Palm Sunday 

the Passion of the Lord

 
I have been thinking about the passion of Christ in the context of everything that’s happening in the world around us. The passion centers on the suffering of Christ. There are all kinds of suffering now. Much of it is the suffering of anxiety. There is great concern over personal financial security, the uncertainty of our own health and the worries over family members who are cut off due to sheltering restrictions. Our culture was anxious enough without a global pandemic.
 
This has led to many exhibiting great stress.  Panic buying and the like. The most telling result has been the surprisingly sudden need for more toilet paper. So, suffering and its meaning, always an appropriate topic for holy week, seems to be even more pertinent as we walk our own journey to Jerusalem in this extraordinary time.
 
A couple of weeks ago I finished a novel written by Elie Wiesel, a Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor.  His novel, “The Gates of the Forest” is a collection of stories  concerning the human condition and in one story he has a character named Yehuda who is gently trying to help a troubled friend named Gregor see suffering in a different way. He writes:
It’s inhuman to wall yourself up in pain and memories as if in a prison. Suffering must open us to others.  It must not cause us to reject them.  The Talmud tells us that God suffers with man.  Why? In order to strengthen the bonds between creation  God chooses to suffer in order to better understand man and be better understood by him.  But you, you insist upon suffering alone.  Such suffering shrinks you, diminishes you.  Friend, that is almost cruel.
 
Having just heard St. Matthew’s Passion of Jesus, I want to consider this passage from Wiesel’s book from the insight of the Jewish Talmud. Let’s start with the idea that God suffers with humankind. Jesus ate and drank, spoke and slept, touched and healed, laughed and cried like us, and like us he died;  like us men and women, the God-man died. But it was the way he died that sets him apart. The prophet Isaiah makes that clear well in advance stating: “He was despised and rejected by men…like a lamb that is led to slaughter…By oppression and  judgment he was taken away; …he was cut off from the land of the living…”
 
On Calvary there is no need for exaggeration, the truth is staggering enough.  It was difficult to believe that this God-man could die. But there it is: “Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.”  So, yes, God suffers with human-kind. But why?
 
The Talmud, that central text of Rabbinic Judaism, says God suffers with humankind “to strengthen the bonds between the creation and the creator…to better understand us and be better understood by him.” As I think of Christ at Gethsemane, I try to Imagine myself standing beneath his cross on that Good Friday. Here is the same Son who, John’s gospel begins, “was the same in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made.” And now, in our flesh, the flesh he made, he sweats our blood and dies our death. It isn’t that he didn’t know what it was like to be human; but now this God of all knowledge experiences how we feel, hurts the way you and I hurt. Nails tear at his flesh and loneliness breaks his heart. On the cross he feels our pain as he never could “in the beginning with God.”
 
Now, on the other side of the coin, we have to admit that seeing Jesus, witnessing his life as we know it from the gospel, we understand God better than if he had never left heaven and taken on our flesh and joined us here in time and space, had never touched this earth with eyes and ears like ours, with hand and heart.  There is nothing that can compare with the experience of a God-man who lies helpless in a crib, and helpless on a cross, hear him cry out in anguish “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Calvary is not just another tragedy, the execution of one more innocent person.  The crucifixion of Christ is an act of love. It is this act of love that transforms suffering into sacrifice. The God-man not only suffered with us, he suffered for us. 
 
In Galatians 2 Paul says: “The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” It is not sheer crucifixion but crucified love that changed the world, changed you and me, and reconciled us to God an made it possible for us to be one with him through faith, with hope, in love.
 
This leads to my final point. “Suffering must open us to others.” Otherwise as Yehuda warned Gregor, suffering can only shrink us,  and diminish us. Being imprisoned by personal pain or suffering is something we all know about.
 
Death of a loved one. Depression and disappointment. Feelings of guilt or utter worthlessness.
Our current health crises and the uncertainty of the world ahead of us.  It can be acne or alcoholism or terminal cancer. Growing old in a world that does not seem to care.
 
There are a thousand and one afflictions we list under suffering that can wall us up in pain and
memories as if in a prison. Such turning in on myself may be understandable  and it may be
beyond my control; but it is always inhuman. It’s also unchristian because it keeps me from
living the life Christ intended  because I cannot with St. Paul “rejoice in my sufferings for your
sake, and in my flesh, I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body,
that is, the church…” 
 
Any more than my love of God is a private affair, neither, then is my suffering.  As a Christian, as a member of the body of Christ, Christ’s own body, I cannot insist on suffering alone.  Suffering is my sharing in the passion of Christ; I suffer with him. United with his, my suffering, my personal passion can touch other people with redeeming grace, give them the courage of Christ and even the peace and joy of Christ. I suffer with them and they with me.
 
