Living the Christian life never means that we just calmly except anything another person does. But we do need to follow a certain procedure in dealing with those sins against us. It’s not right, for example, when we are wronged, or when we perceive we are wronged, to immediately email everyone we know and slander them. Nor is it okay for us disciples to talk about a brother or sister in the Lord behind their back. When someone wrongs us, we owe it to them to give them the opportunity to make amends. We bring the matter to their attention in charity, and open up a pathway to forgiveness. If they choose not to take it, we can escalate the issue as our Lord describes in today’s Gospel, but we never have the right to ruin a person’s good name without cause. Christ has given the keys to forgiveness to the Church as a gift. But that means that we who are the Church have a responsibility to forgive, just as we have been forgiven.
Tag: sin
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Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel is perhaps a bit more vivid for me this week, because on Sunday I spent time weeding the side yard at my mother’s house. It’s not a task I really look forward to, but it is kind of good in that when you finish a job like that, you can look at it and see something good happened. There’s a sense of accomplishment. When Father John and Father Jim and I had lunch yesterday, we talked about what we did over the weekend. Father Jim joked that the difference between a weed and a plant was where it was growing.
That’s the kind of question the disciples had for Jesus today. Jesus had just told them several parables about the kingdom of God, and this one didn’t get read in the Gospels the last few days. So we have the explanation, but not the parable. You can check it out in the 13th chapter of Matthew. The story basically went that the landowner sowed good seed in the field, but when it started to grow, weeds came up too. His laborers asked him about it and he said, “An enemy has done this.” So they wanted to pull up the weeds, but the master said to let them grow together until harvest time, lest in pulling them up they also accidentally pull up the good plants. They could then be pulled up and burnt at harvest time.
Now I think a good gardener might quibble with the analogy. But that’s not the point. The point is good news, and the good news is this: however much we may resemble the weeds during our life, Jesus gives us the time to grow into much lovelier plants during our lives. He doesn’t blot us out of the book of life for one transgression. But the warning is that we only have so much time until the harvest. If we are going to turn to the God who sowed us and provide good fruit, we need to do it now. If we wait until the harvest, it may well be too late. Our God gives us the freedom to choose to be the good seeds in the field of the world, blessed are we who choose to grow that way.
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Tuesday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time
A perfectly respectable reading of the whole Exodus story is the allegorical one. In this reading, the Egyptian army, its chariots and charioteers and even its horses, symbolize the forces of evil and sin. God loved the Israelites, who are God’s chosen people, and in a sense, you and me, so much that he rescued them from their abject slavery in Egypt, a slavery that we all have to the forces of sin. Anyone who has struggled with an addiction or any pattern of sin in their lives, can tell you how sinfulness is really its own kind of slavery. God leads his chosen people away from sin back to the Promised Land, the heaven he promises us all. On the way, the forces of evil are drowned in the abyss of the Red Sea, which symbolizes the abyss between this world of sin and the Promised Land of heaven.
I like this allegorical reading because we are all pretty well removed from the ancient history of the Israelites and the Egyptians. But the slavery that we all have to sin at one point or another in our lives is anything but ancient history. God intends a very real exodus for all his chosen people, and he continues to do the work of salvation in and for all of us every day. All of us who are sister and brother and mother to the Lord Jesus, all of his family, are too important to be left behind in slavery to sin.
All we have to do is follow the Lord through the desert of purification, through the abyss of whatever the Red Sea looks like for us, into the Promised Land. And it won’t be easy. If the desert doesn’t discourage us, the abyss will outright frighten us. But the thought of being back at the fleshpots of our Egypt of sin should easily be enough to keep us all on the journey to get where we’re supposed to be. We too might sing to the Lord for he is gloriously triumphant. The horse and chariot of our own sinfulness has been cast into the sea.
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Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion
The scene at the cross is heart-wrenching. His chosen Twelve have deserted him, all but one. But some women who were among his devoted followers have braved the implications for them and have arrived with him at the foot of the cross. The Beloved Disciple – probably John – has come too. And, of course, his mother.
