If David had advanced against the Philistine with the finest weapons and the most advanced armor possible, the story we have in our first reading would just be nice. But instead of relying on all kinds of technology to take down the giant, he relied on something more certain than technology and way bigger than the giant: he relied on the power of God’s grace. And that, my friends, makes for a darn good story! So what huge, giant thing are you facing these days? Have you been relying on yourself and on everything but God to slay it? If so, it’s not going to happen. But relying on God for the grace we need in every situation is the technology that has power to not just change our situation, but even to change us. And that’s a story worth telling!
Category: Prayer
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Monday of the Second Week of Ordinary Time: Christian Unity
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is challenging some age-old practices. He is not saying that fasting is a bad thing, but instead he is saying that something new is going on. He has come to usher in a new age, and fasting is inappropriate while he is there bringing it in!
Today is the beginning of the annual week of prayer for Christian Unity. This week we remember that Christ came to found one and only one Church and, sadly, we have messed that up through our own sin and pride. But this week we also celebrate that some of that is changing. Slowly, but surely. Catholics, Lutherans and Methodists are beginning to come to agreement on what “justification by faith” means. Orthodox and Catholics are beginning to talk about Eucharist and the role of the pope. Even Catholics and Evangelicals are coming to trust each other more, and have come together in many ways to promote the sanctity of life from conception to natural death.
We still have a long way to go, but these steps are signs of progress. We focus on what we all believe in: a loving, Trinitarian God, salvation in Christ, the gift of the Holy Spirit, our common Baptism and the promise of everlasting life in heaven. From these we can begin our prayer for unity, that, as Christ desired, we may all be one. The bridegroom is among us, even in our fractured state, and doing something new, something wonderful, something life-changing. There is new wine and new wineskins; for that we can all be grateful.
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Friday of the First Week of Ordinary Time
“We have never seen anything like this.”
That statement can be taken in a number of ways. It could be an expression of amazement: the people were seeing something new in Jesus and found it to be astonishingly wonderful. That’s almost too much to hope for from them, unfortunately, so what they probably meant was something much different. They probably meant, we have never seen anything like this, and since it’s not what we are used to, we distrust it and refuse to go there.
What’s sad about that is that we react that way too sometimes, don’t we. The old joke is that the last seven words of the Church will be, “we’ve never done it that way before.” If someone challenges us in new ways, we have a tendency to automatically assume it’s wrong. People tend often to distrust anything that puts them outside their comfort zones.
And Jesus was doing that all the time. The scribes, Pharisees, and religious leaders all distrusted him because he hit them right where they lived. He challenged them to new ways of thinking and praying and fasting and giving and even loving. He showed them a Messiah that was much different than anything they ever expected. And so they dismissed him: “We have never seen anything like this.”
But it cannot be so for us. Jesus still challenges us today, beaconing us out of our comfort zones, challenging us to live for God and for others, and to reach out and live the Gospel with wild abandon. Will we dismiss him and his message too? Or will we say with eager expectation: “We have never seen anything like this!” – with eyes wide open to see where he will lead us next?
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Thursday of the First Week of Ordinary Time
“If you wish, you can make me clean.” This ought to be the prayer of all of us, I think. Does God wish to make us clean? Of course. But do we acknowledge his ability to do so? Sometimes we are so saddened by our sins that we feel we are beyond redemption. Our brokenness stares us in the face time and time again and accuses us of being unworthy of the attention of God. But the fact remains: If God wishes, he certainly can make us clean. All we have to do is let him, to believe in his power to do it, and rejoice in his desire to do so.
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Wednesday of the First Week of Ordinary Time
Learning to discern the Lord’s voice is a big part of our development as people of God and disciples of the Lord. There are many competing voices out there, and so it takes great discernment to know which of those voices is God himself. The way that we learn this is, of course, through prayer. When we practice often enough, we will gradually find it easier to hear the Lord’s voice, and then tell him, “Here I am, Lord; I have come to do your will.”
