Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Prayer

  • The Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.”  So says the wisdom-writer Sirach in today’s first reading.  His words set up well the Gospel today, and the overall emphasis of forgiveness as a powerful tool for the disciple.  The disciple would do well to abandon wrath and anger, and hold fast to forgiveness: eagerly seeking it for himself, and freely giving it to others.  These readings come on the heels of what we heard last week, which was about the way the Christian disciple resolves conflict.  Forgiveness is the natural conclusion to that discussion.

    But forgiveness, sadly, doesn’t seem to come as naturally to us as it does to our God.  Sinners though we are, we seem to always gravitate toward wrath and anger.  You can see it well in just about every corner of our world right now.  We don’t have interesting conversations about political issues any more: we have wrath and anger.  In an election year like this one, campaigns no longer provide us with convincing reasons to vote for a candidate; instead they numb us to everything so that the truth can hardly be found.  Even a pandemic, which should galvanize us and make us all want to seek the common good, has only been weaponized to divide us further.  All we see is wrath and anger, and I don’t know about you, but I’m sure weary of it.

    Well, friends, the way that we move forward has to do with forgiveness.  Those who hug wrath and anger tight will never be at peace; peace only comes from forgiving and letting go of the poison.  So how do we forgive?

    In the Gospel, Peter wants the Lord to spell out the rule of thumb: how often must we forgive another person who has wronged us?  Peter offers what he thinks is magnanimous: seven times.  Seven times is a lot of forgiveness.  Think about it, how exasperated do we get when someone wrongs us over and over?  Seven times was more than the law required, so Peter felt like he was catching on to what Jesus required in living the Gospel.  But that’s not what Jesus was going for: he wanted a much more forgiving heart from his disciples: not seven times, but seventy-seven times!  Even if we take that number literally, which we shouldn’t, that’s more forgiveness than we can begin to imagine.  But the number here is just to represent something bigger than ourselves: constant forgiveness.  The real answer to Peter’s question is that we don’t number forgiveness: just as our God forgives us as many times as we come to him in repentance, so we should forgive others who do that with us.

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

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

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

    This call to a kind of heroic forgiveness takes on a new meaning when we consider the state of our world today.  We still have conflicts all over the world.  In fact, I’ve read that as many as a third of the nations of the world are currently involved in some sort of conflict.  And we owe a great debt to those who are fighting to keep our nation safe.  But I don’t think we can stop with that.  We will never find the ultimate answer to terrorism and injustice in human endeavor.  We have to reach for something of more divine origin, and that something, I think, is the forgiveness that Jesus calls us to in today’s gospel.

    And it starts with us.  We have been forgiven so much by God.  So how willing have we then been to forgive others?  Our reflection today might take us to the people or institutions that have wronged us in some way.  Can we forgive them?  Can we at least ask God for the grace to be forgiving?  I always tell people that forgiveness is a journey.  We might not be ready to forgive right now, but we can ask for the grace to be ready.  Jesus didn’t say it would be easy, did he?  But we have to stop sending people to debtor’s prison for the rest of their lives if we are going to honor the enormous freedom that God’s forgiveness has won for us.

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

    As the Psalmist sings today: “The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.”  So should the Lord’s disciples be.

  • Friday of the Twenty-third Week of Ordinary Time: Anniversary of 9-11

    Friday of the Twenty-third Week of Ordinary Time: Anniversary of 9-11

    Today’s readings

    When I hear today’s Gospel reading, I think about my dad. When he was alive, he was a guy who seemed to know everyone.  Anywhere we went, he’d find someone he knew, even if we were away on vacation!  But Dad wouldn’t just know their names, he’d also know something about them.  He would know their talents, stuff they were good at; he’d also sometimes know if they were going through some kind of difficulty or hard time.  But most often, he always was able to see what was good in them.

    That’s the kind of thing I think Jesus wants us to do in our Gospel reading.  He wants us to know each other as brothers and sisters, instead of seeing everyone’s faults and sins and downfalls.  Because we all have faults and sins and downfalls!  And if we focus on those things, we’ll never be the children of God we were created to be, and we will never have peace.  Jesus uses the hyperbole of seeing a splinter in the other person’s eye but missing the wooden beam in our own.  We all have sins and downfalls, but we all have grace and blessing.  We’ve got to look for the grace and blessing, look for the best in people, because that’s what makes us children of God; that’s what unites us as sisters and brothers.