His mother’s grief has to be palpable. Joseph is out of the picture now; we assume he has died. Jesus is all she has left in the world, her promised one. She continues to trust in God but the pain of these moments is almost too much to bear. And so Jesus speaks to her from the cross: “Woman, behold your son.” And to John, “Behold your mother.” Jesus knows that for those who were closest to him in life, they will have need of support after his death. Grief cannot be borne alone. That relationship, forged at the foot of the cross, became the basis for discipleship for both Mary and John that would be instrumental in leading the fledgling Church into the ages ahead.
But even more than that, we see in Mary an icon of the Church. We grieve too, but we for our sins. As we look up at the cross, we see – with horrifying clarity – the effect of our sins. As Isaiah says, “he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins.” No one sentenced Jesus to die on that cross as much as we did, and do, in our daily sins of commission and omission, in our harsh words, in our unkind and impure thoughts, in our lack of loving and in the neglect of our mission. And yet, as John clearly points out in his Gospel, he went to the cross willingly, taking all that brokenness with him.
Like Mary, we the Church wait at the foot of the cross, not abandoning our Jesus who did not abandon us to our sins. We, like Mary, receive at the cross our relationships, purified for our salvation, beholding our mothers and sons and daughters and fathers, because we never get to the resurrection alone.
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Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion
Today’s celebration reminds us that Lent has been taking us somewhere, and now we see where that somewhere is: Calvary. These days have led us to the cross, which is a place to which, quite frankly, few of us ever want to go. The Psalmist today captures the feeling of our hearts as we arrive here at the cross: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
And haven’t we all asked that question at least once in our lives? As we sing those words, they can quite frankly bring back painful memories, whether they be memories of past hurts, or reflections of current ones. Maybe it’s the time when you were sexually abused and felt abandoned because you were convinced no one would believe you. Maybe it’s the time you received a frightening diagnosis and you felt abandoned because you couldn’t enter into daily life with the same carefree attitude you previously had. Maybe it’s the occasion of the death of a loved one and you felt abandoned because everyone on the planet seemed joyful, except you. Maybe it’s the time you were laid off from your job and you felt abandoned because it seemed that no one valued your skills and talents.
And so we pray with the Psalmist, with Jesus, and with every person who has ever felt lost and alone: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” It’s natural that we would prefer to avoid the cross. It’s painful, it’s embarrassing, and it ultimately alienates us from the world. But, the cross is what joins us to Christ. Christ did not shun the cross on the way to accomplish his mission. He took up that cross, died on it, taking with it all of our pain, all of our shame, all of our loneliness, all of our abandonment, all of our sin, and most of all, our death.
Without the cross, there is no resurrection. Not for Jesus, and so also, not for us. Jesus certainly had his moment in the Garden of Gethsemane when the knowledge of his impending death filled him with dread; so it will be for us, countless times when we are called on to take up the cross. But as we enter this Holy Week, we are reminded gently that the cross, while significant, is not the end of the story. There will be a resurrection for Jesus, and so also a resurrection for all those who believe in him, have faith in him, and follow him. And that is what gives us all the confidence to take up our cross and journey on.
I invite you all to enter into these Holy Days with passion, with prayerfulness and in faith. Gather with us on Holy Thursday evening to celebrate the giving of the Eucharist and the Priesthood, and the call to service that comes from our baptism. On Good Friday afternoon and evening, we will have the opportunity once again to reflect on the Passion, to venerate the cross that won our salvation, and to receive the Eucharist, which is our strength. Finally, on the evening of Holy Saturday, we will gather to keep vigil for the resurrection we have been promised. We will hear stories of our salvation, we will celebrate our baptism as we welcome new members to our family, seeing them fully initiated into the life of the Church, rejoicing with them in the victory of Christ over sin and death. No Catholic should miss the celebrations of these Holy Days, for these days truly sustain our daily living and give us the grace to take up our little crosses day by day.
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Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent
Today’s Scriptures speak to us words of healing. But more than that, they speak of healing us from disease that we have inflicted on ourselves. The children of Israel needed this kind of healing. They had been bitterly complaining about their treatment in the desert, after God had gone to great lengths to rescue them from their captivity as slaves in Egypt. Think about that, would they really rather have remained in bitter slavery than have to put up with some inconveniences as they approached the freedom they had long been promised? But still, they complained, and so they are bitten by seraph serpents and many of them died. But they are healed when they look upon the brass serpent lifted up on the pole, made by Moses.
