Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: repentance

  • The Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s Scriptures speak to us all about our need for a Savior.  If we didn’t need a Savior, this would be a pretty strange gathering.  Why bother getting out of bed and dragging ourselves here?   Even  good King David knew that he needed a Savior and he, very appropriately, helps us to pray in today’s Psalm response: “Lord, forgive the wrong I have done.”

    At the bottom of this need for a Savior is the fact that we are all sinners, every one of us.  We may not have done anything notorious, but we have to know that we all fall short of God’s expectations of us – and not just sometimes, but way more often than we’d like to count.  I know that’s not easy to hear, but it’s also not easy to argue against, is it?  It’s not popular to talk about sin even from the pulpit these days, because in our society everything is someone else’s fault.  In days gone by, if a child misbehaved in school, woe to him when he got home.  Today, if a child misbehaves in school, woe to the teacher when the parents find out the child has been held accountable.  If we spill coffee on ourselves and it burns us, we sue the purveyor who sold it to us.  Personal responsibility is not something we are ready to accept, let alone teach to our children.  Lord, forgive the wrong we have done indeed!

    And so all of us sinners who are in great need of a Savior have gathered here for this weekend Liturgy.  What we hear from today’s Scriptures is all about sin.  First, sin has consequences.  Second, repentance is crucial.  Third, forgiveness is freely given.  And finally, reconciliation brings joy.

    Sin has consequences.  This was what King David heard in today’s first reading.  You may know the story.  While the war was raging and his army was fighting for his own survival, David looked out and saw the wife of Uriah the Hittite, who was very appealing to him.  He sent for her, and had his way with her.  In the society of that day, such an act was an offense primarily against the woman’s husband, because it ended his blood line.  When that happened, the man’s property would not be passed on to his heirs after death, and would instead be given to the state.  King David was the state, so David’s taking of Uriah’s wife also meant that he stole his inheritance.  And just to make the deed complete, he arranged for Uriah to be “accidentally” killed in battle.  This was not just a minor sin or a tiny indiscretion.  What God says to David in today’s first reading is that yes, his sin is forgiven because God is mercy.  But, because of his wrong choices, David has unleashed a chain of events that will result in violence being part of his family’s inheritance forever.  That is not punishment for his sin, but rather the consequence of it.  Even when our sins have been forgiven, we often unleash consequences we could not have foreseen.  That’s how insidious and destructive sin can be, and that is why there is no such thing as a victimless or private sin in which no one else is affected.

    Repentance is crucial.  We see that move to repentance in King David’s behavior today.  When confronted by God, David is quick to repent: “I have sinned against the LORD,” David says.  And this is the crucial step.  God is always ready to forgive, but we have to recognize that we need to be forgiven.  We have to know that we need a Savior.  I think we struggle with this.  I remember the first Ash Wednesday after the new Roman Missal came out, and the words were changed for the giving of ashes.  A couple of people were really angry with me for saying “Repent and believe in the Gospel.”  I am so aware of my own need for repentance that I didn’t really know what to say to them.  God’s forgiveness takes two: God to offer it, and us to receive it.  That’s why the Sacrament of Penance is so important.  You have to get to confession at least once a year, and I say it should be more like once a month.  We should always put ourselves in the presence of God’s mercy.  If you want God’s grace, all you have to do is to make a move to receive it.  We all need a Savior, and we are all promised one if we will just ask for it.

    Forgiveness is freely given.  God’s response to David didn’t even take a minute.  As soon as he says that he had sinned against the Lord, God’s response comes through Nathan the prophet, loud and clear: “The LORD on his part has forgiven your sin: you shall not die.”  And notice, please, that the Lord doesn’t say, “OK, I forgive you,” as in “now that you’ve said ‘I’m sorry’ I will forgive you.”  No.  The message is that David’s sin has been forgiven; that is, the forgiveness has already happened.  It is not necessary that we repent, or do anything, in order that we be forgiven.  But it is crucial that we repent in order to receive that forgiveness and grace that is given to us freely, without a moment’s hesitation, by our God who is at his core, forgiveness and grace.  We should not, of course, commit the further sin of presumption by assuming that that it does not matter what we do because we are always forgiven.  But above all, we should not deprive ourselves of the grace of forgiveness by choosing not to confess and repent and receive what is offered to us.

