriptures speak to exactly what he was saying. In these summer days of the Church’s Ordinary Time, we have been exploring the meaning of discipleship. Each Sunday, I think, we are given a tool for living our discipleship. The tool we get today is that of faith. And faith is a word that we toss around kind of carelessly in these days. We talk about having faith in someone, having faith in ourselves, being people of faith. But what does that even mean? What does faith look like? Well, today’s Liturgy of the Word helps us to paint that picture.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews lays down the definition of faith for us: “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.” Faith is something we all strive to have, but faith is really a gift. We long to be people of faith because it is faith that gives peace in the midst of uncertainty. Faith, as the author points out, is not the same thing as proof. Proof requires evidence, and faith usually provides none of that. Faith, perhaps, is not knowing what will happen, but instead knowing the one in whom we trust. If we know our God is trustworthy, then we don’t need to know all the details of what is ahead of us; instead, we can trust in the One who leads us. The more that we exercise that faith, the more our faith grows.
The author speaks about Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Jacob. They were heirs of the promise God made, a real covenant with his people. Abraham and Sarah should never even have given birth to Isaac and Jacob – they were too old. But they did, and Isaac and Jacob were but the beginning of “descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sands on the seashore.” Even then, they didn’t see the fulfillment of the promise. That would only come about in the Paschal Mystery of Christ our God, but they had the glimpse of it from afar.
The parable in our Gospel today tells us what living the faith looks like: “You also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” Faith requires waiting, and we do all sorts of waiting. We wait in the grocery line and in the doctor’s office. We wait for friends or family to join us at the dinner table. We wait for job offers, for the right person in our relationships, and we wait for the right direction in our lives. In all of our waiting, Jesus tells us today, we must be prepared for the outpouring of God’s grace. If we are distracted by worldly things and worldly activities, we may miss that grace as it is poured out right before us. If we are caught up in things that have no permanence, we may miss our opportunity to follow Christ to our salvation. We must always be prepared for the Son of Man to come into our lives.
The parable gives us some wonderful images. Those faithful servants, whom the Master finds busy doing their jobs when he returns, are not just given a pat on the back. No, they are seated at table, and the Master himself begins to wait on them! That image had to be astonishing to those servants of Jesus’ day. But it is none the less real for us. We come here to Mass today expecting that very same thing to happen. We come to the table, and we are fed by our Master in a way that we could never feed ourselves on our own. The grace poured out on us as people of faith is incredible, if we have the faith to notice it.
The second wonderful image in this parable is what happens at the end: “if the master of the house had known the hour when the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.” But when you think about it, that has already happened: Jesus has returned in his Spirit and has “broken into” our house. Jesus’ return is unexpected: he is like a sneaky thief. And so, we need to be vigilant, we need to be aware of the return of Jesus.
But again, what does that look like? For what should we keep vigil? This is where faith comes in to play. It might be strength in the midst of crisis, or maybe a deep-down joy underneath the same old daily routine. It could be an unexpected treat, like a visit with an old friend. Sometimes it looks like a reassuring presence during a quiet moment of prayer. Or perhaps even a renewed commitment to keep on doing what we know we are called to do.
Faith can be nebulous, but in today’s Liturgy, we are taught that faith looks like something. Faith means living the Gospel with urgency every day, as though Jesus were going to return tomorrow, even if that return is many years in the future. Faith means looking for the blessing in every day, even when cares and concerns and sadness threaten to swallow us up. Faith means standing up for the truth, reaching out to those in need, preaching the Gospel in our words and in our deeds.
The protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr spoke of the notion of faith in his famous “Serenity Prayer.” You’ve probably heard the first part, but I think the last part is that prayer for faith that we all pray today:
God,
Grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things I can;
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world
As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that you will make all things right
If I surrender to your will;
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with you
Forever in the next. Amen.
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Thursday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time
In the ancient Hebrew, the word we have for righteousness and justice is sedeq, which most literally means right order. The idea is that when things are as they were intended to be by God, then the poor will be taken care of, nobody’s rights will be trampled on, and God’s grace will be evident in every situation. So this idea of sedeq is of course a frequently-mentioned topic in the prophets’ preaching. Today we have the prophet Jeremiah pointing out the lack of sedeq in the community of the Israelites: “for they broke my covenant,” Jeremiah prophecies, “and I had to show myself their master, says the LORD.”
