Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

Sunday, August 2, 2015

What do you hunger for? What do you thirst for?

We, as a people, are a lot like the Israelites in Egypt.  We have become slaves to our own culture.  We want everything on our own terms.  Our homes have become bigger and better, our cars more luxurious, our parties more elaborate.  Life is now one big quest for the next new thing.  Think about it for a second. How many people here grew up in a house that was half as big as the one they are now living in?  How many of us shared a bedroom with siblings versus each having their own room?  Our desires, our expectations have changed. We, as a society, have changed our expectations of God.  We can have our beliefs, and worship our God, as long as we keep it to ourselves.  We can practice our faith, as long as we do it behind closed doors.

We heard, in today’s first reading about the Israelite community, wandering through the desert, and grumbling against Moses and Aaron.  We know that they were hungry, and complaining that it would have been better for them to have died in Egypt because, although they were slaves, they at least had their fill of food.  So God rained down manna, miraculous bread from heaven, which they could gather up each morning and eat their fill of each day.

In our Gospel reading, taken from St. John’s sixth chapter, we see the people following the Lord, looking for the next big thing. Shortly before, a multitude of people had been fed miraculously with nothing more than a few dried fish and a handful of loaves of bread. Jesus tells them not to work for food that perishes, but “for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.”  He said  “the work of God (is) that you believe in the one he sent.” Not grasping the importance of what had just happened, they ask the Lord, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?”  Jesus, in the end, tells them “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

Let’s return to my two initial questions.  What do you hunger for? What do you thirst for?  Do we hunger for manna? The Book of Exodus, after our first reading, goes on to say that the Israelites were only allowed to gather enough manna for one days worth of food. They were not allowed to gather a surplus. In other words, they had to rely on the Lord for their sustenance.  They couldn’t store away treasure for a rainy day.  They couldn’t collect more then they needed.  What do I hunger for, a larger home, a faster car, a bigger television?  What do you thirst for? Do you thirst for recognition?  Do you thirst for adulation, worldly things?

Do you hunger for the faith, for social justice, for peace?  Do you hunger for greater respect of life? Do you hunger for the Truth?

This is the real beauty of what Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel passage.  If we seek to do the will of God, if we learn our faith, and grow our faith, and cherish our faith, we will never hunger, we will never thirst, because we have, in the end, the only thing that matters, our Lord.  We can come to this holy place, we can experience a part of Heaven on earth. We can receive the very Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus, we can nourish our bodies with his flesh and blood.  We can learn about the treasure of Eucharistic Adoration.  We can spend time with the Lord, we can pour our hearts to him, we can heap our burdens upon his shoulders. We can ask him our burning questions, we can contemplate his quietly whispered answers.

Let us hunger for the Bread of Life, which gives life to the world, for if we truly hunger for the will of God, and nourish ourselves with him, we will truly receive all that we need.

Homily – 14^th Sunday of Ordinary Time

July 4-5, 2015

“These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

These words were written by Thomas Paine in 1776, some two hundred and thirty-nine years ago. The colonies were in a struggle for their independence, and many of the leaders of the revolution knew that they could pay the ultimate price for their rebellion. There is an apocryphal story told about the Declaration of Independence.  The leaders, John Adams, George Washington, John Hancock, among many others, knew that they would be tried for treason, a capital crime, if they failed in war.  The story goes that John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress, signed the declaration in bold fashion, so that King George could read his name without using spectacles. Luckily for Mr. Hancock, that wasn’t an issue. I bring this up not only because this is the weekend that we celebrate we celebrate our Independence, but, more importantly, to illustrate that when we dare to challenge the prevailing culture, we can do so, but at a price.

Our first reading today tells us of the prophet Ezekiel, being sent to the Israelites who were, as usual, stubborn of heart, having rebelled against the Lord God. The Lord is sending Ezekiel to the people, not knowing whether they will listen to him or put him to death.

In today’s Gospel reading, we see Mark’s telling of Jesus going home to Nazareth with his disciples, teaching in the synagogue.  Everyone knew Jesus as a boy, and refused to open their eyes and ears to what he was trying to do and say. They were astonished when the words came out of his mouth, but they were unable to open their hearts because they were too familiar with Jesus.  They wanted, like so many other generations of Hebrews, wanted what they wanted. They wished to be like their neighbors, worldly, wealthy. They had already turned their backs on the Lord, and couldn’t be bothered to believe.  Jesus could do no great works there, due to their disbelief, other than heal a few sick people by the laying on of hands. 

