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  • Monday of the Twenty-fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Twenty-fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today we begin a little excursion into the Wisdom Literature of the Scriptures.  The first readings this week will be from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, two of the strongest pieces of Wisdom Literature in the Old Testament.  Our friends in CREEDS studied the Wisdom Literature last year, so this is a bit of a nice review.

    Wisdom literature in general was intended to praise God and heroic virtue.  For the Jews, the source of this wisdom was from God himself. Wisdom literature in general used several distinctive forms, such as the proverb, the riddle and fables.  But in Hebrew, it is mostly the proverb that is common.  The proverb could distill the wisdom of the ages into a practical, memorable, pithy line or two that had a bit of sermon in it as well.  The proverbs had to be memorable because it was by memory that most of them were handed down across the generations and perpetuated in the society.

    Today’s bit of wisdom is one that finds its praise in justice.  That justice consisted of concern for the needy among us.  “Say not to your neighbor, ‘Go, and come again,
    tomorrow I will give,’ when you can give at once,” we are told.  We are exhorted to keep peaceful lives, finding our path not in lawlessness but in uprightness and truth.

    The Gospel reading gives us some of Jesus’ own wisdom.  That truth will eventually win out and all that is hidden will be revealed.  Nothing will be hidden but instead will be revealed in the light of God’s kingdom as a lamp on a lampstand.

    So today finds us to be wisdom-seekers.  As we begin our study of the Wisdom Literature this week, we may indeed find that God is pointing out a path to us, one that perhaps we had not seen before.  May we all be open to follow that path to justice, knowing, as the Psalmist tells us, “The just one shall live on your holy mountain, O Lord.”

  • Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Ever since I can remember hearing this parable of the day laborers, it has rubbed me the wrong way.  Maybe it does that for you too, as you sit here having just had it proclaimed to you.  Yes, the landowner describes himself as “generous,” but it seems like he is only really generous to those who came in to work at 5:00, only to work an hour or so, and get paid the same as those who toiled all day long.  It all just seems so unfair.  Why work through the heat of the day and put forth our best efforts, if we’re going to get paid the same as those who have done nothing but stand around all day?  Those of us raised with the American work ethic just bristle at such crazy talk, don’t we?

    But when a Scripture passage rubs us the wrong way and makes us bristle, that’s really a good thing, because it’s usually an indicator that the Words have something important to say to us.

    What’s interesting is that this parable in some ways is pretty timeless.  It’s not like the concept of day laborers has come and gone; we still have them all over our world today.  In cities all throughout our country, men and women continue to stand around waiting for work.  They are, perhaps, undocumented immigrants, those who cannot find sustained work because they cannot provide a social security number.  This election year finds that issue an important one.  How do we protect our borders and uphold our laws and still provide safety for those who are in need?

    But whatever we may think about that particular issue, what we need to see is that the day laborer fills a particular need for handyman help and odd jobs, and helps those people to provide for their families.  But it is a precarious system.  The youngest and fittest among them will certainly find work early in the day – if there is work that day, but the more elderly among them might not get an offer that day at all.  And as much as we might feel justified in cajoling them for standing around doing nothing, we have to realize that they are really standing around worrying about whether they’ll be able to feed their families that day.  Would you rather work all day, or worry like that all day?

    And you don’t have to be a day laborer to have those kinds of worries in today’s economy.  Those at the bottom of the pay scale know with acute anxiety the need to be able to work every day.  Missing just one day can mean the difference between being able to feed their families, or not; or to be able to fill a needed prescription, or not; to be able to make rent, or not.  So before we judge day laborers and low paid workers, we have to ask ourselves if we’d be willing to accept their worries for even just one day.

    So think of all that anxiety and multiply it many times over, and you’ll understand the plight of the day laborer in Jesus’ day.  Poverty was severe, and about 95% of the people were desperately poor enough to be on the verge of starvation.  So those laborers standing around all day were quite literally worrying about whether they would feed their families that day.  For those still waiting for work at 5pm, the fact that no one had hired them could quite literally have been a death sentence.  What an incredibly extravagant gesture it was, then, for this landowner to have paid them for the whole day.  In that kind of poverty, a fraction of a day’s pay might have been too little to have met their needs.  But with the action of the landowner, they were given an incredible, wonderful gift.