There is just one possible antidote to the infidelity of the people, and that is God’s loving-kindness. The Hebrew language has a word for this, too, and that is hesed. It is summed up in the way the Lord wishes to bring the people back into right relationship as Jeremiah says: “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD. I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
The hesed that Jesus brings is still more radical, and that turns out to be a problem for Peter. He knows well enough who Jesus is: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” But when it turns out that the way for Jesus to make all that happen and unleash God’s ultimate loving-kindness is for Jesus to die, that doesn’t set well with Peter. “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.”
The thing is, for hesed to happen in any situation, someone pretty much always has to lay down their life. It might be physically as Jesus did on the cross, but it could also be by letting a disagreement go, pursuing forgiveness even at the cost of being right about something on principle, or giving up one’s own desires so that others can be nourished. And Satan knows that hesed is the worst thing in the world that can happen for him. So he always wants us to say “God forbid, Lord! Why should you have to die? Why should I have to die?” But we have to put such thoughts aside. We have to think as God does, not as human beings do.
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Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings
Today’s Gospel reading is one of my favorites. Truthfully, though, it always makes me a little uncomfortable. Which is what it’s supposed to do. This Gospel wants us to get out of the boat, too.
We can tend to give Saint Peter a lot of grief over this incident. If he was able to walk on the water for a few steps, why couldn’t he finish the journey? What we see happen here is that while he has his eyes on Jesus, he can accomplish what seems impossible: he walks on water. But when he gets distracted by the storm and the wind and the waves, he begins to sink into the water.
Our spiritual journeys are a lot like that, I think. It takes courage to get out of the boat, but the boat is where Jesus is. We won’t get to him unless we make that leap of faith and step out of the comfort of our boats – whatever those boats may be. And we do fine while we have our eyes on Jesus, but the minute we get distracted by the storms raging all around us, we begin to sink into the ocean of despair that surrounds us.
When that happens, we can be depressed about our progress. We can be very hard on ourselves for falling yet again. But we have to understand that Peter, and we, are not the biggest losers in this whole incident. There were eleven guys who never had the courage or the faith to get out of the boat in the first place. And so, like Peter, we can reach up to our Lord and let him pull us out of the swirling waters once again.
For those of us who take the leap of faith with Peter today, we may be of “little faith,” we may even doubt sometimes, but our faith in Jesus will always keep us safe.
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Monday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time
“Give them some food yourselves,” Jesus says to the disciples. Yes, it would be easier to send the people away so they can fend for themselves. But that’s not how God wants to feed them, and Jesus won’t hear of it. “Give them some food yourselves.” All they have are five loaves and couple of fish, hardly enough for the incredible crowd. But, that sacrifice in the hands of Jesus is enough to feed all of them and then some. What meager offering will you be called upon to sacrifice today so that others can be fed? Our little service might not seem like much, but in Jesus’ hands it is more than enough. “Give them some food yourselves.”
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The Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Recently in the news, there have been a few stories of people who have hoarded possessions so much as to put them in danger. In the most recent story, a woman in the Chicago area had passed away, and rescuers needed to cut a hole in her roof in order to remove her from the home. People like this have an illness with regard to hoarding, of course. But today’s Liturgy of the Word seems to address the hoarder in all of us. We are people of means, maybe not the most well-off, but certainly better off than most of the world. When do we have enough? When does it all become too much?
Listen to the last line of this morning’s Gospel one more time: “Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God.” So right away the parable is turned around and directed at all of us. And it wouldn’t be so hard to put that parable in modern terms, would it? Think of winning the lottery, only to know that the day you receive the check is the day you go home to the Lord. Or think of spending your days and nights in the office, building wealth and prestige, only to be part of massive layoffs when the company is sold. Or, even worse, spending your days and nights at the office, only to miss the growing of your family. So, Jesus asks us, what treasures have we built up? With what have we filled our barns?