This prefigures the way God intended to heal the human race through the lifting up of his Son, Jesus Christ, on the cross. We too had been subjected to bitter slavery, and in some sense we continue to be subject to it. The slavery here is slavery to sin, to whatever it is that drags us down, keeps us from God, and makes us miserable, ungrateful, wretched souls. That’s what sin does to us. But we need not die in that miserable state. There is a remedy. We don’t have to look to a mere bronze serpent, because that’s a poor substitute for the remedy God has in mind. Instead, we can look up to Christ, lifted up on the cross for our salvation, and better still, lifted up from his death by the glory of the resurrection.
There’s a lot of lifting up going on. God intends to raise us all up, as he did for Christ. That’s why he created us. He knows that we are still subject to slavery – not in Egypt, of course, but to sin, which is even worse. But thanks be to God, he has provided the remedy by giving his only Son for our salvation.
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Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time
One of the graces that I have here at the parish is that whenever I go to parish meetings, we always pray through the Gospel for the coming Sunday and discuss it. The Spirit works through the community, and more often than not, I’ll start thinking about the readings in a different light than I might have all by myself. This week I met on Monday with the finance committee, and so as we prayed through this Gospel, I had my finance committee thinking cap on. So my first thought was, well, the place where Jesus is meeting is too small by far, so we’re going to have to initiate a building campaign, and that’s going to be a lot of work. The second thought was, great, they’ve cut a hole in the roof and now we have to pay to have that fixed! I did not share those thoughts out loud and, thankfully, the Spirit was working in the folks on the committee, who expressed much more pious thoughts!
There’s a lot of paralysis going on in these readings. In the first reading, it’s the whole nation of Israel that is paralyzed. They are in captivity in Babylon, and their oppression is pretty cruel. They longed for God to come and rid them of their exile, as he had when they were slaves in Egypt. Where are God’s mercies of the past? When will their exile come to an end? Isaiah speaks to them words of consolation today. God will not just lead them back to their land, making a way through the desert and a river through the wasteland. But he is also doing something new: he will deal with the root cause of their paralysis: sin. It was sin that led them into slavery in Egypt, it was sin that led them to captivity in Babylon. So if they are to be truly freed, truly healed of their paralysis, they need to be forgiven of their sins. And it is only God who can do that, so he takes the initiative to do that new thing among them. Praise God!
The paralysis in the Gospel is more literal, but also works on the figurative level here too. The center of attention might seem to be the paralytic, but really it’s Jesus. Jesus has the crowds captivated, preaching words that have them spellbound. So much so, that he can hardly move, for all the crowds around him! Seeing this, the paralytic’s friends take bold action: they haul him up onto the roof, make a hole in it, and lower him down, right in the midst of Jesus and his hearers. You have to imagine that the crowds are on the edge of their seats – except there probably wasn’t room for any chairs – and they were just waiting with eager anticipation to see what Jesus would do now. Who could heal a paralytic? Jesus speaks curious words: “Child, your sins are forgiven.” – What on earth can that mean? Who has the audacity to say he can forgive sins? Why doesn’t he just heal the man as the man had hoped for?
But Jesus is doing something new too. These last several weeks, we have been hearing about Jesus healing all sorts of people, including a leper just last week. And through it all, he’s been telling them to keep it quiet – not that they did! – because he wasn’t healing people just be known as a wonder worker. He’s trying to get at the root cause of the people’s paralysis, the real disease and not just the symptom. And that disease is, of course, sin. “Child, your sins are forgiven.” Those are the words he speaks to the paralytic, because he insists on healing the man from the inside out. The physical paralysis was nothing, the really paralyzing thing was sin. Sin paralyzes us all from time to time. It affects our prayer life, our vocation, our relationships. It holds us back, it keeps us from moving on to what God intends for us. When we are paralyzed by sin, nothing good can come to us, nothing good can even be seen in us or by us. Sin is quite literally deadly. And so, yeah, Jesus can heal a man’s paralysis, but whoa, he can even heal the sinfulness of the whole human family. Now that’s a wonder worker! Healing the world of sin was the whole reason for Jesus being here in the first place. Praise God!
