Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: Prayer

  • The Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time: Persistently Prayerful

    The Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time: Persistently Prayerful

    Today’s readings

    Prayer is one of the most important elements of the Christian life, of the life of a disciple, and yet it is also, I think, one of the most difficult to master. Still, it’s something that we work at every day of our lives, and the working it out should be one of our greatest joys. In today’s Liturgy of the Word, we have just one element of prayer, and that is the element of persistence in prayer.

    Now I’m going to be real careful here. Lots of people give some lousy advice about prayer: you know, if you just pray hard enough and long enough, everything will eventually work out all right. I’m not going to tell you that, because things often don’t work out the way we want them, no matter how much we pray. So why even bother praying? Well, hang in there, we’ll get to that.

    We have a wonderful image of prayer in our first reading. I invite you to raise your arms with me if you’re able, and leave them raised until you can’t any more. This is what Moses had to do to keep the Hebrew army in a winning position against Amelek and his warriors. The minute Moses lowered his hands to rest, things went ill for the Hebrews, but as long as his hands were raised, things went okay.

    Now, again, I proceed cautiously here, because I don’t think things always work out the way we intend them as long as we pray. But there’s an element of this analogy that is very important, I think. And that element is that sometimes it’s hard to be persistent in prayer. Sometimes you get tired. Maybe your arms are not yet weary, but they might soon get there.

    I can think of a few times in my life when I’ve grown weary of praying. One of them was in my late thirties when I was trying, once again, and once and for all, to figure out what God wanted me to do with my life. I prayed and prayed and prayed, and it didn’t seem like God was answering at all. I finally grew weary of prayer and told God that he should give me a big challenge and whatever it was, I would do it. Then one day, the day of the Easter Vigil that year, I got a letter in the mail from a friend and it made everything crystal clear. Six months later I was in seminary.

    Sometimes in our weariness we have to let go of the shopping list of what we want God to do for us and just let God be God. Because praying isn’t supposed to be comprised of telling God what to do. But how are your arms doing? Are you weary yet? Well if so, you’re in good company. Moses found that to really be persistent in prayer, he needed friends – Aaron and Hur – to hold him up. That’s true for all of us, I think. We often need friends to hold us in prayer, to take some of the burden of prayer when persistence has become difficult. If you haven’t already, you can put your arms down now.

    Then what are we to make of the gospel reading? I mean, are we really supposed to think that God is an unjust judge who has no respect for anyone? Obviously not. I think that we’re supposed to see in this little parable that if even an unjust judge – one who neither fears God nor respects any person – if even that judge will eventually give in to the widow pleading for just judgment, well then how much more will our God who is infinitely just and doesn’t just respect us but loves us beyond all imagining, how much more will he pour out his blessings of justice on all of us?

    Which isn’t to say that he will definitely answer our prayers the way we want them answered. Those persistent prayers will be answered in God’s way, in God’s time. He may say “no,” or he may even allow something evil like an illness or some other disappointment. We may have to bear the burden of disease or the sadness of the death of a loved one. But in all of that, God will be with us. He may heal us in other ways, that we might come to know God’s love in the midst of our burdens.

    When we persist in prayer, sometimes the change that happens is not the situation, but we ourselves. We may grow in grace in some way that we would not otherwise experience or even expect. We may grow in our capacity to love, or in our awareness of the needs of others, or in our ability to be steadfast in the midst of chaos. All of these give honor and glory to God, which after all, brothers and sisters, is our ultimate purpose in life.

    So let’s get back to that question that I asked at the beginning of the homily. Why even bother praying if we’re not going to get what we want? I think we pray for three reasons. First, we pray to grow in our relationship with God who is our friend. As in any relationship, we open ourselves up to conversation, watching for God’s response, accepting God’s will and his desire that we grow in love for him.

    Second, I think we pray because God genuinely cares about us. If we are to grow in love, we have to know that he is open to us and desires that we communicate our needs, our hopes, our fears, our deepest longings to him. It’s not that he doesn’t know these things already, but the process of expressing them in prayer helps us to know those needs in deeper ways and helps us to be aware of God’s action and blessing in our lives.