I look at the nurses and doctors in the news talking about the stress and fear that is their daily experience on the front lines of this plague.  I see in their eyes and hear in their voices the passion they feel and share with their patients as well as their frustration at a system unprepared for this crisis. Over and again I hear them say that they carry on because they are finding strength in uniting their exhaustion, their stress with the suffering and passion that surrounds them, and it calls out to them. The cross of Calvary is real to them…an abiding experience of a God-man ever shaping them …roughly and rudely at times, in the image of his dying and rising.
 
This week of the passion is not about a memory or a sad remembrance of a dying God. Christ is risen. He is risen to die no more. This is your week, your journey to Jerusalem. How will you walk it? Alone with your anxiety and fear, alone with your pain, or in company with Christ? Now is not the time to clutch the cross to your breast. Now is the time to stretch out your arms as wide as possible, just like Jesus did, opening yourself to your crucified brothers and sisters and remembering that as Christians we are never in this alone.
 
May we pray?
Father as we begin our holy week, we once again encounter how our savior gave himself for us.  May we imitate that generosity even in the sharing of our own suffering. Give us courage in a time of uncertainty.  Give us fortitude as we walk through the dark valleys.  Give us calm hearts that we may trust in your providence.  From the ravages of disease, God Lord deliver us.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.
Amen

 

The Fifth Sunday
of Lent   

John 11:1-44

Every important event needs a rehearsal.   Rehearsals are designed to point to something larger on the horizon and tell us something of what we can expect. That’s something of what’s happening in this chapter of the Gospel of John.  In the Holy Land, in Bethany you can still visit Lazarus tomb…or what they say is Lazarus tomb.  It’s just up the way from the church that bears his name.  You just go out the front door, turn left up the steep cobblestone road, and look for the Lazarus souvenir and gift shop on the right.  Directly across the street you can see the entrance to the cave, enclosed by metal railings…and for a small fee, you can walk down the winding steps into the wet cellar where the old gravesite is—a small opening in a rock wall very close to the ground.  You have to bend way over to get in, and coming out…there is only one way to do it:  head-first, with your upper body already out while your feet are still finding the three small steps—looking up as you straighten up, trying not to scrape your back.  If it really is Lazarus’s tomb, then he did not come out of it like a man walking out of prison.  He came out of it like a baby being born again—first his wrapped face, then his bandaged hands, and finally his feet.
 
It must have been terrifying for him and everyone else…everyone but Jesus, that is—who seemed to know how everything is going to turn out from the moment he first learns that Lazarus is ill. The news reaches him right after he has escaped a religious death squad in Jerusalem.  He is safe across the river Jordan when Martha and Mary send word to him that their brother is ill. Remember that Mary, Martha, and Lazarus are three of Jesus’ best friends.  They want him to come right away, but he doesn’t.  He waits two whole days, which is hard to imagine, and then travels a day or two more, so that by the time he gets to Bethany he has missed the funeral by four days.  This isn’t news to him either.  He knew it before he ever set out and furthermore, he doesn’t seem concerned about it at all.  Nevertheless, this confidence is wasted on Martha.
 
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  There is love in that greeting; love and blame.  She knows Jesus is a life saver, only where was he when she needed him?  She and Mary have just buried Lazarus way before his time with no help from their dearest friend. Any of you who have lost a loved one know what she is going through.  “If only I had made him go to the doctor sooner.”  “If only I had not left her alone.”  When you lose someone you love, you can drive yourself nuts thinking of all the ways it might have avoided, and you rack yourself with the “What if” game. 
 
For Martha, Jesus is the one who could have made the difference, only he was not there and now it’s too late. At least she thinks it’s too late.  She is also willing to believe that it might not be, although this possibility is beyond her imagining.  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even know I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”  Then she and Jesus had a short, powerful exchange about resurrection, in which Martha talks about it as something that happens in the future and Jesus talks about it as something that happens right now—resurrection and life for anyone who believes in him.
 
We have heard this so often that many of us are numb to it.  The basic idea, as most of us were taught it, is that those who are baptized, confessed, confirmed and accept Jesus as Lord receive a coupon for eternal life.  Later when we need it, we can present it to the angel of death and gain entrance into the land of light and life. In the meantime, all we have to do to secure our reward is to believe in Jesus and act as though we do.
 
You can hear some of that in what Martha says.  When Jesus tells her that her brother will rise again, she says, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”  But Jesus corrects her; “ I am the resurrection and the life,” says Jesus.  “those who trust in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and trusts in me will never die.  Do you trust this?”
 