Today’s first reading is from the book of Ecclesiastes, which in Hebrew is Qoheleth, who is the teacher in the book. Among the Wisdom books in the Scriptures, Ecclesiastes can be the hardest to read because it is almost prophetic in content. Qoheleth is considered wise among his contemporaries, much like many of the popular wisdom teachers of his day. While we don’t know who Qoheleth was, the book is attributed to Solomon, the wise king. Solomon often wrote of the prizes that lay in store for those who were successful. But this book is a little different. Here he questions if it is all worth it, and challenges the complacence and dishonesty that run rampant in that society. If we didn’t know any better, he could well have been writing his words today, couldn’t he? In the end, though, Qoheleth’s message is basically encouraging, and brings us back to the God who made us. At the end of his book, which is not part of today’s reading, he says: “The last word, when all is heard: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is man’s all; because God will bring to judgment every work, with all its hidden qualities, whether good or bad.” (Ecc. 12:13-14) Which is exactly what Jesus is telling us in today’s Gospel.
St. Paul has a little bit of Qoheleth in him too, today. In the letter to the Colossians, which we have been hearing these past few weeks, he is trying to get that community to lay aside earthly things and seek God. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it? “If you were raised with Christ,” he tells them, “seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” In other words, stop filling your barns with the stuff that you accumulate on this earth, and be rich in what matters to God. Qoheleth, St. Paul, and Jesus are in complete concert today, and we must be careful to hear their message. St. Paul, typical for him, is very blunt about what he is asking us to lay aside: “Put to death then,” he tells us, “the parts of you that are earthly: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the greed that is idolatry.” And, “stop lying to one another.” We are called to be disciples who are pure, compassionate and truthful, because absolutely nothing else will lead us to the kingdom of God!
So, let’s get back to Jesus’ instruction at the end of today’s Gospel parable: “Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God.” We have to ask ourselves, then, the very important question: “what is it that matters to God?” I think we know what doesn’t qualify – St. Paul made that very clear. I think the things that matter to God are those things we might count among our blessings: namely our family and friends. Those things that matter to God might also be the things that make us disciples who are pure, compassionate and truthful. So we might seek to be rich in prayer, rich in reaching out to the poor and needy, rich in standing up for truth and justice.
Today God is tugging at the heart-strings of the hoarder in all of us. What are we stockpiling? Maybe we need a look at our checkbooks, our calendars, and our to-do lists to see where our money, time and resources have gone. Can we take any of that with us if we are called home to God tonight? If those things are all we have, we could find ourselves in real poverty when we arrive at the pearly gates. This week’s to-do list might find us letting go of some of what we thought was important, so that we can be rich in what matters to God. These, brothers and sisters in Christ, are the riches that will not spoil and can never be taken away from us.
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Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time
This morning, the prophet Jeremiah is urgently reminding the people Israel – and us too! – that every good thing we have, every blessing we receive, all of it comes from the Lord God Almighty. Israel was trying to find blessing in the strange gods of the peoples around them, the baals. But we have our own baals too, I think, our own strange gods in which we try to find blessing. Whether it’s possessions or wealth or prestige or career, or whatever else tends to get in the way of our relationship with God, none of these baals will ever grant us blessing. “You alone have done all these things,” Jeremiah observes. Sometimes I think we all need to take a step back and make that same observation.
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Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
During this summer chunk of the Church’s Ordinary Time, we have the beautiful opportunity to reflect on our discipleship. We are all called to discipleship, that is, to follow the Lord, in whatever way God has chosen for us. And so, during these summer months, we hear of beautiful aspects of that discipleship, tools that we should have in our discipleship toolbox, as it were. Today’s Liturgy of the Word presents us with one of the most important of those tools, and that tool is prayer.
Prayer is a tool that we must hone and use and perfect over a lifetime of discipleship. Sometimes our prayer life may be rich: we hear what God wants for us and we find ourselves connected to God throughout the day. Sometimes our prayer life may seem to be dead, or at least dormant, or even kind of stagnant: we don’t seem to hear from God, our prayers seem to be rote repetitions of useless words, we seem to just be going through the motions. What is important for the Christian disciple to know though is this: however our prayer life may be unfolding: it is important to pray, no matter what, no matter how it seems to be going.