    Nineteen years ago today, right around this time in the morning, I was in my room in seminary.  That was the day I witnessed, on television, the horrible events that we now call the 9-11 tragedy.  I will never forget that horrible moment.  Over the course of the following days, we came to know that over three thousand people died that day, including many police and fire fighters.  And our world has changed a lot ever since: there is more security when you get on an airplane, more security everywhere, it seems.  And if we would listen to what Jesus is telling us today, maybe things like this wouldn’t have to happen.

    Sadly, the root of all of the tragedies like this, is that we don’t see each other as brothers and sisters.  Because if we did, we wouldn’t have terrorism, or racism, or crime in our streets, or any of the many sad things we hear about in the news each day.  We have to learn to take the wooden beams out of our eyes so that we can see each other as brothers and sisters.  Only then will we become everything that God intends for us.

    Today on this nineteenth anniversary of the 9-11 tragedy, we should do a lot of things.  We should study what happened that day so that we understand the issues and continue to work to change our world for the better.  We should remember those who gave their lives that day, especially those who tried to help the victims, and we should pray for ourselves and all people that we can become peaceful people who love the Lord and see each other as brothers and sisters, without all those splinters or beams in our eyes.

  • The Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    At the core of salvation and the message of the Gospel, Jesus came to forgive sinners and to make things right so that all might go to live in the eternal kingdom.  He came to give new life to sinners and to show them the way to the kingdom.  It’s in that spirit that I think we should dig into the interesting instructions Jesus gives in today’s Gospel reading.

    Those of us who have been in, or are in, seminary can tell you that the community of a seminary is somewhat of a cross between a fishbowl and a pressure cooker.  It’s a community unlike most others, because in seminary everyone pretty much knows everyone, and whatever happens, mostly everyone hears about it.  And so when something doesn’t go right, or worse, when someone is wronged, it becomes, well, a whole thing.  It was in that milieux that I first learned the whole concept of fraternal correction; that is, bringing your brother’s faults to him and working through that together.

    That’s the kind of thing that’s happening in today’s Gospel.  By the time Matthew’s Gospel was composed, the early Church community was already separate from the Jewish community.  They weren’t subject, then, to the daily expectations of the Jewish community.  And much like my seminary experience, they were in a bit of a fishbowl, because they were a recognizable community surrounded by non-believers.  So Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus teaching the community how they are to be a community.  This part deals with how to diffuse conflicts and right wrongs, and it begins with that idea of fraternal correction.

    Step one has the wronged party going to his or her brother or sister and discussing the matter privately.  This respects the privacy of both parties, and respects, and expects, their desire to live in concord with the other and not be simply a troublemaker.  This, I think, is different from how most of us were brought up.  I’m Irish and Italian.  So either we never speak about the problem, force it into repression, and harbor ongoing resentment, or we have a massive blowup and everyone gets emotional shrapnel.  Or sometimes all of the above.  Now, I have a great family, and I’ll say that most of that is a stereotype and isn’t functionally true, but it doesn’t mean I’ve never seen it.  And we could all tell the same story, if we’re honest.  So this idea of actually talking to the party who wronged us and working toward a solution is one that we need to take to heart.

    Step two, if the person doesn’t repent, is to get a couple of other people together to talk to her or him.  This, actually, well-reflects the last line of today’s Gospel: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”  When two or three come together, Jesus is there, waiting to make things right, wanting to affect forgiveness, yearning to bring salvation.  That’s why he came.  So that microcosm of the community has the power of Christ to bring resolution to the situation.