He doesn’t say he has power to give resurrection and life.  He says he is those things, that in his presence they become present reality, because he is the great I AM, whose life is indestructible.  Those who embrace him will never die, no matter what happens to their bodies because he is one with the source and sustainer of all life.  Those who trust that with him…in him…begin their eternal lives right now, and nothing on earth can snuff them out. This is very different from the promise of a future reward, and it is what Jesus is about to do with Lazarus.  He is about to prove that Lazarus is alive and well, even though his body has lain four days in a tomb.  He is about to call his beloved friend back from the living heart of God so that those who think he is dead can think again.
 
But first Jesus must repeat this whole scene with Mary, who says the same thing her sister does.  “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 
Notice that everyone in this story is focused on preventing death, while Jesus is focused on outliving it. When he sees Mary weeping and those who are with her also weeping, it tears him up on the inside.  “He was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved,” St. John writes, but the Greek is more visceral than that. Jesus snorts.  His guts are wrenched within him, and when they offer to show him where Lazarus has been laid to rest, he weeps—but again, two different words here.  Mary and the others are wailing out loud.  Jesus sheds tears.  Because he is sad about Lazarus, certainly.  But also, because everyone else is wailing.  They have given up on Lazarus.  They have all said goodbye to him, and they think Jesus has come to do the same thing.  As many times as he has told them, they still don’t get it.  It never occurs to them that Jesus might have come to say hello instead.
 
Like any good teacher, he decides to show them what he means instead of telling them again.  After thanking God for what is about to happen, he shouts, “Lazarus come forth!”  and Lazarus does, trailing behind him the bandages like a scarf he no longer needs.
 
I used to think this was a story about something Jesus did to Lazarus---Lazarus being the prop, almost, the empty shell that Jesus pumped full of life again.  But now I think it is a story about something Jesus did with Lazarus—who was, after all, his beloved friend
who trusted him, and who was therefore full of God’s own life. 
He had moved on, certainly.  The body he left behind had already begun to smell, and he was presumably resting on the bosom of Abraham when he heard his friend cry out “Lazarus, come forth.” Because they loved each other, Lazarus did.  He crawled back through the dark tunnel toward the sound of that voice and emerged, blinking and stumbling, into the light, which was less bright than the light where he had come from, but which was God’s light just the same because Jesus was there, smiling through his tears. 
 
Then his sisters fell all over him, and his neighbors stood back clutching each other as if they had seen a ghost, and when the religious death squad back in Jerusalem heard about it, they stepped up their efforts to assassinate Jesus, which would be very soon. So, Jesus traded his life for Lazarus’s life, among others, by doing with his friend what God was about to do with him. 
 
The timing is important.  The next death we will hear about is Jesus’ own, which will be far scarier and cause more wailing than did Lazarus’s death.  This story is far more than any kind of dress rehearsal. In the gospel of John Jesus knows exactly what is going on, exactly how thing will progress and is always in charge, in control. It’s John’s way of reminding us that all of this is part of a great plan, a great event to which we have all been invited. 
 
“I AM the resurrection and the life,” he says. Not later but right now.  We can join in with that life while we live, so that eternal life is not something we are waiting for at the end of time but something we begin living right now, because we trust in him who lived it and lives it still.  Our Lord invites us to live it with him; he who loves us more deeply than we can ever imagine.  A majestic mystery of unstoppable love that took our own flesh and blood and gave it back for us; offered it on our behalf to his Father who in unity with the Holy Spirit is one God forever and ever and world without end. Amen.

The Fourth Sunday in Lent John 9:1-41

The story of the man born blind

In our time of uncertainty, social distancing and isolation it is easy for us to lose sight of our reality as church.  Today I’m looking out to a big expanse of empty seats knowing that we are scattered around the city in our homes. The church after all isn’t a place and it never has been.  It has always been a community, whether together or apart.  Church is not defined by proximity but by common faith and purpose.  We are the body of Christ whether we are together here or where you are now.
 
Even though we cannot receive the Eucharist together we can receive Christ in our hearts by making a spiritual communion, desiring Christ Jesus to come into our hearts and minds that we may continue to be his body in the world.  In fact, we are never more that body than when we are where Jesus sends us.  So, taking a cue from the apostle Paul, I begin with “To the church of St. Theresa in the city of Austin and throughout Travis County, I bring grace and peace in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
 
Today we just heard the story of the man born blind, a great opportunity Jesus uses to show us why blind obedience is never the wrong thing when it comes to faith in God. In Jesus’ day, to be born blind is to be branded with the guilt of either being a sinner or being the inheritor of your parent’s sin.  It doesn’t really matter which.  You are blind because you deserve it. There are many self-proclaimed religious people around us today who still think stuff like that. That’s why the blind were marginalized in those days and, usually reduced to begging, they really knew what social distancing was about. 
 
We heard today about a person who also must be relatively young since his parents are still hanging around.  As the result of a conversation Jesus has just had with his disciples about whether it was his sin or his parents sin that caused him to be blind, he approaches the young man and smears mud on his eyes and instructs him to go to the pool of Siloam to wash whereupon sight is given to him for the first time.
 