    But lest we still bristle for those who worked all day long, let us be careful to note that not one of the workers was treated unfairly.  They were all given the usual daily wage.  That those who worked a partial day also received the full day’s wage was an act of generosity, but not an act of unfairness to the others.

    And maybe those full-day-working laborers should not have complained.  How strict an accounting were they really hoping to have from the landowner?  Had they worked their hardest all day long?  Maybe, maybe not.  Did they take an extra break, or slack off toward the end of the day?  Was the work that they accomplished of the highest possible quality?  We don’t know the answers to any of those questions, but the laborers and the landowner certainly would have.  And if their efforts were anything less than exemplary, maybe even their day’s wage was an act of generosity too.

    Many years ago now, I heard about the deathbed conversion of actor John Wayne.  I thought at the time, “Gee, that’s convenient.”  Here he may well have led a life of excess and who knows what all debauchery and only on his deathbed was he willing to form a relationship with God.  Here those of us disciples have been working hard at it all this time, and yet some can get it just at the last minute?  That makes me bristle with thoughts of unfairness.  But, as the prophet Isaiah tells us today, our thoughts are not God’s thoughts, and our ways are not God’s ways.

    The fact is, I don’t know what kind of life John Wayne led.  I haven’t walked a day in his boots.  I don’t know how long that deathbed conversion had been percolating in his mind or how much he had longed for it all through his life.  We disciples can be pretty inappropriately judgmental about those who don’t live the kind of life we think they should be, and that is just as off-base as the judgment of the earliest-hired day laborers in today’s parable.  The daily wage we are looking for is nothing less than salvation, and whether one receives that at baptism or on one’s deathbed, all the Church should rejoice that salvation was found at last.  Because that’s how God sees it.

    And maybe we don’t want to ask for too strict an accounting either.  Because we come here today with our sins heavy on our souls, knowing that our labor hasn’t always been of the highest quality and our efforts haven’t been continuously stellar.  We ought all of us to accept the gift of salvation when it is given, in this spirit that it comes to us, and not be concerned about when it finally comes to others.  As the Psalmist tells us today, “The Lord is near to all who call upon him” – whenever that call is made.  Today we are being called to accept and love and celebrate the generosity of our God.  And all of us more-or-less hard-working disciples are blessed to be able to celebrate that in the most generous way of all, by receiving the very Body and Blood of Jesus Christ our God to nourish us and sustain us on the journey.  Thanks be to God for his great generosity to us in every moment!

  • Ss. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang & Companions, Martyrs

    Ss. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang & Companions, Martyrs

    Today’s readings

    Korea was introduced to Christianity in the late 1500s when some Koreans were baptized, probably by Christian Japanese soldiers who invaded Korea at that time. It was not until the late 1700s that a priest managed to sneak into Korea, and when he did, he found about 4000 Catholics, none of whom had ever seen a priest. Seven years later there were over ten thousand Catholics.  So he was one busy priest!
    In the 1800s, Andrew Kim became the first native Korean to become a priest when he traveled 1300 miles to seminary in China. He managed to find his way back into the country six years later. When he returned home, he arranged for more men to travel to China for studies. He was arrested, tortured and finally beheaded.
    St. Paul Chong was a lay apostle who was also martyred. During the persecutions of 1839, 1846, 1866 and 1867, 103 members of the Christian community gave their lives for the faith. These included some bishops and priests, but for the most part they were lay people, including men and women, married and unmarried, children, young people and the elderly. They were all canonized by Pope John Paul II during a visit to Korea in 1984.
    Today’s first reading speaks of a kind of “everything old will be made new again.”  This is the hope of all the martyrs, those like Andrew Kim and Paul Chong and their companions who gave their lives so that the Gospel would be known in every corner of the earth.  What they gave was merely their corruptible body.  No one could take from them their souls, which had been made gloriously white and gleamingly new as they washed them in the Blood of Christ.

    Many of us have to deal with frustrations and ailments of all kinds.  So hearing about a new, incorruptible body is a source of joy.  But the words of St. Paul are also a cause for peace, that even in the midst of persecution, we will never lose anything we don’t need for all eternity.  Because our body “is sown corruptible; it is raised incorruptible.  It is sown dishonorable; it is raised glorious.  It is sown weak; it is raised powerful.  It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.  If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual one.”  No matter what may come to us in our life, we can be at peace with the words of the Psalmist, “I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.”