    Reconciliation brings joy.  I think what is so important in today’s Gospel is for us to see how great is the joy that comes from sin forgiven and mercy received.  The unnamed “sinful woman” is not bathing and anointing the Lord’s feet so that he will then forgive her sins.  She is bathing and anointing him because she is overjoyed that her many sins have been forgiven.  The little parable Jesus tells to Simon the Pharisee makes that clear: the one who was forgiven the greater debt loves more.  He loves not to have his debt forgiven, but instead he loves because the debt has already been canceled.  And so we too come together with joy this day because the debt of our sin has been erased.  We pour out our time, talent, and treasure, and especially our own lives, on this altar of sacrifice, because our sins have been forgiven and the debt has already been paid by our Savior who stretches out his arms on the cross so that we might have salvation and might be reconciled with our God who created us for himself.  Today in that silent time after Communion, we should all be filled with joy because of the great forgiveness that is ours when we sinful people realize that we need a Savior and turn to find his arms already open to us.  What other response is there to that grace but tears of joy?

    It might not be popular to talk about sin these days but, brothers and sisters in Christ, it’s the only reason we’re here together this day.  If we don’t need a Savior, then we don’t need to waste an hour in Church, do we?  But the truth is we are a sinful people, a people in need of a Savior, who gather together to sing the words of King David, “Lord forgive the wrong I have done.”  In our gathering we can cry out in tears of joy for forgiveness freely given and mercy abundantly bestowed. “Blessed” – indeed happy – “is the one whose fault is taken away, whose sin is covered.”

  • Thursday of the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    This morning’s readings give us a sense, I think, of the urgency of repentance and the real need for discipleship.  The first reading from the book of Sirach reminds us that God’s patience should not be mistaken for apathy.  Just because God does not strike us down on the spot for a transgression does not mean that it our transgressions are not offensive to God.  In fact, they are incredibly offensive, which is why the price of our sins was so great.

    In the Gospel reading today, Jesus encourages us disciples to rid ourselves of everything that serves as an obstacle to living our call.  If even some member of our body causes us to sin, we should part with it!  That’s an incomprehensible directive, and it serves to illustrate the focus that we disciples have to have.

    The Psalmist sings “Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.”  Amen to that.  As we turn up the fire in our spiritual lives in these post-Pentecost days, it would be well for us to remember that our repentance and discipleship are not optional, that they cannot wait for a more opportune time, that we can’t let anything get in the way of our relationship with God.  Blessed are we who hope in the Lord!

  • Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

    Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

    Today’s readings

    I’ve always felt that the celebration of Palm Sunday was a little strange.  We start out on a seemingly triumphant note.  Jesus enters Jerusalem, the city of the center of the Jewish religion, the city he has been journeying toward throughout the gospel narrative, and he enters it to the adulation of throngs.  Cloaks are thrown down in the street, the people wave palms and chant “Hosanna.”  This is it, isn’t it?  It seems like Jesus’ message has finally been accepted, at least by the crowds who have long been yearning for a messiah to deliver them from foreign oppression.

    Only that wasn’t the kind of salvation Jesus came to offer.  Instead, he preached forgiveness and healed people from the inside out.  He called people to repentance, to change their lives, to hear the gospel and to live it every day.  He denounced hypocrisy, and demanded that those who would call themselves religious reach out in love to the poor and those on the margins.  It wasn’t an easy message for them to hear, it wasn’t the message they thought the messiah would bring.

    And that’s what brings us to the one hundred and eighty degree turn we experience in today’s second gospel reading.  Enough of this, they say, the religious leaders must be right: he must be a demon, or at least a troublemaker.  Better that we put up with the likes of Barabbas.  As for this one, well, crucify him.