This sounds a lot like our present day and age, doesn’t it?  Our culture has been shown clearly what the Lord wants from us, but, we as a people, in turn, have said that we will determine what we want of the Lord, what we want the Lord to be and say to us. 

We as a culture, have compromised the truth.  Jesus, speaking to Pontius Pilate, states that he has come to testify to the truth, to which Pilate responds, “What is truth?”  Today, society has declared that we must redefine the sacred institution of Marriage. Men must now be allowed to live with men and women with women and call it marriage.  We know, in our hearts, that this is a lie. Every single time that a law was voted upon to limit marriage to one man and one woman, it passed by large majorities. The cultural elite, the media, the entertainment industry, academia, they all know that if you repeat a lie often enough, it will be believed. We are told that gender is a social construct, gender is meaningless, that if a man feels that he should be a woman, then it is so. He can dress like a woman, and even get an operation to make himself look like a woman.  But this is also a lie. No operation can remove the male chromosome, that inconvenient 23^rd pair of chromosomes. With a female, the pair is “xx”, with a male, it is “xy”. We hear so much about the triumph of science, about the unraveling of the human genome, but we choose to ignore the very nature of our being, and say that what we want is more important than what we are or who we are. This attitude of I want what I want when I want it is tearing our society apart, and in the end, it is the same sin, the same lack of faith that stymied our Lord’s efforts to bring forth the Kingdom in his hometown.

What, then, will become of us, when we are called to give testimony?  Will we, as the saying goes, “go along to get along”, keeping silent for the sake of convention and self-preservation, or will we speak the truth, like the bakers who challenged a faulty judicial system and had to pay a huge fine, close their business, and were ordered to keep silent about the matter by the court. What price will we be required to pay in order to speak the truth…  Will the courts attempt to force our Church to make similar choices? When they knock on your door, what price will you be willing to pay?

Peace be with you - Living in the Spirit

Pentecost Sunday Homily

May 24, 2015

Pentecost, the great Feast of the Holy Spirit, is sometimes referred to as the birthday of the Church.  I always had an easy time picturing the first two Persons of the Holy Trinity.  God the Father looked like everyone's very old grandfather. Bearded, kindly.  Jesus, due to the last two thousand years of artistic tradition, is a piece of cake. The hard one, in my mind at least, has been the Holy Spirit. At least we can always fall back on the white dove.  

During the three years of his public ministry, Jesus traveled, slept, ate, and taught his Apostles.  He showed them, in various manners, what sharing in God’s grace would mean in their lives.  He gave them the power to work great wonders, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, casting demons out of the possessed.   Inevitably, though, as weak humans, they misunderstood, doubted, and argued amongst themselves.  This process of preparing them for their own public ministry continued throughout this time. Eventually, things came to a head during the passion, death.  After their triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, to the shouts of Hosana, our Lord’s instruction was at its most clear.  He explained to them that the Christ, the Messiah, was not to be, as some expected, a warrior king, but was, rather, to be seen as a suffering servant, to be seen as one who was willing to lay down his life for his friends.

Well and good, right?  No.  Instead of understanding his instruction, the apostles missed the point entirely.  At Jesus’ moment of greatest need, they deserted him, ran from him, denied they knew him.

As we all know, Jesus broke the bonds of death, and rose from the dead.  The apostles were huddled together, behind locked doors, in the upper room, fearful, paralyzed, afraid that they might share the same fate as he had. He appeared to the apostles, and very first words that the resurrected Lord spoke to them were “Peace be with you.” 