    Step three, if it gets that far, is to tell the Church.  This is the one that, in my experience as a pastor, we abuse all the time.  Way too often someone gets mad about something, and they go right to the pastor, or the bishop, or whatever.  They’ve skipped steps one and two, the steps that are more satisfying, and, in my experience, more likely to work well.  By the time it gets to the top, however it works out, chances are, no one’s going to be happy with the outcome.  But that is step three, and it’s there if it’s needed.  That reflects the power Jesus gives to the Church in the very next verse, the power to bind and loose: “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven…”

    Step four is the most heartbreaking of all.  If the person doesn’t listen to the Church, then treat her or him as an outcast, “as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.”  Gentiles and tax collectors were the collective term for the pariahs of society at that time.  But here’s the catch: Jesus welcomed Gentiles and tax collectors, so what does he really mean?  I think you know: if the person won’t listen to the Church, then I guess the idea is to welcome the person in and let the community of the Church and the presence of Christ soften their hearts and change their attitudes.  How’s that for a challenge for the week ahead?

    Here’s the idea.  None of us is an island; we are not intended to live on our own without interaction with other people.  But in community, there will be the occasional problem with someone else.  How we handle that has to reflect who we are and with whom we are identified, namely our Lord, Jesus Christ.  That same Lord who, again, came to forgive sinners and make things right so that all might find salvation.  All.  All of us find salvation.  Even the person who just cut you off in traffic; even the person that drives you nuts.  All of us.  And so, in our dealing with one another when we have discord, our goal has to be not just the absence of conflict, but instead the salvation of both of us, because that’s what’s ultimately at stake.

    Now, another challenge if you’re up for it.  This method of solving conflicts doesn’t apply just to individual conflict, or individual sins and sinners.  It doesn’t just apply in the fishbowl of a seminary or church community.  It has to apply also to societal ills and social sins.  It has ramifications about how we address racial injustice.  It has meaning for dealing with the government official or political candidate whose stance or actions are offensive.  It convicts us when we have, as a society, sinned against the poor and the marginalized.  The salvation of all is of ultimate importance.

    “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

  • Saturday of the Twenty-second Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Twenty-second Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    When I think about this Gospel reading, I wonder what’s really going on.  Were the Pharisees really concerned that the Sabbath was being violated, and that people were not experiencing sabbath rest from their labors so that they could grow in relationship with their God?  Probably not.  Contextually, we can see how the Pharisees were being pharisaical: they were concerned more about the minute aspects of the law than on bringing people to relationship with God.

    For Jesus, there wasn’t such a thing as a Sabbath rest from his mission of healing, and teaching, and bringing people to salvation.  So as he walked along with his disciples, it didn’t bother him that they were “working” by picking heads of grain to eat.  They were hungry.  And Jesus was all about feeding people’s hunger, no matter what kind of hunger it was, and no matter what day it was – Sabbath or not.

    He would be widely criticized for teaching on the Sabbath, but people were hungry for news of salvation.  He would be called blasphemous for calling God his Father on the Sabbath, but people were hungry for relationship with their God.  He would receive death threats for healing on the Sabbath, but people were hungry for wholeness, and relief, and new life.

    Jesus’ point here is that the Sabbath is never important just for itself.  The Sabbath was an opportunity for people to rest in God, and it was God, not the Law, that could decide how that happened.  The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.

  • Monday of the Twenty-second Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Twenty-second Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I think much of the reason people don’t preach the Gospel to others is because they think whatever they say or do has to be flashy, has to be as big as God is.  But that never works because God is always bigger!  Proclaiming the Gospel, at its core, is and always should be, as simple as showing people what God has done for us and in us.

    The defense St. Paul was making to the Corinthians in today’s first reading describes a way of living that might be very useful for us to consider.  Rather than caring about what people thought of him and proclaiming the word in a powerful way, he instead resolved to keep himself focused on Jesus and to say what he would have him say and live as Jesus himself would live.  His proclamation of example called those Corinthians to recognize a message not based on mere human wisdom but instead on the power of God.  We too can proclaim that same kind of powerful message in the way that we live.

    So if there are people in our lives who we wish knew the joy of the Gospel — and who among us doesn’t have someone like that? — then I think today we’re being called to take a fresh look at how we bring Jesus to them. Our proclamation of the Gospel has to be simple and authentic. If our proclamation rests on what we can do, it’s always going to fail. But if it relies on Jesus and what he has done in us, it will be irresistible.