    Who are we going to blame for this?  Whose fault is it that they crucified my Lord?  Is it the Jews, as many centuries of anti-Semitism would assert?  Was it the Romans, those foreign occupiers who sought only the advancement of their empire?  Was it the fickle crowds, content enough to marvel at Jesus when he fed the thousands, but abandoning him once his message was made clear?  Was it Peter, who couldn’t even keep his promise of standing by his friend for a few hours?  Was it the rest of the apostles, who scattered lest they be tacked up on a cross next to Jesus?  Was it Judas, who gave in to despair thinking he had it all wrong?  Was it the cowardly Herod and Pilate who were both manipulating the event in order to maintain their pathetic fiefdoms?  Who was it who put Jesus on that cross?

    And the answer, as we well know, is that it’s none of those.  Because it’s my sins that led Jesus to the Way of the Cross.  It’s my sins that betrayed him; it’s my sins that have kept me from friendship with God.  And so he willingly gave his life that I might have life.  And you.  He gave himself for us.

  • Fourth Sunday of Lent/Second Scrutiny [Cycle A Readings]

    Fourth Sunday of Lent/Second Scrutiny [Cycle A Readings]

    Today’s readings

    The theme for this week’s liturgy is vision and light.  The gospel gets at that pretty quickly, healing the man born blind in the first couple of minutes of what is admittedly a pretty long reading.  And that’s a good thing because, honestly, who cares about the man born blind?  I know that sounds terrible, but he lived a couple thousand years ago, and he was healed, so you know, good for him, but how does that affect us?  I’ll tell you how it affects us: the man born blind is us.  We all have affected vision: that’s why the first reading is such a slap in our faces.  So we have to decide today if we are the man born blind who is easily and quickly healed, or if we want to be the Pharisees who, at the end of the day, never regain their sight because they just don’t want to.

    So maybe you’re asking the same question those Pharisees asked, “surely we are not also blind, are we?”  Of course we are.  That’s why we have Lent: to realize our brokenness and to accept the healing power of Christ.  Lent calls us to remember that we are dust, that we are broken people fallen into sin, but that none of that is any match for the power of Christ risen from the dead, if we just let him put a little clay on our eyes.

    Today’s Gospel then is a kind of journey to clearer vision.  We are all born blind, in a sense, and it takes the presence of Jesus to clear our vision.  Just as the man born blind was sent to the pool of Siloam, we too are sent to the waters of baptism, which clears our eyes and helps us to really see.  Our Elect, Korrin, will experience that in a very literal way this coming Easter Vigil.  In baptism, the darkness of life is transformed by the presence of Christ, the Light of the World.  We see that light shine brighter and brighter in today’s Gospel.  During the course of all the questionings that follow, the man’s vision becomes clearer and clearer.  At first he doesn’t know who Jesus is or where to find him.  Later on he testifies that Jesus is a prophet and finally, with the help of Jesus’ instruction, that Jesus is the Son of Man and worthy of worship.  We make this same journey ourselves.  From the waters of baptism, we need to continue the conversation and return to Christ again and again to grow in our faith.  We grow in the way that we see Jesus through our lives.  Our faith when we were young is not the same faith that works for us later in life.  At one point Jesus is a friend walking with us on life’s path; later on he might be a rock that helps us in a particularly stormy time of life.  Still later, he might be the one calling us to become something new, something better than we think we can attain.  Jesus is always the same, but we are different, and Jesus is with us at every point of life’s journey, if we open our eyes to see him.

    Traditionally, today is Laetare Sunday – laetare being Latin for “rejoice.”  That’s why we’re wearing these rose-colored vestments today.  We are now pretty much half way through Lent, and with eyes recreated by our own trips to the pool of Siloam – the waters of baptism – we can begin to catch a glimpse of Easter joy.  Laetare Sunday reminds us that even in the penance of Lent, that it’s not penance for penance’s own sake: there is reason for rejoicing.  We have, indeed been born blind.  But we don’t have to stay that way.

  • Saturday of the Third Week of Lent

    Saturday of the Third Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

    These are perhaps the most important words of the spiritual life, uttered today by the repentant tax collector in the temple area.  These words are so important, actually, that they form the basis of one of the most ancient acts of contrition that we have, called the Jesus Prayer.  The Jesus Prayer comes out of the eastern and orthodox Church traditions, and the full version is “Lord Jesus Christ, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  Everyone should memorize this prayer.