Peace be with you.  Don’t be afraid. It’s me.  I’m not a ghost.  Touch me.  See the wounds in my hands and feet.  Eat with me.  His first concern is to put them at ease, because all has been forgiven.  Many times before, Jesus had spoken about justice, about cutting the weeds and burning them, about the foolish being thrown into the street in the middle of the night to wail and gnash their teeth.  But now, he speaks to them words of peace.  Then he breaths on them.  This is not any random description.  The Greek word used here, pneuma, is a word of action, meaning Spirit and also wind or breath.  In giving them his Holy Spirit, he breathed new life into them, the very life of God.  This power transformed the apostles.  Instead of hiding, frozen with fear, they became fearless and powerful preachers.  Instead of being ruled, as Paul says in our second reading by works of the flesh: immorality, impurity, lust, idolatry, fury, selfishness, dissension, envy and orgies, they manifested the fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Now, in our own lives, just as Jesus feeds us with his very Body and Blood, he enlivens us with his Spirit.  With this Spirit, we are no longer slaves to our flesh and our passions.  Now, with this Spirit, we can be strong, fearless, resolute.  Our lives will still have trials and tribulations. We are still beset with weakness and fear.  We will still be challenged by an ever increasingly secular society, a society that tries to tell us that black is white, that evil is good, that the unnatural is natural.  Now, instead of giving into those fears, we can, with the help of the Holy Spirit, respond that Right is still Right, that wrong is still wrong, that there is no such thing as your truth which is different from my truth, that truth is absolute, and real.  Now, we, who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified our flesh with its passions and desires. 

As Paul said to the Galatians, “If we live in the Spirit, let us also follow the Spirit.”

Failure. Disappointment. Guilt. Shame.

Homily – Third Sunday of Easter – April 19, 2015

Failure.  Disappointment.  Guilt.  Shame.

Strong emotions, all of them.  We’ve all felt them at one time or another.  We’ve felt them when we’ve let down a friend, failed to challenge an inappropriate comment or joke, told a convenient lie instead of an inconvenient truth, or broken a solemn oath.  Most of the time, we are our own harshest critics.

In today’s gospel, the apostles are in a funk.  For three years now, they have been following Jesus, eating with him, listening to him, watching in amazement as he heals the sick, gives sight to the blind, raises the dead back to life.  They see him ride into Jerusalem on a donkey to the shouts of Hosanna, fronds of palms thrown down ahead of him, covering the dusty road up into the Holy City.  All of their hopes are rising.  Then the unthinkable happens!  Jesus is betrayed, arrested, scourged, and crucified.  He dies on the cross, and is hurriedly buried.  As their master is laying down his life, they abandon him, run away from him, deny they ever knew him.

Now, they are together in the Cenacle, the upper room where they shared their last meal together three days ago, hiding, afraid.  There is talk of some women having seen the risen Lord, but, perhaps because of their own self-recriminations, they are still fearful, worried that the authorities will choose to similarly end their lives, feeling guilt and shame.

Then, two of the disciples, Cleophas, a cousin of Jesus, and an unnamed companion rush into the room.. They have seen Jesus alive, spoken to him, broken bread with him. The eleven are puzzled, not sure what to think.  Then Jesus is there in their midst.  “Peace be with you!”  He sees the frightened look on their faces, reads the doubts in their hearts, and assures them that they are not seeing a ghost.  He shows them the holes in his feet and hands, and eats with them. 

Just as he did with the companions on the road, he breaks open the Law and the Prophets, opens their eyes to all that was foretold about him, and explains that what had happened was not a failure but a triumph.  He ends his appearance by telling them of their new mission, preaching to all of the world of repentance, for the forgiveness of sins.

  

In light of all of this, how are we to proceed?  What are we to make of our failures, our disappointments, our guilt, our shame?  We are to be disciples of the Lord.  Although they were sinners, they were forgiven by Jesus.  Although they ran from him in his great need, he ate with them, taught them, allayed their fears.  And in the end, emboldened by the Holy Spirit, they spread his message to the world, laying down their lives as a testimony to their beliefs.

We, like them, are forgiven by the Lord for our failures, not in person, but in Persona Christi.   By confessing our sins to the priest, it is Jesus himself, through the priest, who forgives us with the words of absolution.

We, like the disciples, are fed by the Lord.  Not by mere food, which a persons eats and hungers again.  We are fed by Jesus with his very Body and Blood, in the Eucharist.  Just as they saw the resurrected Lord, and still doubted, some of us still walk to the altar, thinking that what they are about to receive is mere bread and wine, when in truth, it is Jesus himself.  When we feel the doubts rising in our hearts, we can sit before Him, in adoration.  We can feel his warm embrace, experience his calming presence, hear his words in our hearts, “Be not afraid”.

We, like the disciples, must spread the Good News, proclaiming the Mercy shown by the Lord in our own lives.