  • Friday of the Twenty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twenty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today we get a bit of a glimpse as to how Jesus’ day-to-day ministry worked.  We can see three things in particular that characterize how things happened.  First, he journeyed to proclaim the Good News.  He met people where they were, and even sought them out.  This shows us God’s relentless pursuit of the people he loves.

    Second, he brought people with him.  He travelled with the Twelve Apostles, some of the women he had cured of evil spirits and of illnesses, some particular women (Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna), and “many others.”  All of these were drawn to Jesus for various reasons.  We can assume they had all been given some gift: healing, a call to ministry, recognition of their worth – and all of them had responded by wanting to be near him.  This models for us our response to God’s work in our lives.

    And finally, those travelling with him provided for his ministry out of their resources.  Some of the women were well-connected, especially Joanna, whose husband was a high official in the court of Herod Agrippa.  So she would have had resources to help with the ministry as well as leisure to follow Jesus.

    We can hardly visit this gospel reading, though, and not notice the meticulous mention of the women that were among his followers.  In a day where a woman’s participation in anything of a public nature would be totally frowned upon, Jesus reached out to women, and brought them into his ministry.  Certainly the Evangelist would never have mentioned it if it weren’t important to the Gospel itself.

    We come here today for Mass, aware that our God seeks us out in little and big ways every single day.  We too want to be close to him, and respond as did the Twelve, the women, and the “many others.”  Our desire for God and our yearning for forgiveness are themselves God’s gift to us.  Blessed are those who journey with Christ on the way.

  • Thursday of the Twenty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Twenty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    The ancient fathers of the church always taught that every day of our life is a preparation for death; that we should keep the dying of the Lord before us.  That’s a principle of the spiritual life that ought to still be relevant to us today.  This is not the same thing as merely saying “live every day as if it were your last.”  That kind of thinking would have us living kind of a hedonistic life, making everything all about us.  And that’s not what the fathers were advocating at all.

    Rather, they had in mind what is portrayed in our Gospel reading today.  The anointing of Jesus’ feet was certainly a preparation for his dying, that’s pretty obvious.  That’s the kind of oil she used, and everyone would have known that in Jesus’ day.  But her action was a preparation for her own death.  She came, knowing her sins, putting herself at the feet of Jesus, being a gift to him by her very presence.

    Because what Satan wants for us is to know our sins and be so ashamed of them that it keeps us from Jesus.  But what this woman models is the very opposite.  She approaches him burdened by her sins, and weeps at Jesus’ feet knowing her woundedness.  Jesus sees her openness, and that openness allows for Jesus to heal her to her very core.  She loves much, he loves much, and she is forgiven much.

    Which is what brings us here today, isn’t it?  We wounded ones come with love before our Jesus who loves us much, and forgives us everything if only we confess it.  And we receive the best gift of love there is, the Eucharist, his very body and blood, soul and divinity.  At the end of it all, may Jesus one day say to us as he did to the repentant woman, “Your faith has saved you, go in peace.”

  • Ss. Cornelius & Cyprian

    Ss. Cornelius & Cyprian

    Today’s readings

    St. Cornelius was ordained as the Bishop of Rome in 251.  The Bishop of Rome is what we now call the Pope, so you can see the significance of his position.  His major contribution was to defend the faith against the Novatian schismatics, a group who denied the readmission of those who had lapsed in the faith by being made to perform a ritual sacrifice to pagan gods, under the threat of death by the Roman Emperor.  St. Cyprian was a brother bishop who helped him in this struggle.  Both men were subsequently martyred for the faith.  Cornelius died in exile in 253, and Cyprian was beheaded in 258.

    The focus of both men was to preserve church unity during a time when there was much oppression against the church.  They could well echo St. Paul’s call for unity in today’s first reading: “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit.”  They reached out to those who repented of their lapse in faith and earnestly desired once again to be one with the church.