    The Jesus Prayer, and our readings today, give us one of the great tools of Lent: humility.  Humility is that great virtue that recognizes that I need a Savior.  That because of my sins, I have no access to God, except for the fact that he loves me beyond anything I have a right to hope for.  Humility recognizes that God loves us all so much that he gave everything for us, poured himself out for love of us, and desires to heal all of our sins and brokenness.

    All it takes is a little repentance: realizing my sinfulness, turning back to Christ, letting him love me, and accepting his forgiveness.  The prayer that manifests that kind of attitude is not the prayer of the Pharisee in the Gospel reading today: his attitude is the antithesis of what prayer needs to be.  The prayer that manifests the attitude we must have is that of the tax collector: “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

    O, that God would grant us the great gift of humility this Lenten day.

  • The Third Sunday of Lent

    The Third Sunday of Lent

    Today’s readings

    Our memories of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut are not old ones.  We still may remember where we were when we heard of the tragedy, we may even recall with great clarity the knot in our stomach, the rage in our head, the overwhelming sadness.  Tragedy is like that: it shakes our world and turns everything on its head, crying out for an explanation – why would God let something like that happen?

    This seems to be the situation that is giving rise to the conversation in today’s Gospel reading.  Jesus is told about some people who were killed by Pilate while they were offering sacrifices in the Temple.  Can you imagine: people killed while at prayer!  Certainly those who heard about the slaughter were shocked by it.  News of another tragedy also seems to have been common knowledge, so Jesus includes it to illustrate what he intends to say.  It seems that at Siloam a tower collapsed killing 18 people.  These tragic events were on everyone’s lips – the news of the day.  Times are different, but the events seem like they could have happened yesterday: a tyrant kills the citizens of his own country; faulty building construction causes a wall to collapse killing passersby on the street below.

    Commonly in that time, people would have attributed such a tragedy to sin – God was punishing the people for something they, or their loved ones, had done.  But Jesus isn’t having any of that in the Gospel: their sins were no greater than anyone else’s sins, no greater than our own sins.  We all have sinned, and we all need to repent, that’s the message here.  We don’t know if we will have tomorrow to do that; we don’t know if we will fall victim to tragedy or illness or disease; we just don’t have a guarantee of another day.  So the acceptable time for repentance is now.

    To illustrate that, Jesus tells the parable of the fig tree.  It seems an odd parable, so there are a couple of things we should all know before we roll up our sleeves and dig in.  First of all, fig trees actually did take three years to bear fruit.  During those three years, of course, they would need to be nourished and watered and tended.  But when those three years of hard work were up, the farmer certainly wanted his fig newtons!  And the second piece of background is that, since the days of the prophet Micah, the fig tree has been a symbol for the nation of Israel, and Jesus’ hearers would have known that.  So when they hear of a fruitless fig tree, it was a little bit of an accusation.

    Conventional wisdom is that if the tree doesn’t bear fruit after three years of labor and throwing resources at it, you cut it down and plant a new one; why exhaust the nutrients of the soil?  But this gardener is a patient one; he plans to give it another year and some extra TLC in hopes that it will bear fruit.  So it is for us, the heirs to the promise to Israel.  If we are found unfruitful, our Lord gives us extra time and TLC in order that we might have time to repent, take up the Gospel, and bear fruit for the kingdom of God.  Our gardener is a patient one too.

    To a point, though.  We don’t get forever; if we still don’t bear fruit when the end comes, then we will have lost the opportunity to be friends of God, and once cut down in death, we don’t have time to get serious about it.  The time for repentance is now.  The time for us to receive and share God’s grace is now.  The time for us to live justly and work for the kingdom is now.  Because we don’t know that there will be tomorrow; we can never be presumptuous of God’s grace.

    The consolation, though is this: we don’t have to do it alone.  The Psalmist today sings that our God is kind and merciful:  We get the TLC that our Gardener offers; the grace of God and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  The Lord God, our great “I AM,” comes to us and leads us out of captivity to sin just as he was preparing to do for the Israelites in the first reading today.  We are always offered the grace of exodus, all we have to do is get started on the journey and begin once again to bear the fruit of our relationship with Christ.