    Third, I think we pray because that’s how we grow in holiness. The more that we bind ourselves to God by receiving his mercy and grace and knowing his love for us in prayer, the more we become new people, new creations.

    At the end of the Gospel today, our Lord asks, “But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” That’s an incredibly important question. So often it seems like the world, or even our lives, have gone horribly wrong. We may be upset about our country’s values, or the candidates for the upcoming election, or the seemingly constant wave of crime, terrorism, or natural disaster. But it’s important that we remember that we can’t stop praying about these things. If we ever want to see things change, we have to be people of faith. We have to persist in our prayer, even if we don’t see things changing as quickly as we would like. The Psalmist reminds us today that “Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Every prayer may not be answered in our time and in the way that we’d like. But by persisting in prayer, we will eventually and always become something better.

  • Thursday of the First Week of Lent

    Thursday of the First Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    During this first week of Lent, our Liturgies of the Word are teaching us about the Lenten disciplines: fasting, almsgiving and prayer.  On Tuesday, we heard the Lord’s prayer, and today we hear the prayer of Esther and Jesus’ injunction to persistence in prayer.

    I love the story of Esther, and as I often tell people, you should read the entire book of Esther from the Bible (it’s not very long).  It reminds us that we need a Savior.  Esther’s adoptive father Mordecai was a deeply religious man.  His devotion incurred the wrath of Haman the Agagite, who was a court official of King Ahasuerus of Persia.  Mordecai refused to pay homage to Haman in the way prescribed by law, because it was idolatry. Because of this, Haman developed a deep hatred for Mordecai, and by extension, all of the Israelite people.  He convinced King Ahasuerus to decree that all Israelites be put to death, and they cast lots to determine the date for this despicable event.

    Meanwhile, Esther, Mordecai’s adopted daughter, is chosen to fill a spot in the King’s harem, replacing Queen Vashti.  Esther, however, never had revealed her own Israelite heritage to the King.  She would, of course, be part of the extermination order.  Mordecai came to Esther to inform her of the decree that Haman had proposed, and asked her to intercede on behalf of her own people to the King.  She was terrified to do this because court rules forbade her to come to the king without an invitation.  She asked Mordecai to have all of her people fast and pray, and she did the same.  The prayer that she offered is beautifully rendered in today’s first reading.

    Esther knew that there was no one that could help her, and that it was totally on her shoulders to intercede for her people.  Doing this was a risk to her own life, and the only one that she could rely on was God himself.  Her prayer was heard, her people were spared, and Haman himself was hung from the same noose that had been prepared for Mordecai and all his fellow Israelites.  Next Wednesday evening, in fact, is the beginning of the Jewish feast of Purim, which is a festive observance of this very biblical story.

    God hears our own persistent prayers.  We must constantly pray, and trust all of our needs to the one who knows them before we do.  We must ask, seek and knock of the one who made us and cares for us deeply.  Prayer changes things, and most of all, it changes us.  It helps us to rely on God who gives us salvation through Jesus Christ, the One who shows us how to ask, seek, and knock.

  • Tuesday of the First Week of Lent

    Tuesday of the First Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    The prophet Isaiah and Jesus speak today about the great power of words. Isaiah speaks specifically of the power of God’s word, a word that will not return empty but will go out and accomplish the purpose for which God sent it.  We see the word that the prophet speaks of here, of course as the Word – “Word” with a capital “W.”  That Word is Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who comes to accomplish the salvation of the world, the purpose of God ever since the world’s creation.  Indeed, that Word would never return to the Father empty or void, but instead filled with the richness of God’s beloved children – you and me, the ones he came to save.

    The prayer that Jesus gives us today, the classic prayer that echoes in our hearts in good times and in bad, is a prayer with a specific purpose in mind.  That prayer, if we pray it rightly, recognizes that God’s holiness will bring about a Kingdom where his divine will would be done in all of creation.  It begs God’s forgiveness and begs also that we too would become a forgiving and merciful people, just as God is merciful to us.  Finally, it asks for help with temptation and evil, something with which we struggle every day.  It is the prayer above all other prayers, the prayer that unites us to the Father’s will for us, the prayer that contains every prayerful attitude or thought.