We are here today on the precipice of a new season of the Church year. This Wednesday is the beginning of our Lent, the beginning of that time of year when we all have the opportunity to turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel. It’s a forty-ish day retreat for us; we can take stock of those sins that have held us back, and bring them to our Jesus who came that they might be blotted out. And we know that, as good as our lives tend to be, as faithful as we try to be, we have, on occasion, blown it, both individually and as a human family. We have missed opportunities to be of service. We have held on to grudges and past hurts. We have broken relationships through the distractions of lust in its many forms. We have taken what belongs to others, maybe not giving an honest day’s work for our pay, or taking credit for work that was not ours. We have stolen from the poor, either by not making an effort to reach out to them, or by wasting resources. We have deprived God of the worship due to him, either by missing Mass for yet another soccer game, or by being inattentive at Mass or forgetting our prayers. We have taken the lives of others by allowing abortion to continue its pandemic spread through the world, or by not caring for the sick, or by allowing racial bigotry to go unchallenged. We have dishonored our parents and ancestors by allowing the elderly to die alone, or by allowing the cost of health care to be beyond what people can pay. You get the idea – our personal and communal sins have been myriad, and they have paralyzed us for far too long.
But our Lent is a gift to us. Our ashes remind us that we will not live forever, so the time to open ourselves up to change is now. We will have these days to concentrate on fasting, almsgiving and prayer. This is a gift, but also a responsibility; it is likewise sinful to ignore the opportunity completely. Our fasting might be food, or it might be something else that consumes us, like television or the internet. Our almsgiving can consist of any or all of the traditional ways of time, talent, and treasure. Our prayer can be communal or personal, devotional or reflective, whatever it is that is going to lead us face-to-face with Christ. This is also a time to rid ourselves of the sin that binds us, to hear those wonderful words spoken to us as well: “Child, your sins are forgiven.” We have so many opportunities planned for the Sacrament of Penance, that if you cannot find a time to go to Confession, you’re just not looking hard enough!
But if it’s the length of time since you last received that sacrament that is paralyzing you, then you need to hear what I always tell people about the Sacrament of Penance: Don’t let anything stop you. When you go into the confessional, tell the priest: “Father it’s been years since my last confession, and I might need some help to do this right.” If he doesn’t welcome you back and fall all over himself trying to help you make a good confession, you have my permission to get up and leave and go find a priest who is more welcoming. Because it is my job to help you make a good confession, it is my job to make sure the experience is meaningful for you, it is my job to make you want to come back, and I take that very seriously. I know that Fr. Ted does too.
The important thing to remember in all of this is that you cannot let anything stop you from being healed of what paralyzes you. If need be, make a hole in the roof so that you can end up right at the feet of Jesus. Lent is our gift from God, that opportunity that he initiates to do something new among us. Let’s not ever turn away from that gift. Our staff had a retreat day this week, and in it we heard these words from the Rule of St. Benedict which I think tell us everything we should learn from today’s Liturgy of the Word: “Let no one follow what he thinks profitable to himself, but rather that which is profitable to another; let them show unto each other all … charity with a chaste love. Let them fear God, … and prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may He bring us all together to life everlasting. Amen.”
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Family Reconciliation Service
Reading: Mark 10:13-16
Well, we have some children here tonight, so this reading about Jesus embracing the little children makes some sense. But not all of us are children, are we? We have big people and little people and every age, and that’s very nice. But you know, we are all children of God, aren’t we? That’s what our baptism service teaches us – it says right after the children are baptized: “they are now called children of God.” All of us are children of God our Father.
When you stop to think about it, this is so true. The nice thing about children isn’t that they are innocent and pure. Lots of little children sometimes do bad things. Any substitute teacher or mom or dad can tell you that! So I don’t think that Jesus was saying that children are special to God just because they are so innocent. I think children are special to God for the very reason that they are children. And children depend on their moms and dads for just about everything. When they are very little, moms and dads have to do everything for them, feed them, change them, take them to the doctor, entertain them. As we get older we need that less and less, but I think some part of us always depends on our moms and dads for support and love.
I think that’s what Jesus wants of all of us children of God. He wants us to depend on God for our guidance and for our needs. Because when we stop thinking that we need God, we run into all sorts of trouble. We get too full of ourselves and we look down on people and we treat everyone in our lives badly. We call that the sin of pride. We start looking at what God has given other people and we get jealous, and we call that envy. We start wanting everything that we can find, whether it’s good for us or not, and we call that greed. We start looking for love and joy in ways that are not healthy, and we call that lust. We begin to think we can slack off on doing good things for ourselves and others because no one is really watching us, and we call that sloth. We overeat or consume things to the point of waste, because we always figure those things will be there for us, and we call that gluttony. And when all of these things lead us in the wrong direction, we get angrier and angrier – we get angry at others, at ourselves, and even at God, and we call that wrath.