  • Ash Wednesday

    Ash Wednesday

    Today’s readings

    Behold: now is the acceptable time!
    Behold: now is the day of salvation!

    This is the way the prophet Joel calls the Israelites, and all of us, to repentance.  Repentance is an important spiritual theme for Lent: in fact, if it were not for our need for repentance, we wouldn’t need Jesus, he wouldn’t have to have taken on flesh, he wouldn’t have to suffer and die.  But he did, and he did that not just because religion in those days was out of whack, or that people in that time were more in need of repentance than people in other times, including our own.  He did that because we all have need of repentance, now just as much as always.  Each of us is probably not evil to the core, but we all have things we need to let go of and move away from, so that we can return to the Lord.  That’s repentance, and that’s what Lent is all about.

    It’s so much a part of Lent that one of the two instructions we can give when someone comes to us for ashes is “Repent and believe in the Gospel.”  The other, of course, is “Remember, you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  I tend to use both of these, alternating between the two, and letting the Holy Spirit decide who hears each.   I do that because I think they are both fitting reminders for us as we enter into holy Lent.  We have to keep repentance, and our own return to dust one day, in our minds and hearts so that we can long for the salvation God wants to bring us.

    We have come here today for all sorts of reasons. Lots of us may still have the remnants of old and bad teaching that you have to come to Church on Ash Wednesday or something horrible will happen to you, or maybe you even think that getting ashes on Ash Wednesday is what makes us Catholic.  When you don’t come to Church on a regular basis, you lose contact with God and the community, and yes, that is pretty horrible, but not in a superstitious kind of way.  The real 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 are the grateful 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.  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 Joel tells us, is now:  Now is the acceptable time!  Now is the day of salvation!

    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 after Epiphany

    Monday after Epiphany

    Today’s readings

    “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

    Perhaps our devotion for this Epiphany week should be to pray the Mysteries of Light of the Rosary.  Epiphany is a time of manifestation, of light coming into the dark place that our world can be at times.  We long to see, and more than that we long to see Christ, the one who comes with peace and justice to make all things right.

    Today’s Mystery of Light, then would be “Jesus proclaims the kingdom of God with its call to repentance,” the third Mystery of Light.  Those, in fact, are his very words this morning.  This preaching is accompanied by the great and mighty acts of healing, which have the crowds flocking to him in droves.  They definitely see in Jesus a light that shines into the darkness of their lives, marked as they are by illness both physical and mental, but also perhaps overwhelmingly spiritual.

    But there were all sorts of people who didn’t flock to Jesus.  Many saw him as a charlatan and thought his healings were smoke and mirrors.  They preferred the darkness.  The same is true today.  Many hear the word and turn away from it.  Many hear of the kingdom with its call to repentance and choose to reject it.  But we cannot be that way.  We have the Light, and we are called to live in the Light.  Living in that Light, as the Psalmist tells us, gives us the nations for our inheritance.

  • The Third Sunday of Advent [C]

    The Third Sunday of Advent [C]

    Today’s readings

    Today’s readings and liturgy call us to rejoice.  That’s the reason for the rose-colored vestments and the more joyful tone of today’s readings.  This is called Gaudete Sunday: gaudete being Latin for “rejoice,” the first word of today’s introit or proper entrance antiphon which says: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice.  Indeed the Lord is near.”

    And there is reason to rejoice.  The prophet Zephaniah tells the people Israel that, even though their sins had displeased the LORD to the point that he gave them over to the hands of their enemies, he has relented in his judgment against them and will deliver them from their misfortune.  Their deliverance is so complete that the LORD will even rejoice over them with gladness!  If that’s not a reason to sing joyfully and rejoice with all their hearts, there never will be one!