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Monday of the First Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings
Now that the Christmas season has come to its close, it’s time to get down to business. And Jesus does so quickly. John has been arrested, so there is no time like the present to keep the word out there. Just as John preached a baptism for the forgiveness of sins, so Jesus preaches a whole Gospel for the forgiveness of sins. The task for us to is to repent and to believe. As we begin the Ordinary Time of our Church year, we may find in necessary to do some more repenting ourselves so that our belief can be stronger in this coming year.
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The Baptism of the Lord
What wonderful words we have in today’s Gospel to close out the Christmas season: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well-pleased.”
We have come a long way since December the 25th. Jesus, the Son of God has become the son of Mary, and has sanctified the world by his most merciful coming. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity has taken on flesh and become one like us in all things but sin. He took that flesh as the lowliest of all: as a baby born to a poor young family in the tiniest, poorest region of a small nation.
But during his Epiphany, which we have been celebrating ever since last Sunday, we saw the importance of this Emmanuel, God with us. Magi came from the East to give him symbolic gifts: gold for a king, frankincense for the High Priest, and myrrh for his burial. Today, the Epiphany continues with the second traditional reading of the Epiphany: the Baptism of Jesus. Obviously, Jesus didn’t need to partake of the baptism of John, because it was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. But Jesus’ taking part in that baptism manifests himself as One who has come to be with sinners, to take on their sinfulness, and to sanctify those waters of baptism so that they can wipe away our sins.
And here’s a wonderful thing: even though the Christmas season officially ends today, we continue to celebrate it in some ways, all the way up to Candlemas day, February the 2nd. We see that especially this year, because next week, we get the third traditional reading of the Epiphany, the Wedding Feast at Cana, in which Christ is manifested in his ministry, ready or not.
The secret to our celebration of the Epiphany is that we must be ready to accept the manifestation of Jesus in our own lives. We have to let him be our king and priest, accepting his death for our salvation. We have to celebrate our own baptism, which is only significant because Christ has gone through it first, long before us, sanctifying the waters. We have to let him minister to us as he did at the wedding feast, giving us the very best of food and drink, in great abundance, to nourish us into eternal life.
This is the One with whom the Father was well-pleased; he is the One with whom we are in awe. We are moved to silence before our Christ who came most mercifully to sanctify our way to heaven. That silence can only be appropriately broken by the exclamation of the Father: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well-pleased!”
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Wednesday after Epiphany
We still need more light, don’t we? Just like the disciples who don’t yet get who this Jesus is and what he’s about, sometimes we too struggle with that. Jesus was doing amazing things among the disciples and they didn’t yet understand. Jesus is doing amazing things among us and sometimes we don’t get it either. The Epiphany of the Lord, which we continue to celebrate today, continues to shed light on who Jesus is for us and for the world. Today, may we open our eyes to the brightness of his coming.
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St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
Mother Seton is a major figure of the Catholic Church in the United States. Her accomplishments contributed greatly to the growth of Catholicism in this country. She founded the first American religious community for women, the Sisters of Charity. She opened the first American parish school and established the first American Catholic orphanage. All this she did in the span of 46 years while raising her five children.
And she didn’t start out Catholic. She was born to an Episcopalian family and married an Episcopalian, William Seton, bearing five children with him before his untimely death. At 30, Elizabeth was widowed, penniless, with five small children to support.
While in Italy with her dying husband, Elizabeth witnessed Catholicity in action through family friends. She was drawn to Catholicism because of the Real Presence, devotion to Mary, and the apostolic succession which led back to the original Apostles and to Christ. She converted to Catholicism in 1805, and because of that, many of her family rejected her.
But perseverance was a special aspect of her spirituality. She wrote to her sisters: “Perseverance is a great grace. To go on gaining and advancing every day, we must be resolute, and bear and suffer as our blessed forerunners did. Which of them gained heaven without a struggle?”