It is an amazing gift that Jesus gives, and the young man has not even asked for it.  Jesus did not even ask him first if there was any sin.  He simply restored him.  He brought him from the edge to the center in one gracious act of love.  The writer of this gospel wants his readers to see the blind man as a symbol of human life apart from God. While it is not a comparison we would use today, it is nevertheless a sign of what Jesus wants to do for all of us if we let him.  In other words, this story, is about more than just the gift of physical sight.  It tells us also that Jesus gives spiritual sight: the inner light of faith.
 
Pay attention to the progressive stages of the blind man’s journey.  Instead of healing him with a word or touch, Jesus invites the man to cooperate in his own healing by going to a certain pool and washing from his eyes the mud Jesus smeared on them.  That first directive doesn’t make any sense from any human perspective, now or then.  Most of us, right then and there would have told Jesus “thanks but no thanks.” Let’s look more closely.
 
The blind guy has not made an appointment with Jesus first.  Jesus just comes to him recognizing need. In other words, Jesus reached out. 
 
How often has he reached out to you and me with the same offer?  How often does he do it without us even asking for it?  For us it isn’t going to be like what we hear in this story. Most often Jesus comes to us in the form of his body here on earth, the community of faith.   We are the body of Christ.  If we take this seriously then when we offer someone an encounter with Christ, and every time we share the good news that Jesus loves them and has a plan for their lives, it is up to them to accept or reject.  And if they cannot trust that this is true, then they will reject.  And if you think we are not offering anything as odd as smearing mud in the eyes as a sign of trust, think again.  We are asking them to put their faith in a first century social misfit who told people that up was down and backward was forward.
 
So, today, as then, following those peculiar instructions requires faith.  Think of how easy it would have been for the young man to have said, “You’re crazy, that won’t do any good…now beat it …imagine that? 
“Here I am minding my own business and his dude comes up to me and then smears mud in my face.  Seriously?
 
But that’s not what this blind young man did.  By his willingness to do this simple thing Jesus asks of him, even when it made no sense whatever, the man, without knowing it, begins his own journey toward faith.  His journey brings him into increasingly sharp conflict with those who, unlike him, are certain that they already possess all the light there is, people who know all the answers. The answers given by the formerly blind man to his questioners shows his advance toward faith.  When asked who had healed him, he first says: That man they call Jesus.”  Later he adds: “He is a prophet.” Then he confesses that Jesus comes from God.  Finally, questioned by Jesus himself, the young man accepts Jesus as the Son of Man: God’s anointed servant, the Messiah, before whom he bows down in worship.  Starting with the recovery of physical sight, he has completed his journey from the blindness of disbelief to the spiritual light of faith. 
 
Meanwhile those who are confident that they have all the answers already are journeying, from self-assured enlightenment to the inner darkness of disbelief.  Initially they seem ready to accept the healing as fact.  Then they begin to question it by raising doubts about the man’s identity.  When his identity has been firmly established, they resort to bullying: “What? You are steeped in sin from your birth and you are giving us lectures?”
 
Finally, these self-righteous spiritual leaders who presume to sit in judgment on Jesus are in turn judged by him.  “If you were blind there would be no sin in that. ‘But we see,’ you say, and your sin remains.”  Refusing to acknowledge their need for God and the enlightenment only Jesus can give, they are condemned to their self-chosen darkness.
The story asks for a decision.  Where do you stand, with the blind young man or with his critics?
The blind man’s journey from darkness to light is possible because he admits that he has a need for light and trusts the one who offers it.  What condemns his critics to journey in the opposite direction is their complacent certainty that they know all the answers already.  Confident that they don’t need what Jesus has to offer, they turn their backs on him, only to have him turn on them with the terrible words: “I came into this world to divide it, to make the sightless see and the seeing blind.”
 
If you can make little sense of life; if you cannot see the way ahead; if you do not know sometimes whether you believe in anything…Then come to Jesus as the blind man came.  He invites you to show him your needs, your fears, your doubts, your blindness. 
 
Tell him you want what he alone can give.  And as you tell him, trust him as the young man born blind trusted him when he obeyed Jesus command to “Go and wash.”  Did this young man know exactly how it happened?  No.  In fact, he wasn’t sure about anything… but he was the only one who eventually saw the light.  One outcast healed another outcast and the Pharisees said so. They even questioned the young man born blind from birth about this Jesus and the only thing he could say with any certainty was this: “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
 
May we pray?
Loving Father help us to see more clearly as we open our hearts to you.  Heal us in the ways that can only come from you, help us to be open to your healing so that with your grace we may see as we have never seen before, and in seeing come to believe.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen

 

What We Can Learn From the Woman at the Well

The Third Sunday of Lent 2020
John 4: 5-26

 

Lent is our opportunity to reclaim our authentic selves. There is a great deal of unreality in the way most of us live.  We can go a long way through life without ever facing up to certain things about ourselves we know very well should be faced. But what would happen if we met someone who was not prepared to allow us to get away with our games, someone before whom there was no hiding? This is what we hear about today.  This is what happens at an encounter near the village of Sychar.
 