There are three things at stake in our prayer lives which I’d like to focus on today. First, prayer must be part of a relationship with God. Second, prayer must be persistent. And third, does God really answer our prayers? The first two issues are issues that every disciple, every pray-er, must learn on their spiritual journey. And that last question is one that every disciple, if he or she is honest, probably has to answer or struggle with this question at some point in their lives.
So, first, prayer must be persistent. Jesus presents this concept in the parable he tells about prayer. Even if friendship does not get the neighbor what he wants, persistent knocking on the door will certainly help. Nothing illustrates this better, though, than the very astonishing story we have in our first reading. This reading has always intrigued me, ever since I can remember hearing it as a child. God intends to destroy the city of Sodom because of its pervasive wickedness. Abraham, newly in relationship with God, stands up for the innocent of the city, largely because that was where his nephew, Lot, had taken up residence. In what seems to be a case of cosmic “Let’s Make a Deal,” Abraham pleads with God to spare the city if just fifty innocent people could be found there. God agrees and Abraham persists. Eventually God agrees to spare the city if just ten righteous people could be found in the city of Sodom.
It is important, I think, to know that Abraham’s prayer does not really change his unchangeable God. Instead, God always intended to spare the city if there were just people in it. What I love about this reading is Abraham’s line, “See how I am presuming to speak to my Lord, though I am but dust and ashes!” Here he prefigures the kind of prayer Jesus has in mind for us, we who also are but dust and ashes. The prayer Jesus teaches us is amazingly familiar, and I mean “familiar” in the sense of being close to God. Our God is not a distant potentate who has set the world in motion and then stepped back to observe events as they unfold. No, instead our God can be called “Abba, Father” and we can approach God as we would a loving parent. Because of this, we can pray, “Father, hallowed be your name…”
And this leads us to the second issue at stake for the praying disciple: prayer must come out of a relationship with God. Abraham may have been somewhat presumptuous to speak to God the way that he did. But if he didn’t know God, if he didn’t have a relationship with God, well, then his conversation would have been completely offensive, wouldn’t it? And everything that Jesus teaches us about prayer in this Gospel presumes relationship. The prayer he gives is that of a community praying to its Father God. The parable that he gives following that prayer tells of one neighbor begging another to help him provide for and unexpected, but not unwanted, guest. All that we are taught about prayer is that prayer is to be an expression of our relationship with God, or else it’s a useless exercise.
I once heard an apocryphal story of a woman who was not religious, never prayed, never worshipped. At one point in her life, she was going through some very hard times, and decided that she should pray. Not really knowing how to pray, she reached for the dusty old Bible on her shelf that someone had given her years ago but she never really opened. She decided to open it up, point to a passage, and hope it spoke to her. So that’s what she did. Opening the Bible, she pointed to a passage and read: “And Judas went out and hanged himself.” She thought that was frightening, so she decided to try again. This time she opened it up, pointed to a passage, and read: “Go, and do likewise.”
Now obviously, the woman was reading these passages out of context. Had she read the whole story around each of these quotes, she would have been clear that neither of these brief sentences spoke to her situation. But more than that, she was praying without the context of a relationship with God. Prayer can be very effective in times of crisis. But a time of crisis is not the time to learn how to pray. It is our relationship with God as disciples of the Lord that makes sense of our praying and teaches us how to speak to God. Abraham learned that, and Jesus knew it well.
The final issue is a sensitive one. So often, parishioners will tell me, “Father, I’ve prayed and prayed for (whatever the issue is) and I don’t seem to be getting any answer from God.” Whether you have a sick loved one, or a child who’s gone the wrong way, or a marriage that is troubled, or a job situation that is unhappy, or any one of thousands of other problems, you may have asked something like, “Why doesn’t God answer my prayers?” Today we’re hearing that we should be persistent in our prayer and that God will answer the prayers of those he loves, and so you may well be asking yourself, “What good does that do?” These are questions I get all the time, and I can understand them, having asked them a time or two myself. So let me give you my take on it with a parable out of my own life.