    Cyprian wrote to Cornelius, “Dearest brother, bright and shining is the faith which the blessed Apostle (that is, St. Paul) praised in your community.  He foresaw in the spirit the praise your courage deserves and the strength that could not be broken; he was heralding the future when he testified to your achievements; his praise of the fathers was a challenge to the sons.  Your unity, your strength have become shining examples of these virtues to the rest of the brethren.”

    In this year when our parish is focusing on welcoming then, we must also strive to focus on unity.  We are all one body in Christ.

  • The Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Youth Version)

    The Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Youth Version)

    This was for the afternoon youth ministry Mass.

    Today’s readings

    Today is the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, sometimes called the Triumph of the Cross.  On the face of it, this is a rather strange feast.  How could something as awful as the cross ever be triumphant, exultant, or glorious?  It’s been said that the cross was a very strange way to save the world, and I think that’s a good point.  Sometimes I think we get so used to seeing the cross that we forget how terrible it is.  We see the cross in Church, in our houses, on neck chains, and many other places.  Maybe we’ve gotten kind of jaded because we’ve seen it so often.

    But the truth is the cross was horrible, humiliating and terrifying.  So why on earth did God pick that way to save the world?

    First of all, we know we needed salvation.  We are all of us sinners, me too.  People all through history have been sinful, and time and time again we have turned away from God.  The price of all that sinfulness is death and a final ending in hell, or the netherworld as the Bible calls it.  But God wasn’t satisfied with that.  He made us to be with him forever, and so there is no way that he could let sin and death be the end of us.  He refused to live forever without us, so he pursues us relentlessly, even to the point of his own Son’s death on the cross.

    Because we had no way to make up for our sins, God did it for us.  He sent his only Son Jesus into our world to live our life and die our death.  He became one of us and acquainted himself with all our frustrations and worries.  He taught us the way to live and we have all that in the Gospels.  But he also took up our death, and died in the most horrifying, humiliating and painful way possible at that time.  He died a criminal’s death for us who had been criminals against God.

    But that death wasn’t the end of the story.  God raised Jesus up and made possible our own resurrection from the dead one day.  Just as death wasn’t the end for Jesus, it doesn’t have to be the end for us, if only we believe in Jesus and follow his way.  The Gospel puts it simply for us today.  We all know this verse John 3:16 because we see it on posters at so many sporting events.  “For God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish, but have eternal life.”

    People sometimes call that one verse the “Gospel in miniature.”  And it sums up what we believe about the Cross today.  Yes, it was horrifying, painful and humiliating, but because of the Cross we have the possibility of eternal life with Jesus Christ.  There would be no Easter without Good Friday.  Only God could take something as horrible as the cross and make it a victory.  And so today we thank God for the gift of salvation as we celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

    “We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.”

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  • The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

    The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

    Today’s readings

    Chicago priest and theologian Robert Barron speaks of what he calls a “beige” Catholicism. This is how he describes the Church during the years following the second Vatican Council. It was a time, he says, when “Christianity’s distinctive qualities and bright colors tended to be muted and its rough edges smoothed, while points of contact and continuity with non-Christian and secular realms were consistently brought into the light and celebrated.” Now, to be fair, Vatican II did indeed rightly bring to light the points of contact we have with our protestant brothers and sisters, and even our non-Christian friends. We do, in fact, have some things in common. But the downside of this emphasis was this kind of “beige” or blasé religion which challenged no one. “As a result,” Barron says, “the Christianity into which I was initiated was relatively bland and domesticated, easy to grasp and unthreatening.

    So what we were left with was a Catholicism in which one could come and go, there were no demands made of anyone so that they didn’t feel bad, and everyone was welcome to gather around and sing “Kumbaya.” And there may be a time and a place for all that, but it’s not what our religion is ultimately about.

    And so we have today this relatively strange feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, sometimes called the Triumph of the Cross. This feast enters into our Liturgical year and rips us from our complacency to gaze on the awful, disfigured body of our Lord, writhing in pain, nailed to the cross. There is nothing beige about this moment. We are forced to look at this horrible scene and try to figure out how it can ever be glorious. What is exultant or triumphant about such a horrible, painful, humiliating death?