The story involves Jesus and a very articulate and independent woman who, like all of us, had things to hide, but again, like all of us, was prepared to put up quite a struggle rather than reveal what was underneath her mask. Jesus triggered the encounter by simply asking for a drink. In that society that was far from being an ordinary thing to do. A man did not address a woman in such circumstances, and a Jew almost never spoke to a Samaritan. Both rules applied here, and Jesus broke both; probably because he had a strong intuition that something more important than rules was at stake…another human being’s welfare.
 
The next sequence of the encounter is a verbal fencing match. Jesus moves the conversation to deeper spiritual things. She is determined not to, and if we are honest, we know exactly how she feels. 
Only in rare moments, usually when our defenses are down because we feel very vulnerable, are we prepared to express the depths of our life. All during the fencing Jesus’ deep intuition is at work.
Suddenly he moves into the area of relationships and strikes at the heart of her hidden world.
Even then she makes one more effort to detour the conversation to the far less threatening subject of religion using it to deflect.
 
Relationships are deep inside us; religion can be kept outside if we choose. But Jesus does not allow her to succeed.  He stays in the area of her problem and her pain.  Knowing too that this woman is far more real than she is pretending to be, Jesus calls her to face the reality of herself and the grace he can offer her. She shows her real worth by recognizing what he is trying to do for her.
From very early on the people who follow Christ have set aside the season of Lent as a journey toward authenticity.
 
Lent is a good time to take stock of who we really are.  A good look at the lives we lead and ask ourselves the hard question: “How much longer will I keep on like this?” It is a time to stop lying to ourselves; to stop running in away, to stop denying that there is nothing wrong; nothing sinful, nothing out of place. Like the woman in this story we often go to the well, but we fail to get all it has to offer…
we are afraid to lower our buckets all the way down because we hold back. Our pride keeps us from being true to ourselves. We live close to redemption in our daily lives but fail to be washed fully in it. 
The water is always there.
 
When the Israelites were thirsting, complaining and even thinking life would be better under the misery of slavery, God told Moses where the living stream was to be found…and Moses obeys God and strikes the rock with his rod. One even greater than Moses would meet the woman who had come to the well with an even deeper thirst and was prepared to settle for less than what she really needed.
Jesus had to strike the woman’s hardened heart before she would admit to her messed up marriage situation.
 
Paul constantly reminds us that we are the body of Christ. We are part of that which is greater than Moses or Elijah. We can strike the rock ourselves…if we believe, if we have trust in God.
 
 
The gospel message to us is a challenge. It is an opportunity for us to come true before God and admit our failure and allow healing to take place.  Jesus loves you and he has a plan for your lives.
Lent is our opportunity to reclaim our authentic selves. It is an opportunity to relinquish the sin of pride and stop deceiving ourselves; making up our own rules about our faith life and then lying to ourselves saying everything is fine. It is an opportunity to come to Jesus as the woman in the gospel did.
We have a greater than Moses or Elijah here. Come to Jesus and stop settling for something less.
 
Father give us courage this Lent to come to well and surrender to grace.
Father open our ears to hear, open our eyes to see, and open our hearts to embrace what is offered to us from Christ our source of living water.  Amen

 

St. Paul’s Universal Wisdom for a Universal Church 

By Fr. Larry Covington

Paul’s letters fascinate me. 

They offer a glimpse into a time and place, and into particular situations… and almost always situations arising from bad behavior and failure to progress in faith. 

That’s what we heard about today.  He has had a report from Chloe’s people. 

You know Chloe? Right?  Don’t worry neither do I.  All we know is that in Corinth there was a church and the head of that church was a real go getter named Chloe who is clearly identified as the leader of a Christian group there.  She may not have been the presiding elder or the one who offered the Sacrifice of the Lord’s Supper, but there is no mistaking that she was head of that group, make of that what you want. 

The situation there was division and rivalry a sin that has plagued the church since the beginning.  They all believed in Christ Jesus and were striving to live the life of faith, but they had not progressed beyond being a society of people. 

They hadn’t made to leap from association to communion, that state of being really united with another, bound together for the purpose of something bigger and more important than who and what they are as individuals together. 

And, apparently, it was bad enough to bring to Paul’s attention. 

So he wrote this letter that has been preserved and handed on to us as Scripture…meaning that the Holy Spirit saw in Paul’s words something that would apply not only to some contentious early Greek Christians but also to us today.   