    Today’s readings are a plea that God’s will would finally be done.  That his Word would go forth and accomplish God’s purpose.  That his will would be done on earth as in heaven.  As we pray those familiar words, they can often go past us without catching our attention.  But today, maybe we can slow down just a little, and pray them more reflectively, that God’s will would be accomplished in every place, starting in our very own lives.

    Because to God belongs the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.

  • Friday after Ash Wednesday

    Friday after Ash Wednesday

    Today’s readings

    Sometimes people say they aren’t giving up something for Lent, they’re just going to try to do something positive. I think that can be a little permissively vague, to be honest. I usually tell people it doesn’t just have to be one or the other.  In fact, the Church teaches that it shouldn’t be one or the other.  Today’s Liturgy of the Word makes it clear that it very definitely should be both.

    Fasting is important because it helps us to see how blessed we are. It is important because it helps us to realize that there is nothing that we hunger for that God can’t provide. Fasting teaches us, once again, that God is God and we are not. This is important for all of us independent-minded modern-day Americans. We like to be in charge, in control, and the fact is that whatever control we do have is an illusion. God is in control of all things, even when it seems like we are in chaos. Fasting teaches us that we can do without the things we’ve given up, and that God can provide for us in much richer ways. Fasting is absolutely essential to having an inspiring, life-changing Lent, and I absolutely think that people should give things up for Lent.

    But giving something up for Lent does not excuse us from the obligation to love our neighbor. This falls under the general heading of almsgiving, and along with fasting and prayer, it is one of the traditional ways of preparing our hearts for Easter during Lent. We might be more mindful of the poor, contributing to the food pantry or a homeless shelter or relief organization. We might reach out by serving in some capacity, like volunteering for the mobile pantry, or helping out at the Daybreak shelter. We also might give the people closest to us in our lives a larger portion of the love that has been God’s gift to us, in some tangible way. Today’s first reading reminds us that fasting to put on a big show is a sham. Fasting to bring ourselves closer to God includes the obligation of almsgiving and prayer. Together, these three facets of discipleship make us stronger Christians and give us a greater share of the grace that is promised to the sons and daughters of God.

  • Ash Wednesday

    Ash Wednesday

    Today’s readings

    Rend your hearts, not your garments,
    and return to the LORD, your God.

    Today we begin something really important.  And I don’t mean just the smudging of our foreheads with the ashes of burnt palms.  That’s just an outward sign.  What I mean is the inward activity those ashes represent, what our collect prayer today calls “this campaign of Christian service.”  This time of Lent is so important to us because it calls us to newness in our relationship with God, that relationship that brings us to the eternal reward for which we were created.  That’s why we call it “Lent.” Lent means “springtime,” a time of rebirth and renewal and new creation.

    We have come here today for all sorts of reasons. But the most important reason we come to Church on this, the first day of Lent, is for what we celebrate on the day after Lent: the resurrection of the Lord on Easter Sunday.  Through the Cross and Resurrection, Jesus has won for us salvation, and we have been blessed to be beneficiaries of that great gift.  All of our Lenten observance, then, is a preparation for the joy of Easter.

    Lent calls us to repent, to break our ties with the sinfulness and the entanglements that are keeping us tethered to the world instead of free to live with our God and receive his gift of salvation.  Traditionally, our Church offers us three ways to do that: fasting, prayer and almsgiving.  Giving things up, spending more time in prayer and devotion, dedicating ourselves to works of charity, all of these help us to deeply experience the love of Christ as we enter into deeper relationship with him.  That is Lent, and the time to begin it, as we are told, is now: Now is the acceptable time! Now is the day of salvation!