    Now, to be fair, we have looked at the cross so many times in our lives that it may no longer be shocking to us. But in order to recapture the significance of this feast, indeed in order to recapture the significance of our faith, we must look once again at the cross and be repulsed. The book of Lamentations is a wonderful invitation to the cross: “Come, all you who pass by the way, look and see whether there is any suffering like my suffering, which has been dealt me when the LORD afflicted me on the day of his blazing wrath.” (Lamentations 1:12) If the thought of our God nailed to a cross and suffering an agony that can only be relieved by death doesn’t evoke strong feelings in us, then we cannot possibly ever come to a true acceptance of our faith.

    What we should see on that cross is that our faith is not so much about our quest for God as much as it is about God’s relentless quest for us. As Fr. Barron says, his quest for us is a quest even to the point of death. And that’s the triumph we see on that horrible cross. The truth is that our God simply loves us too much to let sin and death have any kind of permanent hold on us. So he sent his only Son into our world to walk among us, to live our life and bear our temptations and frustrations, and to die our death in the most horrible and shocking way possible so that we could be relieved of the burden of our sins and come at last to everlasting life.

    That’s the message of today’s Gospel. That one verse, John 3:16, which we see on placards and posters at so many sporting events, has been called the “Gospel in miniature.” “For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.” And sadly, we can get pretty bland about that too. We can accept the fact that our believing brings us to eternal life to the point that we never give it a second thought. But the cross makes that kind of beige faith impossible. It shows us that the eternal life of our expectation came at a price; a horrible, painful, humiliating price.

    We are an Easter people who dwell, as well we should, on the Resurrection of our Lord. But we must not ever forget that the Resurrection would never have been possible without the Cross. Without the Resurrection, the cross is definitely that awful reminder of a meaningless death. But without the Cross, the Resurrection would never be the joyful relief that it is. We are never a Church that is about just one thing. We are always about Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

    Which is good news for us because, as I’m sure you can tell me, every day of our lives isn’t Easter Sunday. We experience all sorts of death: the very real death of a loved one, failures of all sorts, sickness and infirmity, broken relationships, disappointments and frustrations – all of these are deaths that we must suffer at one point or another in our life. No life is untouched by hardship at some point. This feast, though, reminds us that God’s love can embrace all of that death, take it to the cross and rise up over it. Our life’s pain is not the end for any of us; those who believe in Christ can have eternal life, as John the evangelist eagerly reminds us today.

    And so, as much painful as it is to look with horror on the cross today, our eyes of faith can also see great beauty, exaltation and triumph. But we have to see both things. If we cannot bear to walk through the pain of the Cross, we’ll never get to the joy of the Resurrection – it’s both or nothing.

    So this feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross has us seeing anything but beige. Instead we see the black darkness of sin and death, the red blood of Christ shed for that sin, and the gold glory of the Resurrection. This feast must find us bending the knee at the cross of Christ, and proclaiming with our lips that Jesus Christ is Lord – Lord of our pain and Lord of our triumph – to the glory of God the Father.

  • Wednesday of the Twenty-third Week of Ordinary Time

    Wednesday of the Twenty-third Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Luke’s treatment of the Beatitudes is a little different than Matthew’s. While Matthew lists the blessings, it is only Luke who lists the woes. Whether we are looking at the blessings or the woes, it is clear that God’s wisdom is different than ours. How many of us would choose to accept hunger, grief, hatred and insult? How many of us would turn down wealth, plenty, laughter and good feelings? Yet the Lord makes it clear to us that what we choose may not ultimately be what we get.

    It’s kind of like my grandmother used to say, when we were playing and laughing a lot, “that laughing is going to turn into crying.” Usually, she was right. And that’s true of all of our lives. Time has a way of changing our circumstances and life comes with its ebbs and flows. But what Jesus is worried about here is a little more serious than that. He is concerned about those who make comfort and good feelings and wealth their number one priority, those who are addicted to these things. If this is what becomes our god, then what use have we for God our maker?

    Today’s Gospel is a call to get it right. To put our priorities in order. It’s not just about us; we have to take up the cross and follow Christ. That might indeed mean some hardship, some hunger, grief, hatred and insult. We might have to put aside the wealth, plenty, laughter and good feelings for a time. As St. Paul says in our first reading, “the world in its present form is passing away.” We are not home yet; we are mere travelers on this earth. And so the sufferings of this present time are but temporary. Our real reward is in heaven, and we pray that we don’t miss it by striving here on earth for all the wrong things.