When my dad was dying a few years ago, I was absolutely positive that he was going to be okay. If I had my own way, of course, I would have prayed that he would live many more years, but I knew that was selfish. God had made Dad for himself, and I knew that he was going back to be with God. I wanted nothing else for him than that he would be free of pain and happy forever. I was positive that was what was going to happen. So was Dad. Just before he died, he looked up at the nurse who was attending him and said, “It’s going to be okay.” And of course that was true.
How did he know it was going to be okay? Well, he knew he’d be okay because Dad was a man of prayer. He went to Mass with my mom every Sunday and very often went to weekday Mass after he retired. He prayed his rosary and daily prayers every day. He and I used to go every Holy Thursday to pray before the Blessed Sacrament together. His wonderful life was immersed in prayer and he had no regrets. Everything was going to be okay. And because he was a man of prayer, I knew that I could let him go and that God would take care of him. Prayer is like that; it’s contagious. His example of persistent prayer was one that led me to my vocation.
The point is this: praying persistently doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is going to come out the way we want it to, but it does mean that everything is going to come out the way God intended it, which is so much better than our little plans. If we are people of prayer, if we pray persistently, we will be able to see the blessings in the midst of sorrow and to have confidence when everything seems to be falling apart. Sometimes, even when the circumstances don’t seem to change, the praying changes us, and makes us more open to the blessings God wants to give us in the midst of the pain.
One final note: praying persistently, as we care called to do, does not mean praying constantly for just one thing. It means praying in all ways: praying in adoration before our beautiful Savior, praying in contrition and repentance for our sinfulness, praying in thanksgiving for our many blessings, praying in supplication for our needs and the needs of all the world. It means praying, above all, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
The psalmist today says, “Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me.” God intends the very best for us, we may be certain of that. And if we are people of persistent prayer, then we will indeed see blessing all around us. My prayer today is that we would all be persistent in prayer, that we would become people of prayer, and that we would never, ever, ever lose heart.
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Friday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time
This morning’s Gospel passage is the explanation of the parable of the seed and the sower, which we heard on Wednesday morning. What we quickly find out is that the parable is all about us. Clearly the ideal is the good soil which produces much fruit, and just as clearly, we don’t want to be the soil on the path or the rocky soil, or even the soil with the thorny growth. All those soils yield nothing but dead plants, hardly an offering to God or even anything that would be pleasing to us.
When we allow ourselves to have a surface-level relationship with God, one that is not nourished by devotion and worship, we end up being easy picking for anything in the world that comes away and would snatch us out of the hands of God. Just like the soil on the path, such as it is.
When we think that we can live our faith without any kind of effort on our part, we end up with a very shallow basis for that faith. We sometimes latch on to the joy of religion or religious experience, but when it becomes hard work, we let go and have no way to keep growing. Just like the rocky soil.
When we try to live our faith and still be people of the world, we find that the faith gets choked out as our desire for more riches, more things, more prestige – or more whatever – overshadows our desire for strong relationship with God. We can’t serve two masters, and we soon take the path of least resistance, abandoning the faith for what we think will give us more happiness, at least right now. And when that fails us, we wither up and have nowhere to turn. Just like the soil with the thorny growth.
But it can’t be that way for disciples of the Lord. We have to have a faith that goes beyond the surface so that we can really know God. We have to have a faith that is developed by embracing the hard work of repentance and devotion so that we can continue to dig deep into the life of God. We have to have a faith that is single-minded and not subject to whatever ill-winds and thorns come along. We have to be that rich soil which yields not only joy for ourselves, but grace for others.
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Wednesday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time
The job of a prophet is not an easy one. And we should all know, because we are all in some ways the prophetic seeds the Lord is sowing in the world. We might fall on good soil, or amongst rocks or thorns, but wherever we are, we are expected to bear fruit. We are called upon to preach the Word in our actions and sometimes our words, no matter how difficult a job it can sometimes be. And we prophesy knowing that our words and actions come from our God who is the one who places those words on our lips in the first place. Our witness can be an authentic one if we remember the words of the Psalmist today: “O God, you have taught me from my youth, and till the present I proclaim your wondrous deeds.”
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