    In his letter to the Philippians, Saint Paul calls us to rejoice too.  The reason he calls for rejoicing is that “The Lord is near.”  He was referring to Jesus’ return in glory, of course, which they thought would be relatively soon in those days.  While he never saw that in his lifetime, we may.  Or perhaps our children will, or their children.  One thing we definitely know is that the Lord is near.  He does not abandon us in our anxieties but instead listens as we pray to him and make our petitions with thanksgiving.  Our Lord is as near to us as our next quiet moment, our next embrace of someone we love, our next act of kindness.  Rejoice indeed!

    Maybe this call to rejoice rings a little hollow today, based on the events of Friday morning in Newtown, Connecticut.  But our faith tells us that’s not true.  The Psalmist sings today about the kind of hope our world needs right now:

    God indeed is my savior;
    I am confident and unafraid.
    My strength and my courage is the LORD,
    and he has been my savior.

    And it is up to us to bring this kind of hope to a world that has almost become accustomed to horror and shock and terror and sadness.  The world may almost prefer to sit in this kind of darkness, but not people of faith.  People of faith instead light a candle of hope and dance in the light of Christ!  People of faith can rejoice because even in times of sadness and despair, the presence of our God is palpable, realized in stories of heroism and seen in acts of charity and grace in moments just like this.

    And so today we rejoice because the Lord is near.  We light that third, rose-colored candle on our Advent wreath and we see there’s not many candles left until the feast of the reason for our rejoicing.  We look forward to celebrating the Incarnation, perhaps the greatest and best of the mysteries of faith.  That God himself, who is higher than the heavens and greater than all the stars of the universe, would humble himself to be born among us, robing himself with our frail flesh, in order to save us from our sins and make his home among us for all eternity – that is a mystery so great it cannot fail to cause us to rejoice!  Indeed that very presence of God gives hope even in the worst tragedy – THE LORD IS NEAR!

    The people who came to Saint John the Baptist in today’s Gospel knew of the nearness of their salvation, because John preached it with intensity.  So today they come to him and ask them what they should do – what’s the next step?  And he tells them.  They need to repent, to reform their lives, and keep watch for the One who is mightier still than he is.  The coming Savior will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire, and the only way to be prepared for that is to turn away from their practices of darkness and live with integrity.

    It’s a message that is intended for us too.  Because we also could clean up our act a bit.  We too have need to repent.  And I say that advisedly, because back on Ash Wednesday when I used one of the exhortations that we can use when distributing ashes: “Repent and believe in the Gospel,” a couple of people were very angry at me for telling them they had to repent.  So let’s be clear about this.  We know in our hearts that there are just two people in this room who don’t need to repent.  One would be the man nailed to the cross up there, and the other is the beautiful lady standing next to Saint Joseph over there by the candles.  If you’re not Jesus or Mary, you have sin in your life – maybe not serious sin, but maybe there is.  Whatever kind of sin is there, Advent calls us to repent.

    Because sin is what keeps us from rejoicing, brothers and sisters in Christ.  Sin keeps us mired in the darkness.  Sin breaks the relationship with God and others that keeps us from seeing that the Lord is near.  But we rejoice because our God came to us to give us the antidote to that.  He refused to keep us mired in sin, but instead came to us and calls us to repent so that he can forgive and we can rejoice.  That’s good news, and that’s why we celebrate – yes, celebrate! – the sacrament of Penance.

    In order to help you to prepare so that you can rejoice, we have a penance service scheduled for this Thursday at 7pm.  Several priests will be there to hear your confession.  I hope that you will be able to be there.  But if not, there are still two more opportunities for confession before Christmas.  Three of us will hear confessions on Saturday evening from 4:00 to 4:45, and then again on Christmas Eve right after morning prayer, from about 8:30 until 9:30.  If none of those work for your schedule, our bulletin has a list of confessions at parishes in our area.

    I want you to go to confession before Christmas because I want you to be able to rejoice.  If you have not been to Confession in years and maybe are a little ashamed or scared or don’t know how to do it, then rejoice and go anyway.  The priest will welcome you back warmly and help you to make a good confession.  That’s what we do; that’s why we are priests, and it’s our privilege to help you experience the Lord’s mercy and kindness so that you can once again rejoice.  So if you haven’t been to confession yet this Advent, I want you to go this week.  You’ll rejoice and be glad when you do.