Many years ago, the Austrian philosopher Martin Buber wrote a book titled; “The idea of the Holy.”  In it he declared that our highest human duty is to transform society into community.  Here, I think, lies our own critical need.  The Catholic Church is a society;  

Saint Theresa parish is a society. Each is a group of people using common means to achieve a common end.  Each is a group of folks working for salvation, making its way to God, by believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, by responding to his grace, by living a moral existence in harmony with Church and conscience. The Church, the parish, should be more than a society… it should be a genuine community.   Because community adds intimacy to society.   

As Buber saw it, you have a community where people reach out to one another in mutual concern.  Where the overriding relationship is not I to it, but I to you: where the indispensable ingredient, the glue that holds the whole together, is love.  Love not merely in personal relationships but in working together for common values, the good of the community. 

 When I first arrived here, I asked about out parish strengths and the universal answer was “community.” We are a community to the extent that love binds us together, in the measure that love is what motivates us to work together, to the degree that love drives us, despite our disagreements, to achieve intimacy with Christ and one another. 

And I admit, this is abstract, talking about love usually is.  So, let’s balance the abstract with the concrete:  several facts and attitudes without which “Catholic love” is an empty phrase.   

First and above all, we are a pilgrim people.  The ideal really is Paul’s plea: “I appeal to you, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you say the same thing…that you be fully united in the same mind and in the same conviction.”   

That’s the ideal; but that’s not going to happen here on earth.  Until then, we are pilgrims; we are on the way.  Even though we claim to have the fullness of truth we fail to see with perfect clarity; our very sinfulness blurs our understanding.  To know the risen Christ is a ceaseless struggle; it is an agonizing struggle to be in the community he had in mind when the Church was born of his blood and his Spirit. 

If we are going to evangelize and begin with those who belong to the largest denomination outside of the Catholic Church, namely “former Catholics,”  or “nones” then we must realize that although the Catholic Church has all the treasures of God’s truth and grace, its members fail to live by them with all the fervor they should.   

This makes the Church less credible and less attractive than it should be, both to lapsed Catholics and other Christians in the world at large.  We all have a responsibility for the reunion of Christ’s followers.  Each time we compromise Christ’s standards and his demands on us, we diminish the church’s radiance and inflict new wounds on the body of Christ, of which we are members at baptism.  Our sins are not private affairs between ourselves and God.  By weakening our allegiance to him, our sins weaken the unity of this great family we call the Church. 

Second, this means we accept an invitation to be humble, recognizing who I really am: my talents as well as my limitations.  Humble in recognizing how relatively little I know of the God who revealed himself in our flesh.  Humble in recognizing that I too am swayed by passion and prejudice, by likes and dislikes.  Humble, therefore, in accepting direction from above, from those who, the New Testament tells us, have been placed over us to “tend the flock of God.” 

Third, this does not imply that we accept direction blindly, nor does it mean we close our eyes to problems or silence the voice of our own conscience.  And there are different levels of disagreement.  It’s one thing to deny that Christ is God; it is quite another thing to emphatically refuse to shake someone’s hand during the sign of peace.  The first is a refusal to be a Christian while the other is a matter of taste.   

In our day to day morality it isn’t simply to say just when dissent makes one less than Catholic.  Here as in all things we should be slow to judge.  And even when sin is crystal clear, there is a need to image the merciful Christ, whose heart went out particularly to sinners. 

Fourth, if my disagreement is to be Catholic, it must be impregnated with affection: a warm feeling of empathy for those who differ from me.  Not an arrogant “No one can tell me what to do;” not a selfish “This is the way I feel about it and that’s that.”  History and experience will tell us that within one Catholic body we will always have our differences, big and small.  For the most part, the differences are not in basic belief.  But basic belief has never been the historic catalyst for division and so the crucial question is: Can we differ without disliking? Can we contradict without condemnation?  Can we debate without hate?  If not, we need to learn how for the sake of salvation.  

I spend time in dialogue with people outside of the Catholic Church trying to devise ways to focus on our commonality rather than our differences.  But when I stand before the judgment seat of God, the judge who died for me will not ask me: “Did you solve the ecumenical problems plaguing my Church?”  No.  He will simply ask: “Did you love me above all else? And did you love your brothers and sisters as if they were your own self?” 


 

Happy New Year to all 

January 2020

It is my hope that everyone experienced a grace filled time of joy and peace.  Fr. Hai and I were privileged to share the Christmas liturgies with you and members of your families.  We were blessed with the great music of our many dedicated choristers and instrumentalists and the sanctuary was splendid due to the special dedication of those who arranged flowers and decorated the trees.  Many thanks to all who gave time and energy to make our celebrations joyful.