It is especially appropriate that we celebrate St. Elizabeth’s feast day during this season of Epiphany. Just as we hear in the Gospel that Christ continued to come and shed more light on the people, so her life radiated with light that led to our Savior. And the light of Christ’s most merciful coming has continued to shine in our Church, through the hard work and intercession of saints like Elizabeth Ann Seton.
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Mary, the Mother of God
My mother has a lot of stories about me as I was growing up. Some of them are funny or interesting, others are just a little painful or embarrassing. I suspect your mother has or had stories like that about you too. Maybe they are funny or maybe they are sad, but these are the stories that make us cringe a little bit when we hear them.
I wonder how Jesus felt about the stories Mary remembered about him. Probably they didn’t make him cringe! Luke tells us of all the amazing things that were observed and said about Jesus, even in his infancy, and all these things are what Mary kept and reflected on in her heart. I think it’s fair to say that she probably didn’t understand all of them at the time, or at least she didn’t know where they were leading, although she certainly knew that her son was someone very special, the Son of God. And so she keeps all these things and reflects on them in her heart. She is the first, really, to receive the Gospel – observing it, as it were, while it was happening and unfolding. And so she is the model for all of us hearers of the Word; we too catch little phrases or episodes that we later reflect on in our hearts. When we first hear them, it might well be that we don’t understand them. But we know that we can later reflect on them in our hearts, and the Holy Spirit will reveal their meaning.
The Church gives us this wonderful feast of Mary on this, the octave day of Christmas. In a very real way, the Church still celebrates this day as Christmas day – that’s one of the wonderful things about being Catholic. We don’t have to cast off Christmas with the wrapping paper; we get to celebrate for many days. But to celebrate the eighth day of Christmas as the feast of Mary, the Mother of God is a wonderful and appropriate thing to do. We all know that if Mary hadn’t said “yes” to God’s invitation and cooperated with his plan for her, that salvation history might have gone rather poorly, to say the least. We are indebted to Mary’s faith, a faith which made possible the salvation of the whole world and everyone ever to live in it.
More than that, Mary’s faith is a model for us. We often do not know where God is leading us, but in faith we are called to say “yes” anyway. How willing are we to do that? We are often called upon to take a leap of faith, make a fiat, and cooperate with God’s saving plan for us and for others. Just like Mary, we have no way of knowing where that might lead us; just like Mary, that might lead to heartache and sorrow; but just like Mary, it may lead to redemption beyond belief, beyond anything we can imagine.
And so, yes, Mary is the Mother of God. And let me tell you, this was a doctrine that didn’t come without a price. People fought over whether a human woman could ever be the mother of God. How would that be possible? But the alternative, really, would be to say that Jesus was not God, because we clearly know that Mary was his mother. So to say that Mary was not the Mother of God is to say in a very real and precarious way that Jesus was not God, and we know just as surely that that would be incorrect. Jesus was fully human but also fully divine, his human and divine natures intertwined in his person without any separation or division or degradation of one nature at the expense of another. And so, as theologians teach us, Mary is the Mother of God the Word according to his human nature. Sister Sarah made us memorize that in seminary, and every once in a while, when I’m feeling particularly theologically courageous, I reflect on that statement and marvel at its beauty.
So, Mary is the Mother of God, but Mary is also the Mother of the Church, leading its members to her son Jesus and to faith in God. She is mother of priests, caring for us in a special way and interceding for the faithful completion of our mission. She is the mother of mothers, interceding for them and showing them how to nurture faith in their children. She is the mother of the faithful, showing us how to cooperate fully with God’s plan. She is mother of scripture scholars and those who just love the scriptures, having seen the Word unfold before her and treasuring it in her heart. She is the mother of disciples, having been the first of the disciples and the most dedicated of them all. She is the Mother of God, and our mother, and we cannot sing our Christmas carols without singing her praises too. We honor her faith and example today, and we ask for her intercession for our lives, for our families, for our Church and our world.
Pray for us, o holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
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