    These final days of Advent call us to prepare more intensely for the Lord’s birth.  They call us to clamor for his Incarnation, waiting with hope and expectation in a dark and scary world.  These days call us to be people of hope, courageously rejoicing that the Lord is near!  Come, Lord Jesus!  Come quickly and do not delay!

  • Saint John of the Cross

    Saint John of the Cross

    Today’s readings

    Today at Mass we hear from three prophets.  A prophet is a person who helps us to see God.  And during Advent these prophets help us to see God coming to be born in us.

    And we have to admit: lots of times we don’t see God.  We’re either too busy to notice God, or too wrapped up in ourselves to care about God, or just completely disinterested in the whole notion of God.  Sometimes we just don’t want to see God because we would rather be doing what we want to do and not what’s best for ourselves or others.  God can see through all of that, and prophets help us to see through it too.

    We hear from three prophets today.  The first is the prophet Isaiah, and we heard from him in today’s first reading.  The people of Israel had turned away from God a whole lot.  God often made a new covenant with them, and then after a while, they would lose interest and get distracted and turn away from God all over again.  So in today’s reading, Isaiah is trying to wake them up once again.  He tells them if they had stayed on the right path, the path God marked out for them when he made a covenant with them, if they had followed his commands, they would have been blessed by good fortune, many descendants, and a rich land and nation that would never have been destroyed.  It’s too late for that now, but maybe by seeing what caused their misfortune, they can turn back to God and let him heal them.  Which is something God is always longing to do.

    The second prophet we hear from today is St. John the Baptist, and we hear about him in today’s Gospel reading.  Jesus is frustrated with people of Israel – again! – because just about nothing could get their attention.  When John the Baptist went around fasting and staying away from strong drink, the people thought he was weird and couldn’t relate to his message to repent of their sins.  But when Jesus came along asking them to repent also, he ate and drank just as they did, so they judged him harshly and wouldn’t listen to him either.  They always had an excuse, and of course it was never their fault.  Kind of sounds like us sometimes, doesn’t it?  Basically, no matter who was calling them to reform their lives and no matter how they proclaimed that message, the people wanted to do what they wanted to do, and nothing was going to persuade them to change.

    The third prophet we hear from today is Saint John of the Cross, whose feast we celebrate today.  Saint John of the Cross was a Carmelite friar, a kind of monk who was vowed to poverty, chastity and obedience.  He was called by God and by his friend, Saint Teresa of Avila, to reform the Carmelite Order.  The Carmelites had relaxed some of their rules over time, and had basically turned away from the life that had been envisioned when the Order started.  Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila founded a reformed Carmelite Order, and Saint John suffered for it terribly.  In those days, religious affairs were all tied up in the government of the nation, and so there was a lot of politics.  People didn’t agree with Saint John, so he was taken prisoner for over nine months.  Even when he was released, his fellow friars who didn’t agree with him went around to all the monasteries making trouble for him.  He was oppressed for his preaching of reform almost until the day he died.

    Each of these prophets had been given a message by God.  Isaiah and Saint John the Baptist called the people of Israel to turn back to God.  Saint John of the Cross called his fellow Carmelites to turn back to the ideals on which their Order was founded.  All of them suffered for their witness to the truth.  Prophets don’t usually have an easy life.  But if we will get past the politics and get over ourselves, we might hear from them a call that leads us back to God who will make us happier than we’ve ever been.

    During Advent, we remember that Christ is always near to us, and we remember that we must always turn back to him and let him be born in our hearts once again, stronger than ever.  And so during Advent, we hear from the great prophets like Isaiah, John the Baptist, and John of the Cross who are calling us to turn back to God and to prepare a way for Christ in our lives, in our hearts, and in our world.

    Today in our Psalm we hear what God is trying to tell us through all these prophets:

    Blessed the one who follows not
    the counsel of the wicked
    Nor walks in the way of sinners,
    nor sits in the company of the insolent,
    But delights in the law of the LORD
    and meditates on his law day and night.

    And we will be happy too, if we hear God’s call through the prophets and follow in his ways.