And now it is back to work again. The manger is empty; the wise men have returned to the East, the shepherds to their flocks; the angels have stopped singing and the star has faded somewhere over Williamson county.  The poinsettias have wilted, the tree ornaments and stockings are packed away for another year and January presents us with credit card bills as we get back to business as usual.

The church has a name for this time of year, “ordinary.”  Prior to the changes of  Second Vatican Council, this time of year was called “Epiphany” because through the Sunday readings we were given those instances in the gospels where the many aspects of Jesus were revealed or shown to us.  We still have those readings in the various cycles but not the continuous cycle that gives us an unfolding of who Jesus is for us and the world.  We would see this through the encounter with Simeon and Anna.  Simeon would sigh a breath of relief having finally witnessed the “light of revelation to the nations.”  Rolling up the scrolls in the synagogue, Jesus would tell everyone there that Isaiah was talking about him.  His baptism in the Jordan would reveal God’s pleasure in his beloved Son.  He would perform his first miracle at a wedding showing the world that plenty made available wherever you encountered him.  All ways in which Jesus would be revealed as the way, the truth, and the light.

Truthfully, we do not need any special sequence of Scriptures to remind us of this.  Our celebration of the Sacrament each week is our greatest connection to the ongoing revelation of Christ.  The Holy Eucharist make of us Christ for the world.  We reveal Christ in our own words and actions, the daily little miracles that spur us on.  Christmas is a marvelous season, but it is only the beginning of God’s glory being revealed among us. It is a flickering candle next to the fire of Easter’s glory on the radiant face of the Savior, risen from the dead.  But then that’s another story, so stay tuned!

Wishing you all anything but an ordinary new year!
 

What is Your Mustard Seed?

Fr. Larry's Homily on the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C

Have you ever had the experience of trying to buy something with useless currency?
I tried, once, to use a twenty-five-year-old British One Pound note only to be told that they aren’t accepted anymore.  Imagine that feeling. One moment you have in your hand what you believe is exactly what you need to get what you want only to be told that you do not. And this is not the friendly and beneficent “your- money- is- no- good- here” kind of statement.  It’s the bold fact that what you trusted has let you down.
 
The disciples had also reached that point in their walk with Jesus, so much so that they finally broke down and blurted out: “Increase our faith.” A simple demand, a reasonable request made by those who had seen Jesus do some astonishing and spectacular things.  If he can cause great miracles to happen, summoning faith should be a snap. But Jesus gives a peculiar response.
 
He gives them outlandish comparisons about mustard seeds and mulberry trees.  The rhetoric may be outrageous, but the reality is rich.  Forget about the scenery…the mulberry and the ocean; focus on the fundamental affirmation. In fact, Jesus’ answer does not really meet the disciple’s request; he does not say, “OK, here’s some more faith.” He puts the disciples on the spot.
 
For the Jesus we encounter in the gospel of Luke, what is important is not the amount of faith but the kind of faith. If it were no bigger than a mustard seed, it would still be of unbelievable power.
 
The point for Luke is this: with even the tiniest amount of genuine faith, men and women who listen to Jesus’ word and commit themselves to him can do things impossible to naked human nature. Can you recall how the gospel of Mark ends? “These signs will accompany those who believe: BY using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will lay their hands on the sick, and the sick will recover.
 
What about us? What is this faith as we experience it? Especially as Catholic Christians? What is this commitment in concrete reality?
 
First off, faith is not the same thing as certainty. Many people get the two mixed up. Many ask for faith but what they really want is certainty. They want to be excused of all responsibility on their end. “Give me absolutes so that I can get on with my life and not have to think about it anymore.” While that sounds ideal, there is nothing in our faith that points to such a transactional, detached and irresponsible position. Nothing of that speaks to a living, daily relationship.
 
Honestly some think of the pursuit of faith as if it were like their internet or cable provider.
“I just want to make my payment and then always get what I want when I want it.”  When the service fails…and it usually does, then they say: “Well, you just cannot trust them…” 
“I say my prayers, I go to Mass, I give when I am asked…and then God lets me down…”
Faith in God is never the result of any quid pro quo arrangement.
 
For us there are two aspects to faith. First is the intellectual reality and by that, I mean the so-called Act of Faith.  This is what we have been taught and retain in our memory. These are the fundamental truths of our faith in Jesus Christ: “I believe everything the Catholic Church teaches, because God has revealed it through Christ; I accept it not because the church says so; I accept it because through the Church God has made it possible for me to accept it. 
 
It is on God’s word that I can make the declaration: “There is but one God in three divine persons; The Son of God was born of the Virgin Mary. This wafer that looks like bread and tastes like bread is not bread but the flesh and blood, body, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ.”
This is essential for a genuinely Catholic faith, and why? Because the Son of God took on flesh and blood and died for us to tell us something…about God, about ourselves and about living and dying. It is important for us to take God’s truth on God’s word…but faith is not simply a matter of the intellect.
 