  • The Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Here’s something I want you to remember today, and cling to in your spiritual life: We can’t do anything good in our spiritual lives all by ourselves.  We can’t be perfect disciples all by ourselves.  We can’t bring other people to Jesus all by ourselves.  We can’t overcome sin in our lives all by ourselves.  We can’t speak up for the marginalized or take a stand for life all by ourselves.  We can’t vote for the right candidate all by ourselves.  We can’t raise our children all by ourselves.  We can’t love the other people in our lives as they should be loved all by ourselves.  Take any good thing and put it in that formula: whatever it is, we can’t do it all by ourselves.

    And we shouldn’t.  But what we should do is stop doing things that way as if that was ever going to work.

    So over the past several Sundays, we have been seeing a lot of one of my favorite characters in the Gospel, and that is Saint Peter.  Just three weeks ago, the Apostles were out in a boat, and Jesus came to them on the water.  Saint Peter asked our Lord to command him to come to him on the water, and he did, and we all know how that went.  Then last week, Jesus was quizzing the Apostles about who people said that he was.  Peter was the one who spoke up and professed that Jesus was the Christ, the coming Anointed One, and Jesus proclaimed Peter the Rock on which he would build the Church.

    And here we are today, just a couple of verses later in Matthew’s Gospel, and Peter is in the spotlight again, but this time for a far different reason!  So, for context, it’s important to realize that Saint Peter, like all of the Jews of that time, had a preconceived notion about what the Messiah would be like, and what he would come to do.  The Messiah was to be a great king and military leader, championing the people and overcoming their enemies, giving them political and military peace and safety.  That’s how people thought about the Messiah in those days.  Peter was still clinging to those old notions, and so he could not fathom that Jesus would have to suffer and die.  And so Jesus chastises him for thinking not as God does, but as people do.  It’s a mistake we all make time and again in our spiritual lives.

    Peter’s faith journey was like that: up one minute, and down the next.  One minute he’s walking on water, the next he’s drowning; one minute he speaks eloquently of his Lord, and the next he’s the voice of temptation.  So maybe it seems like Saint Peter, flawed as he was, was an inappropriate choice to be the pillar of the Church, the first of the Popes.  But our Lord never makes any mistakes.  He chooses who he chooses for a reason, and I think that’s what we have to spend some time looking at today.

    If Peter was unqualified for the position to which he was called – and it certainly seems like that was the case – then we have to expect to feel unqualified for the roles to which we have been called.  Parents often feel that way when they start to raise their first child.  Priests feel that every time they witness something incredible – which is a lot of the time.  We are all unqualified, but God sees more in us, he sees our heart, he sees who he created us to be, and he won’t rest until we’ve fulfilled that potential.  It’s often said that God doesn’t call the qualified, but instead qualifies those he has called.  If that’s true, then Saint Peter is the patron saint of that!

    If Peter made some mistakes along his journey of faith and discipleship – and he clearly did – then we have to expect that we will make mistakes in our own faith journey.  One minute we’ll have a glimpse of God and we’ll feel like we could never let him down, then the next minute we’ll fall into sin, maybe a sin we’ve been struggling with for so long, and we’ll feel like God couldn’t possibly still love us.  But he loved Peter all through the good and bad, and he loves us, no matter what.  He pulled Saint Peter out of the stormy waves, and he will reach out and pull us out of our own storms of failure, as often as we cry out to him.

    The one thing you can’t fault Saint Peter for is his courage.  Eleven other guys stayed in the boat, but Peter wanted to be where our Lord was: out on the water.  Eleven other guys kept their mouth shut when Jesus asked who they said he was, but Peter did his best to make a profession of faith.  Even what he said in today’s Gospel was probably what the rest were all thinking, but he at least had the guts to say it out loud.  His life wasn’t perfect, his discipleship wasn’t perfect, his faith had a long way to go, but he knew that he couldn’t leave our Lord forever.  Even when he blows it in the hours before Jesus died and denies our Lord three times, he accepts our Lord’s forgiveness and fulfills the role Jesus gave him in last week’s Gospel.