    Today, you can take our Lenten handout with you as you leave Mass.  It has information about all of the spiritual events that are taking place here at Saint Mary’s during Lent, including our parish Mission with Father Ed O’Shea, a program for men on Saturday mornings led by our Fishers of Men group, and online mission allowing us to Encounter Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, and a Bible Study called “Witness at the Cross” which will prepare us for Good Friday.  There is also a list of events for our parish Year of the Eucharist.  I invite you to take one, look it over, sign up for what jumps out at you, and save the handout for future reference.  I’m pleased that we have an array of spiritual offerings to help all of us make the most out of Lent.

    The handout also lists our Holy Week, Easter, and Divine Mercy Sunday schedule, and lists times for confessions during Lent.  It’s important to make a good confession some time during Lent, taking that step of repentance which is the first step toward newness, re-creation, and springtime in our lives. 

    Today’s ashes are just the beginning of our “campaign of Christian service.”  Ashes have traditionally been a symbol of an interior disposition.  In scripture, you’ll hear of people sprinkling ashes on their person as they ask pardon for their sins.  Then they fasted and prayed for renewal, and changed their lives.  That’s what the repentance of Lent is all about: literally turning around and going in a new direction.  Getting back on the path and following our Lord who calls us to take up our crosses and follow him.  So ashes can’t be the last time you’re here in church, it can’t be the only discipline of Lent.  It’s the beginning, and certainly a good one.

    Finally, a word about receiving ashes today.  You’ll recall that last year, due to the pandemic, the Vatican directed that instead of etching a cross on foreheads, we return to the more ancient practice of sprinkling ashes on the top of a person’s head.  This is reminiscent of the practice I mentioned a minute ago, in which people sprinkled themselves with ashes as a sign of repentance.  This year, you have both options.  If you come forward with your head bowed, we will sprinkle ashes on your head.  If you don’t, we will trace a cross on your forehead.  Either is fine.

    So here we go.  Our Lenten fasting, almsgiving, and prayer begin today with the sprinkling of ashes.  It’s a wonderful gift to have this opportunity to make our relationships with God and others right.  It’s a great time to get out of our own heads and show our love for others as God has loved us.  And none of this, as the Gospel reminds us today, is to be done begrudgingly or half-heartedly.  None of it is to be done with the express purpose of letting the world see how great we are.  It is always to be done with great humility, but also with great joy.  Our acts of fasting, prayer, and charity should be a celebration of who God is in our lives, and a beautiful effort to strengthen our relationship with him.

    It is my prayer that this Lent can be a forty-day retreat that will bring us all closer to God.  May we all hear the voice of the prophet Joel from today’s first reading: “Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart!”

  • Monday of the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time – Presidents’ Day

    Monday of the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time – Presidents’ Day

    Today’s readings

    So the disciples are waiting for Jesus to come down the mountain after the Transfiguration.  They have attempted to cure a man’s son from the hold of a demon, but they were apparently unable to do so.  This seems to have led to an argument between them and the scribes.  You can almost feel Jesus’ exasperation.  Both the disciples and the scribes should have been able to do something for the boy, but they couldn’t.  Why?  Because instead of praying, they argued about it.  “This kind can only come out through prayer,” Jesus tells the disciples when they ask why they were ineffective.

    I often wonder, with more than a little fear, how many demons I could have cast out – in myself and in others – if I had a little more faith, if I prayed a little more than I do.  There are, of course, all sorts of demons: demons of illness, demons of cyclical sin, demons of impure attachments, demons of homelessness, poverty, and marginalization, and so many more.  Think of all the demons we could cast out if we just had more faith, if we prayed more fervently and stopped arguing with everyone over everything that isn’t to our liking.

    Today is Presidents’ Day, and we remember those who have served our country as the leader of the most powerful nation in the free world.  It’s a task that should never be undertaken lightly.  Some of these men have been great, and others really terrible.  All have been flawed in some way, because no one is perfect.  None of them has had the luxury of everyone agreeing with everything they said and did.  Perhaps those who have been more successful have been those who thought long and hard before responding to people and situations, taking their gravely important task to prayer before speaking and arguing.  One thing is certain, we need to pray for all of them, living and dead, because their judgment will be a difficult one: from those to whom much has been given, much will be expected. 

    Sometimes, when we are trying to overcome some problem, the last thing we think to do is pray, when it should absolutely be the first.  The disciples were guilty of it, the scribes were, and we are too sometimes, if we’re honest.  And all of us should know better.  I know that I myself can think of a number of problems I’ve tried to solve all by myself, when it would have been so much more effective to first turn them over to our Lord.  We can’t just cut God out of the picture and rely on our own strength; that never works – our own strength is so fiercely limited, whether we are the President of the United States, or just a citizen gathered in church for Mass.  We have to turn to the tools we have been given: faith and prayer.  And we can start by saying with the boy’s father: “I do believe, Lord; help my unbelief.”

  • Saturday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Thirty-fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Our readings have been reminding us that the night is far spent and the day is drawing near.  We are called upon today to remain vigilant so that we do not miss the second coming of the Lord.  And it is well that we receive that warning today, on the cusp as we are of the new Church year.  This is the last day of the Church year and tomorrow, well even tonight, we will begin the year of grace 2022 with the season of Advent.  The day draws ever nearer for us.

    That day, our first reading tells us, will be a complete reversal of the power structure the world has known.  On that day, the power of the evil one, who has destroyed the kingdoms of the world, will be taken away by “final and absolute destruction.”  What is left, what will emerge, is an everlasting Kingdom of the people of the Most High.  Christ our King, who we celebrated last Sunday, will then present to his Father, “an eternal and universal kingdom, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.”  (From the Preface of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe)

    That day might seem far off, but we cannot ignore the proclamation of Jesus from the beginning of his ministry that the Kingdom is here, among us.  So we need to be building that Kingdom through our acts of worship, repentance, and charity.  We cannot, as he warns in the Gospel today, have that day catch us by surprise like a trap.  No, we must be the vigilant ones, praying for strength to survive the tribulation we face every day in an anti-religious society and living the Gospel with integrity every moment of every day.

    Tomorrow is the New Year of the Church, so today might be a good time to make some New Church-Year’s resolutions.  How will we live differently in the coming year that the Kingdom might grow in our midst?

  • Tuesday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Try as we might for perfection in our journey of faith, we all of us stumble and fall sometimes.  That’s just the way, unfortunately, it is in this fallen world.  But that being the case, we have in our Liturgy of the Word this morning some saints who can accompany us on this precarious journey.

    We will be immersed in Jonah’s story for the next few days.  This story is not at all about the great things Jonah did.  It is more about the journey of discipleship that was Jonah’s life, and about the wonderful things that God did in and through the rather unwilling disciple who was Jonah.  Today’s reading has Jonah finally doing what God asked him to do.  Fresh out of the belly of a big fish, Jonah finally realizes that God’s call in his life is not optional.  So he does what he is told to do, and accomplishes the conversion of the evil city Nineveh.  But Jonah’s story is not done yet, and we’ll see this week the ups and downs he still has to endure.

    And then we have the story of poor Martha in today’s Gospel.  I often think that Martha gets a raw deal in this story.  Someone had to make the food!  But I think the real message of this Gospel story is that neither Martha nor Mary had salvation all wrapped up.  Because there are times when we definitely have to be Mary, sitting at the Lord’s feet in adoration, prayer and praise.  But if we are never Martha, our faith is useless.  There has to be a balance between our spiritual life and our service, or, in the words of St. Benedict, between our prayer and our work.

    So for those of us who haven’t yet achieved spiritual perfection, the message is that we have lots of saints in Scripture who are on the journey with us.  The point is to keep moving on the journey, so that we will one day reach perfection in that kingdom that knows no end.  And may God be glorified in the belly of the big fish or in Nineveh; in our Martha days and our Mary days, in our prayer and our work.

  • Ash Wednesday

    Ash Wednesday

    Today’s readings

    Someone reminded me that last year, I proclaimed that Lent to be the “Lentiest Lent that ever Lented!”  Certainly we have just been through a very Lenty year, with the specter of a pandemic, the sadness of racial injustice and social unrest, the frustration of political rancor, and all the rest.  The arrival of Lent again, already, well, it almost seems unfair, doesn’t it?

    And this Lent seems more unfair with the directive that we cannot trace an ashen cross on people’s foreheads due to the pandemic.  Instead, today, we will sprinkle them on your heads as you bow in penitence.  But it seems like it’s just another thing they’ve taken away from us, that the virus has stolen from us.  Unless we, people of faith that we are, change our outlook.  If we look at this as an opportunity to receive ashes the way most non-English speaking countries in the world have for ages, then we can see this as an opportunity for Church unity.  If we seek to still witness to our faith even though we can’t point to our ashes, then we can see this as an opportunity to strengthen our Christian witness every day.  I get it: it’s still another thing we’ve lost this year, but if we activate our faith and let God give us new opportunities, then maybe this can be the moment that we get out of the funk we’ve seemingly been in for the last year and become a Church and a people who truly live for Christ so much that the people around us who don’t know Christ get curious about who he is.

    In every day and age, times are tough.  Sometimes it seems times are tougher than others, and if this isn’t one of them, I don’t know what is.  But the only way we can get through that, honestly, is by being people of faith who entrust their times to the providence and love of God, who is most merciful.  Lent, friends, gives us the opportunity to do that, as it always does, through fasting, almsgiving, and prayer.

    Fasting can take on a whole lot of forms.  It’s not the same thing as going on a diet for Lent.  We should certainly give something up, something that will be uncomfortable, something we will miss.  It should, ideally, be something we have given greater place in our lives than we have to God.  In fasting, friends, we learn that there is nothing we hunger for that God can’t provide, and provide much better, if we let him.  Fasting makes us remember that God is trustworthy, that his love for us helps us in ways we can’t even imagine.  So perhaps we will give up a favorite food or a television show, or a video game or social media.  Maybe we will give up the necessity to always be right, to always get our way, to always get the final word.  Maybe we will give up deep-seated resentments, or unjust attitudes toward others.  Maybe we will give up just living for ourselves and taking care of “number one.”

    Almsgiving, too, can look different in every person’s life.  We are told that giving alms covers a multitude of sins, because giving alms shows love that is unencumbered by our ability to control things.  When we make a donation, when we give to a person in need, we let God decide exactly how that gets used.  It’s a way of freely giving of ourselves.  So maybe we will make a donation to the parish or to another charity; but almsgiving for us might look like giving of our time: helping to teach a religious education class or read to students, or looking in on an elderly neighbor or bringing them a lovingly-prepared meal.  Maybe giving alms for us looks like foregoing the daily Dunkin’ run or Starbucks stop and using that money to give to someone in need.  When we give of ourselves, we see God using us in ways we never even considered.

    And finally, prayer.  We’re supposed to be praying every day, of course, and I think most of us do.  But there’s always the need, I think, to grow in our prayer lives.  That’s certainly true for me.  Maybe our prayer has become rote, or stale.  If that’s true, Lent is a great time to shake things up and do a reset.  I always tell people who say that their prayer life isn’t going anywhere to try something new.  Maybe the Rosary, or Divine Mercy, or if you’ve been doing those, maybe some centering prayer or prayerfully reflecting on a book of Scripture during Lent.  It could be coming to Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, even if we’re doing it drive-up style for now.  It could even be as simple as zealously digging out a five minute break in the day to sit and be silent, looking at a religious picture, or listening to some inspirational music.  Whatever it is that we haven’t tried, it might be worth trying and see if we find it helpful.  Whatever leads us closer to God is always a grace, and God uses different experiences to speak to us all the time.  Try trying something new!

    Lent isn’t all about the ashes.  There’s a lot to it: fasting, almsgiving, and prayer.  But in another sense, it is all about the ashes: how will we quiet ourselves, humble ourselves, do penance, and come closer to Jesus?  I hope your experience of ashes, and of Lent, this year enlivens your life with Christ in ways you never imagined.  I pray that this forty day retreat moves heaven and earth in our parish, in our community, and in our homes.

  • The Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Heaven knows there are a lot of experts out there, or at least people who claim to be experts.  That’s why blogs and comments posted on news stories and Facebook are so popular: everyone claims to know something about everything.  Or at least it sure seems that way.  Certainly, it should give us pause when we think about the quality of information we get from these sources.  We see that time and time again: Whether it’s sports news, political news, or even the weather, half the time what we hear is pure conjecture, and not something resembling the truth at all.  Why we give so much of our time to hearing it should frighten us.

    This being the case, it should give us all the more pause when people give us their religious knowledge.  So often it starts with words like “I think…” or “In my opinion…” and perhaps ends with “I think that’s what’s right,” or “I think that’s what’s right for me,” or even, “that’s my truth.”  As if our opinion on what’s right is the truth.  But when it comes to faith and morals, it doesn’t matter what we think; our opinions are not truth, and the subjectivity of “what seems right for me” is completely useless.  Faith and morals are about the Truth – Truth with a capital “T”, and there is just one source for that knowledge, and that is our Lord Jesus Christ.

    For Moses, that relationship with the Truth was life-giving.  He was close to the Lord.  He had been up the mountain and seen the Lord face-to-face, which no one was thought to be able to do and live.  So when he told the people what the Lord had said, they trusted him.  In today’s first reading, Moses seems to know that that trust would dwindle after his death, and so he foretells that a prophet would come after him one day, a prophet like Moses himself, who would have the Truth in him.  He was foreshadowing our Lord, of course.

    So Jesus arrives in Capernaum, and you can almost feel the anticipation.  I imagine they had heard about Jesus and the things he said and did, and were probably eager to see what might transpire when he arrived in their town.  In the midst of teaching the people, he encounters a man with an unclean spirit.  And this is what illustrates the conflict.  The scribes were there.  These were the religious leaders of the people.  It was their job to write out and interpret the Scriptures and to be the resource of truth for their community.

    But they didn’t.  For whatever reason, they had long since abandoned their vocation and focused instead on adherence to the rules and making profit on God’s word.  Thus, they were unable to cast out the spirit from the man, and in fact, they would more likely have cast the man himself out so that he wouldn’t be a disruption.  But in order to see what would happen, they didn’t cast him out; they left him for Jesus to deal with.

    And Jesus does deal with him.  Only instead of casting the man out, he does what was more important and cast out the evil spirit.  The man wasn’t the problem; the evil spirit was.  That evil spirit was actually an icon, a photograph, of what was wrong with their religion: they tolerated the evil they could not control, and cared nothing for the people who needed their God.  The people are then astonished that his teaching was able to cleanse them from the evil in their midst.  This was a teaching with authority, and not the so-called teaching of their scribes.

    I think this is what we have to catch.  There’s lots of teaching out there, but precious little of it with authority.  Broken political promises, self-help gurus on television and in books, blogs that claim to know where the world is headed – none of this has authority.  There is only one authority that can cleanse us of the evil amidst us, only one source of Truth and that is our Lord Jesus Christ.  We need to do much more listening to him than to the other noise that’s out there.  We need to catch the Gospel and not the latest gossip, and then put what we hear into practice.

    If we would listen to our Lord’s teaching, it would indeed help us deal to with poverty, crime, violence, drugs, lack of respect for life, racism, healing a world plagued by a pandemic, and all the many other demons that are out there seeking to ruin us.  And so we have to tune in to the right message.  We have to seek the Truth and turn off all the noise.  Perhaps it’s time we made a retreat, or joined a Bible study or a book discussion or a prayer group, all of which we offer here at the parish all the time.  Lent is coming up in two weeks.  Now would be a good time to take advantage of our parish’s Lenten offerings to bring us closer to the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

    We have to give way more attention to our prayer lives and put God’s love and God’s will first.  If all we’re hearing is the lies, we’ll never get rid of the demons in our midst.  But if we would listen to the Truth, if we would harden not our hearts, we will indeed find ourselves healed, and then our land blessed, and all the world made right.