Scrutinies – Third Sunday of Lent 2015

Lent is a time for self reflection, for looking into the deepest part of our lives. If we do this in a completely honest fashion, we are likely to see things we are not very proud of.  But the real purpose of this self reflection is not to convince ourselves that we are scum, that we have no redeeming value, or that the world would have been better off if we had never been born.  When we bare our lives to a close inspection, we must see our faults, admit them, and ask the Lord for forgiveness.  This process in the language of the common Greek of the New Testament, is Metanoia, a “turning away”, from sin, from temptation, from anything that separates us from Jesus.

Let’s look at today’s Gospel, and find how it can open our eyes to our personal need for turning away from sin.

First of all, Jesus and his disciples are in the town of Sychar, in Samaria.  We all know about Samaria and the people who lived there.  They worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, just like the Jews. They didn’t, however, follow the Mosaic Law, which God gave to His people through Moses.  They sacrificed to the Lord, but not in Jerusalem. They wanted to follow God, but on their own terms, not the terms that the Jews received during their forty year trek through the wilderness. Therefore, they were unclean, sinners, and were to be avoided, shunned. When you came upon one of their towns, you generally wanted to put your head down and keep moving.  But what does Jesus do? He was hot and thirsty, so he sits down by a well, next to a Samaritan woman, and asks for a drink of water. When she is surprised by Jesus’ actions, he didn’t get up and leave. Instead, he engages her in a conversation, seemingly speaking in riddles, telling her that if she knew who He was, she would be asking him for “living” water.  Jesus doesn’t reject her, condemn her, avoid her, but instead he draws her into conversation.  He invites her to look beyond the surface, beyond appearances, and see reality.  He tells her that if she would recognize who he truly is, she would ask him for Living Water, and upon drinking this water, she would never thirst again.

Still unclear as to what the Lord is talking about, she ask him for this water.  Jesus does something here that we need to focus on.  He starts a line of questioning that would become uncomfortable for the Samaritan.  He points out that she is currently living in sin, living with a man who is not her husband.  She tries to be evasive, but finally admits to the Lord the nature of her sin.  In doing so, her eyes are opened to a new understanding of Jesus, of his nature as a prophet.  She speaks to him about the difference in the worship of God between the Samaritans and the Jews.  Jesus cuts through these differences and speaks about the future of Jerusalem, and the future of true worship, about the establishment of a new way of worshiping God, in Spirit and in Truth.  She then tells Jesus that she knows this is so because both the Samaritans and the Jews are waiting for the Messiah.  Jesus then says to her,

         “I am he, the one you are speaking to.”

Now the disciples return, clueless as ever, and ask Jesus, in so many words, what are you doing, talking to this outcast? Instead of reacting to the disciples and their questions, she goes back into the town and evangelizes!  She was a sinner, she was shown the reality of her sin, admits it, and in the process, she is given a revelation. She is shown the true nature of Jesus. She doesn’t keep it a secret, but instead tells everyone she can find.  Remember that these people she is speaking to are her neighbors, who, like anyone in a small town, know everyone else’s business.  They, however, don’t reject her testimony, but believe it. Over the course of the next few days, they tell her that while they at first came to believe in Jesus because of her testimony, now they have heard Jesus for themselves, and recognize the divinity of the Lord.

What can we gain from this Gospel?  We need to be like the Samaritan woman.  We need to recognize first, that we didn’t find Jesus on our own, but just the opposite – Jesus comes to us, where we are, broken and sinful.  He opens our eyes to the reality of our sins, and in admitting them to the Lord, we are healed and changed.  In the living waters of Baptism, and in the Sacrament of Confession, we confess our sins, and receive absolution from the Lord. In this process, we are adopted into God’s family, into a loving relationship with the Lord.  But at this point, it is clear that this is not to be a “Jesus and me” thing.  No, we have to share this with everyone around us.  We experience Metanoia, we turn away from sin, and turn to the Lord.  We turn away from sin and turn to the Altar, where the Lord comes to us under the appearance of bread and wine, where we eat the Body and Blood, Soul, and Divinity of the Lord, and in doing so, we accept a commission to spread this good news to all around us.  We are also invited to speak to the Lord in adoration, where we can sit and speak to Jesus, to ask for his living water, and to receive his invitation to eternal Life.