    Saint Peter’s story kept being written all throughout the Gospel narrative, and our story isn’t finished yet either.  Our Lord loved Saint Peter and he loves us too.  What we have to do is rely on that love, accept God’s forgiveness, and get out of the boat and go to Jesus.  We have to stop thinking like people do, and start thinking with the mind of Christ.  We have to stop trying to do good things in our lives all by ourselves and start doing them with the grace and power of Christ that can accomplish anything in anyone.

    He can make a lousy fisherman the rock on which he would build his Church.  He can do great things in us too.  If we let him.

  • Tuesday of the Twenty-first Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Twenty-first Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Pay attention.  Keep your eye on the ball.  Don’t ignore the forest for the trees.  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  However you want to say it, our Liturgy of the Word today is asking us, as it often, rightly, does, to get things right and stay in the game.

    In our first reading today, Saint Paul tells the Thessalonians not to freak out if they hear about the second coming of Christ. Rather, they should be in the moment and live as they have been taught and formed in the Gospel that Saint Paul preached to them. They need to pay attention to what is going on in front of them, to be attentive to what the Gospel calls them to do, and trust that if the Lord comes in glory, he will find them doing his will and gather them to himself.  That’s the best possible way to enter eternity!  No need to scramble around in fear of what is to come.  When it comes, it comes, so let us pray that on that great day, God meets us doing what we’re supposed to be doing.

    Jesus today scolds the scribes and Pharisees, as he often does, about paying more attention to the minute bits of the law than they do to really doing God’s will. They are so caught up in the ritual cleansing of bowls and cups that they cannot attend to the purification of their own hearts. And that, Jesus tells them, is a complete disaster. Their blindness will eventually leave them out of salvation’s reach.  And we can be that way too sometimes, can’t we?  Sometimes we get so caught up on the little things that we miss what is truly important, and that can be a disaster. 

    And so we too are called today to pay attention, to keep our eye on the ball.  We need to be attentive to the needs of those around us, to reach out to the oppressed and forgotten, to always be mindful of the poor, to stand up for human life, to feed the hungry and take care of the sick – in short, we are to live the Gospel faithfully.  We shouldn’t be caught up in details, nor should we be overly concerned about when the Lord will return.  We can’t have our head in the clouds nor in the sand.  We must be attentive to what’s in front of us, the opportunity to live the Gospel faithfully.

  • The Twenty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    One of my jobs before I went to seminary was in the sales department of a computer supply company.  In that job, they taught us that one of the first good rules of sales was never to ask a question to which you didn’t already know the answer.  I think teachers get taught that principle as well.  I can’t help but think that Jesus’ question to the disciples in today’s Gospel falls under that heading.  Because Jesus certainly knew who he was.  But, as often happens in our interactions with Jesus, there’s something more going on.  And to figure out what that something more is, all you have to do is go back to the Gospels the last couple of weeks and see in them that Jesus is looking for people’s faith.  He was looking for faith from Peter when he called him to walk on the water.  He was impressed by the faith of the Canaanite woman last week as she persisted in her request that Jesus heal her daughter.  And now he queries the disciples’ faith – and ours too – as he asks us the 64 thousand dollar question: “Who do you say that I am?”

    He actually starts with kind of a soft-ball question. “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they recount all the obvious and probably much-discussed options of the time.  If there were bloggers and influencers and talk radio people and cable news in that first century, they too might have said “John the Baptist” or “Elijah” or “Jeremiah” or “one of the prophets.”  So this is an easy question for the disciples to answer.  But when he gets to the lightning round question, “But who do you say that I am?” there’s a lot more silence.  And, as often happens with the disciples, it’s the impetuous Peter who blurts out the right answer, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  Very good, Peter, you have been paying attention.

    But here’s the thing: that answer is going to require much of Saint Peter.  You see, his answer not just a liturgical formula or a scriptural title or even a profession of faith in the formal sense.  Jesus is looking for something that goes quite a bit deeper, something that comes from the heart, something integrated into Peter’s life.  He is looking for faith, not just spoken, but faith lived, and that’s why Peter’s answer is actually pretty dangerous.  If he is really convinced that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” then that conviction has to show itself in the way Peter lives.  He can’t just believe that and keep it under his hat.  If Jesus really is the One who is coming into the world, the Promised One of all generations, the salvation of the world, then Peter has to proclaim it from the rooftops.  Now, to be fair, we should note that Peter had a little problem with this around the time of the crucifixion, when he denied Jesus not just once, but three times.  But that’s not going to be his everlasting reality, because Peter has to be the rock on which Jesus will build his Church.  Whether people want to accept that or not.

    So I’m very sorry to tell you all this, but we have all gathered here on a very dangerous Sunday.  We too, you know, are being asked today, “But who do you say that I am?”  And Jesus isn’t asking us just to recite the Creed, the Profession of Faith.  That’s too easy; we do it all the time.  Half the time it just flies past us by the time we say “Amen.”  Jesus doesn’t want to know what you learned at Bible Study or what you read on Facebook.  Those things are nice, but He isn’t going for what’s in your head.  Jesus is calling all of us today to dig deep, to really say what it is that we believe about him by the way that we act and the things that we do and the life that we live.  It’s a dangerous question for us, too, because what we believe about Jesus has to show forth in action and not just word.  Our life has to be a testament to our faith in God.  And if we cannot answer that question out of our faith today, if we are not prepared to live the consequences of our belief, then we have a lot of thinking to do.

    Because if we really believe – really believe – that Jesus is who he says he is, then we cannot just sit on the news.  Like Peter, we are going to have to proclaim it in word and deed.  In our homes, in our workplaces, in our schools, in our communities – we must be certain that everyone knows that we are Christians and that we are ready to live our faith.  That doesn’t mean that we need to interject a faith lesson into every conversation or bludgeon people with the Gospel.  But it does mean that we have to live that Gospel.  In St. Francis’s words, “Proclaim the Gospel at all times.  If necessary, use words.”  People absolutely need to be able to tell by noticing the way we live our lives that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.  If they can’t, then our faith is as tepid as the Pharisees’ and that’s certainly no cause for pride!  Frankly, that too has consequences.

    Every part of our Liturgy has consequences for us believers.  “The Body of Christ.”  When we hear that proclamation and respond with our “Amen,” we are saying “yes, that’s what I believe.”  And if we believe that, if we are then filled with the Body of Christ by receiving Holy Communion, then we have made a statement that has consequences.  If we truly become what we receive, then how does that change the way that we work, the way that we interact with others?  “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life.”  “Thanks be to God.”  If we accept that command, then what?  What does it mean to glorify the Lord with our life?  Does it mean that we just do some kind of ministry here at Mass?  Absolutely not.  The first word in the command is “Go” and that means we have to glorify the Lord in our daily lives, in our business negotiations, in our community meetings, in our interactions with peers or the way that we mentor those who work for us.

    So if we really believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, then our lives just became a whole lot more complicated.  We may have to give up some of our habits and vices, we may have to make a concerted effort to be more aware of Christ in our daily lives, we may have to learn to treat other people as the Body of Christ.  We may have to do all this preaching in a hostile environment, because sometimes people don’t want to hear the Good News, or even be in the presence of it.  I think that’s more true today than every.  The Gospel is met with hostility just because Christians preach it.  And this is dangerous, because if we really believe, then we have to preach anyway.  Peter did, and it eventually led him to the cross.  What will it require of us?

    So I don’t know just how dangerous this will be for me or for you.  I’m not even sure how we will all answer the question right now.  But one thing is for sure, all of us sitting here today have the same one-question test that Peter and the disciples had.  Who do you say that the Son of Man is?  Be sure to take that to your prayer this week.

  • The Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s Gospel is a very interesting one.  And I say that in the sense that it is often the kind of Gospel reading that gets people riled up.  Because we can probably agree that this vignette portrays Jesus in a rather unflattering light.  Was he really going to snub this poor woman’s request?  Was he really going to let the child be tormented by a demon?

    I actually think that this is a good day on which to grapple with this Gospel and the issue of faith it brings up, because today, we have the great privilege of initiating these, our brothers and sisters, into the faith.  Over the past many months, they have been preparing for initiation by studying the faith and praying for God’s mercy.  Today, we have the great joy of seeing them baptized, confirmed, and receiving their first Eucharist.  This was supposed to have happened at the Easter Vigil this year, but a pandemic delayed the joy.  But even a pandemic is no match for God’s mercy, today we will fulfill for them the promise that God calls us all to be part of his Church, and members of Christ’s body.  

    So first of all, let’s just agree that Jesus was always going to help the Canaanite woman’s daughter.  Probably even before the Canaanite woman asked.  He’s God, after all, and he knows our needs.  He always wants the best for the ones he has created.  So some might tell you that this whole interaction was just to test the woman.  Well, that might be comforting if you love a God who has nothing better to do than test us and make us dance for him.  But that’s not our God.

    Instead, I think he wanted the Canaanite woman’s faith to be noted by the people looking on, including the disciples, and perhaps even by the woman herself.  Probably the only one who was sure of the woman’s faith in this story was Jesus.  Now, the Canaanites were a people that were presumed to be faithless and have no claim on the grace and mercy of God (as if any of us do!).  The Canaanites were the inhabitants of the Promised Land, which was given to the Israelites after being led out of Egypt by Moses.  So the disdain for them was long-standing by this point.

    But Jesus notes her faith as opposed to the faith noted elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel.  In just a couple of chapters from now, Jesus will berate the “faithless generation” that included the scribes and Pharisees.  And just last week, Jesus chastised Peter for being “of little faith” when he pulled him up out of the water.  Contrast that with what he says about the Canaanite woman: “O woman, great is your faith!”

    All of this begs the question for us: where are we on the journey of faith?  For most of us, it probably depends on the day.  But are we bold enough of faith to implore God’s mercy when we have no claim on it?  When our sins have been dragging us down and we’ve been committing the same ones over and over?  When we aren’t where we think we should be in our lives?  When we feel like we’ve disappointed almost everyone?  When we’ve disappointed ourselves?

    In those moments, are we of enough faith to call on the Lord and implore his mercy?  Because if we are, God is ready to answer us.

  • Saint Clare, Virgin

    Saint Clare, Virgin

    Today’s readings

    Whoever becomes humble like this child
    is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.

    Today’s Gospel paints the picture of humility that we need to appropriate in our lives in order to be led to heaven.  This is a virtue that Saint Clare, whose memorial we celebrate today, strove to possess.  Clare refused to marry at the age of 15, partly because she was moved by the dynamic preaching of Saint Francis.  He became her lifelong friend and spiritual guide.  So at age 18, she escaped one night from her father’s home, in order to flee the pressure to marry, and was met on the road by friars carrying torches.  They led her to a little chapel called the Portiuncula, where she received a rough woolen habit, exchanged her jeweled belt for a common rope with knots in it, and had her long hair cut by Saint Francis himself.  He placed her in a Benedictine convent, which her father and uncles immediately stormed in rage. She clung to the altar of the church, threw aside her veil to show her cropped hair and remained adamant.

    Sixteen days later her sister Agnes joined her.  Over time, others joined them too.  They lived a simple life of great poverty, austerity and complete seclusion from the world, according to a Rule that Saint Francis gave them as a Second Order, which came to be known as the Poor Clares.  Francis obliged her under obedience at age 21 to accept the office of abbess, one she exercised until her death.

    The nuns went barefoot, slept on the ground, ate no meat and observed almost complete silence. Later Clare, like Francis, persuaded her sisters to moderate this rigor, saying: “Our bodies are not made of brass.”  The greatest emphasis, of course, was on gospel poverty.  They possessed no property, even in common, subsisting on daily contributions.  When even the pope tried to persuade her to mitigate this practice, she said to him: “I need to be absolved from my sins, but I do not wish to be absolved from the obligation of following Jesus Christ.”

    In the Convent of San Damiano in Assisi, Saint Clare served the sick, waited on table, and washed the feet of the begging nuns.  She came from prayer, it was said, with her face so shining it dazzled those about her.

    We are all called to the holiness of life that leads us to see God’s glory.  To get there, we are called to humble ourselves, like a child, so that we can be great in the kingdom of heaven.  For Saint Clare, that meant breaking away from her family’s expectations of marriage so that she could be wed to Christ.  For us, there will also be some kind of sacrifice involved.  Through the intercession of Saint Clare, please God let us be willing to make the sacrifice so that we can see the glory of God.