And we commit all those sins just because we think we don’t need God any more, that we have maybe outgrown God, or that we’re too smart to need God any more. And this makes God very sad. After all, it’s God that has made us, created us out of nothing, given us our families and our friends and every wonderful blessing that we have. So God really deserves all of our love and devotion.
Even when we think we don’t need God, we’re really wrong about that. Every talent that we have has been given to us by God, so it’s not like anything we do is all from our own effort anyway. Also, when we think we don’t need God, things start to go wrong at some point or another, and then where do we end up? If we’re really smart, we end up coming back to God and asking for another chance.
That’s where we are tonight. We have come here to ask for another chance. We have come to promise to be his children once again, to rely on him for everything we need, to give him all of our love because he gives us all of his love. And do you know what? He absolutely will give that love to us. He will forgive us of our sins, those times when we wandered from him and thought we were too big for him. When we confess our sins, those sins go away, never to be discussed again, because God’s love is bigger than our sins.
Jesus says to all of us children of God: “Let the children come to me! Don’t try to stop them. People who are like these little children belong to the kingdom of God.” When we remember that we are children of God, that we depend on God for every blessing of our lives, then we will receive what we need, then we will be blessed by Jesus and embraced as his loving family.
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Monday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time
We’re still in the opening chapters of human history in our first reading, and in these opening chapters we see some of the less beautiful parts of human nature. These are deadly sins, and they have continued to plague humankind ever since.
We start with envy, as Cain laments that his offering was not accepted with the same favor as was Abel’s. We move from envy to murder, with Cain committing the very first fratricide, killing his very own brother. From there, we go to apathy, as Cain rejects the opportunity to be his brother’s keeper. And then we meet false witness, as he lies about the murder that he committed. And if all of that isn’t enough, Cain then complains about his punishment as if it was something he didn’t deserve. If he’d only tried repentance, or expressed sorrow for his sins, or even accepted responsibility for what he’d done, maybe things would have turned out differently.
But, in this opening act of human history, we see God’s mercy. God does not remit the entirety of Cain’s punishment, but promises that even his death would be unacceptable. Maybe we should think about that in regard to the death penalty: if even God doesn’t condone the murder of a murderer, then who are we to do that? So God marks Cain, as we all are marked with God’s presence at our baptism. So even in this very early story of our history, we can see that baptism was always intended for our salvation.
The Psalmist this morning says that we absolutely cannot profess God’s commandments and sing his praises, without also accepting God’s discipline and following God’s word. A sacrifice of praise is a life lived with integrity, and that is the sacrifice that God wants of us in every moment.
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Saturday of the First Week of Ordinary Time
In today’s Gospel, we have the epiphany of Jesus manifested as one who identifies with sinners. That is not, of course, to say that he was a sinner; quite the contrary, we know that Jesus was like us in all things but sin. But today we see that he is certainly concerned with calling sinners to the Kingdom, and concerned enough that he will be known to be in their company. He eats with them, talks with them, walks with them.
This of course, riles the Pharisees. And for good reason; Jewish law taught that sinners were to be shunned; they were cast out of the community. But Jesus has come to say that he hates the sin but loves the sinner, that nothing in us is beyond the power of God to redeem. Nothing that we have done can put us so far away from God that we are beyond God’s reach. And God does reach out to us, in tangible ways, in sacramental ways, in the person of Jesus and in through the ministry of the Church.
Sin is a terrible thing. It’s often cyclical. Because not only does the judgment of the Pharisees make sinners feel unworthy; but also does the guilt that comes from inside the sinner. The more one sins, the less worthy one often feels of God’s love, and so the more does that person turn away from God, and then they sin more, feel less worthy, turn away again, and so on, and so on, and so on.
But Jesus won’t have any of that. Instead, he walks into the midst of sinners, sits down with them and has a meal. He is the divine physician healing our souls, and those who do not sin do not need his ministry. But we sinners do, and for that we should be always grateful.
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