What the disciples were asking for could not be provided by a catechism or a laundry list of doctrines to be accepted without delay. Nor was Jesus about to tell them what doctrines they had to believe to enter the kingdom.
 
What Peter, Matthew, and John wanted was an increase of trust. Faith in its fullness is a surrender of my whole person. My intellect will not save me…nor will it save anyone.
To believe means that I yield everything, including my whole self, to God. Here it is that I risk all.
Against all odds, against all fears, against all objections and in a sense against all reason.
I utter a total yes to God whose will in my regard I often find difficult to understand.
 
A total yes in darkness.
 
Here belief involves total trust. It’s Abraham leaving country and his kin…” not knowing where he was to go”, not knowing what would happen to him along the way, knowing only that God was calling him …at the age of 75, to leave what he loved and to settled where God alone knew.
That’s why we call Abraham “our father in faith.”
 
It is poor old Job sitting on a dung heap crying out in the middle of his torments. “Though God slay me, yet will I trust in him.” 
 
It is Mother Teresa explaining her success to an inquiring reporter: “I am like a little pencil in God’s hand.  The pencil has only to be allowed to be used.”
 
It is the mom and dad accompanying to the cemetery their second child who has died in tragic circumstances to be buried next to the first… not reciting the Creed, only repeating over and over again; “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place my trust in you…”
 
Or how about Jesus? I suspect a fair number of people do not realize that Jesus lived a life of faith. We tend to see him so absorbed in his Father, so protected by his Father, that faith played little or no part in his life. Not so! A famous German theologian Karl Rahner brought this home to me in his writing about belief in Christ:
“ According to Scripture we may safely say that Jesus in his life was the believer…he is the one who hopes absolutely…loves absolutely.  Jesus surrendered himself in his death unconditionally to the absolute mystery he called his father, into whose hands he committed his existence, when in the nigh of his death and forsakenness he was deprived of everything that is otherwise regarded as the content of a human existence…everything fell away from him, even the security of the closeness of God’s love, and in this trackless dark there prevailed silently only the mystery that…has no name and to which he calmly surrendered himself as to eternal love and not to the hell of futility.
 
The point is this:  For all that he was the Son of God, for all that he had a unique relationship with his Father, this man too died not with experience of resurrection, not with any unassailable proof that he would rise from the dead; he died with faith in his Father,
with hope of life forever. That’s why the last words from the cross are so striking…and faith-filled: “ Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Remember what his enemies said as they taunted him on Calvary? “He trusts in God; let God deliver him how, if he wants to” …He trusts in God.
 
The disciple’s request for an increase of faith is our request as well. The answer Jesus gives them and us concerns no what can be done for us but what we ourselves can do.  It begins by surrendering anxious lives for the peace that is ours if we decide that there is, instead of ourselves, someone else in charge of everything. It means taking our desire for certainty and placing it where it belongs, in the knowledge that God wants wonderful things for us when we give up trying to buy them with currency for which he has no use. If currency is still the image that works best, then the only currency Jesus takes is us.
 
The boldest move a poker player can make is to say “ I am all in.” Recognizing that God always has the upper hand, maybe our best move is to lay all our cards on the table.
 
May we pray?
Father we often confuse faith with certainty.  It comes from our desire to be the gods of our own little worlds.  Remove what keeps us from surrendering ourselves completely to you that we may with total trust in your plan for our lives, live fully in sure knowledge of your love.
We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen
 

“Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard
comes from the preaching of Christ”

- Romans 10

 

 

Organic Gift

by Parker Palmer

 
Years ago, I heard Dorothy Day speak. Founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her long-term commitment to living among the poor on New York's Lower East Side - had made her one of my heroes. So it came as a great shock when in the middle of her talk, I heard her start to ruminate about the "ungrateful poor."

I did not understand how such a dismissive phrase could come from the lips of a saint - until it hit me with the force of a Zen koan. Dorothy Day was saying, "Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward."

When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless - a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other's need to be cared for. That kind of giving is not only loveless and faithless, based on the arrogant and mistaken notion that God has no way of channeling love to the other except through me. Yes, we are created in and for community, to be there, in love, for one another. But community cuts both ways: when we reach the limits of our own capacity to love, community means trusting that someone else will be available to the person in need.

One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess - the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have; it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place. 

May Sarton, in her poem "Now I Become Myself," uses images from the natural world to describe a different kind of giving, grounded in a different way of being, a way that results not in burnout but in fecundity and abundance:

As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root...

When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself - and me - even as I give it away. Only when I give something that does not grow within me do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal.
About the Author: Excerpted from Parker Palmer's book "Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation"