Third Sunday of Lent (March 24th, 2019)

Just a few words regarding the Lord’s Gospel for today:

In the year 70 AD, just decades after the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, the Romans would invade the lands of the Israelites and place the city of Jerusalem under siege.  This happened in response to warring factions of Israelites that had seized control of city and attempted to establish what they believed to be a true expression of the prophetic hope for a Messianic kingdom. Impatient that God was not acting in accord with their own aspirations, they sought to do for themselves what God had declared only he should and could do.  They would make for themselves the kingdom of God.  What they created was hell on earth.

The Roman administration was expelled, those presumed to have been collaborators with Roman power were either killed or driven out of the city. A new king, acclaimed as a new David, was announced and even though an invasion by the full force of the Roman army, then the most powerful military force in the world, was inevitable, the revolutionaries believed since their cause was righteous on behalf of the God of Israel, they had nothing to fear.

They were brave, but they were also fools.

The rebellion would be utterly crushed by Roman might and city of Jerusalem would be utterly destroyed.  It was a catastrophe that exceeded that of the invasion of Babylon hundreds of years before in 587 BC.

Christ’s words in his Gospel for today foreshadow the events of 70 AD.  He knows what is coming and he warns the people where things are heading and that the terror to come will sweep away righteous and unrighteous, innocent and guilty.  The only means to endure is to repent- to change.  And Christ also knows that in pride and narrowness, this will be difficult, because human beings prove themselves over and over again that we would rather be ruined than change.

If you read and study the Gospels carefully you will come face to face with the fact that Christ’s words are so very often dire and even threatening.  He foresees that an end is coming and a judgment with it.  Often times this tendency is interpreted by Christians, transposed if you will, as a matter concerning of our deaths and what happens after that event.  And this is true, but it is not the whole of what Christ intends for us to hear.

Christ’s reference point is worldly, not just otherworldly.  He warns us that the judgment of God will arrive in the here and now and we must be prepared to receive it.  This judgment will most often look like the events of 70 AD- a catastrophe of human design, a reckoning with decisions that we have made, decisions that are contrary to God’s will and purposes, that bring about terrifying results- political decisions, economic decisions, cultural decisions, personal decisions.  In all these decisions we will be convinced of our own righteousness and will justify our decisions at all costs- even in the face of their apparent failure.

When our decisions are concerned more with self- interest than self-giving love… When our decisions favor the attainment of wealth, pleasure, power, and honors at the cost of justice and truth… Then disaster inevitably follows.  Judgement arrives as the cost of our decisions and we don’t have to wait until after death to pay the price and count the cost and sin being what it is, our protests of innocence will matter little when the day of reckoning comes.

This was the harsh lesson for the Israelites of 587 BC and then again of 70 AD.

It is a lesson for all of us- even now.

If we attend to this lesson, then we will repent, not later, but now.  If we attend to this lesson, we will change now rather than be ruined later.

Lent is given to us, given to the Church as a privileged and urgent time to repent.  This repentance is not just some kind of exercise in self-improvement, but an opportunity to move out of the confined and defensive shelter of the self-involved and self-interested structures that we create, structures we use to insulate ourselves from ever having to change.  A thorough examination of conscience that compels us to consider both what we have done and failed to do, that is, our decisions, prepares us to face the judgement of God- and what is the judgment of God?  What have our fears done to us?  What have our refusals to love and to forgive and to serve made us into?  What darkeness has our desperate clinging to our need to be right created in our own lives and the lives of others?

It is a pain filled reckoning and realization of our own truth.  There is nothing capricious in the judgment of God. The judgment of God means that we see our own truth. This revelation is not deferred to the end of our lives, but it is happening even now.  The judgment we face at the end of our lives is so terrifying because at the moment of death we lose any power we had to change, to repent.

The urgency of Christ’s words in his Gospel are about all this.  We should not wait to repent, to come to terms with our truth, what we have done and what we have failed to do.  Why?  Because in this present moment of judgment we can still change, we can still repent.

Like the fig tree in Christ’s parable, we have a chance, but we can lose that opportunity.

All this does not just seem harsh, it is harsh.  Because of our affluence and distorted sense that we are more exceptional than we actually are, many Christians sidestep the harder facts of the Gospel, meaning Christ’s words of warning and judgment, for a pseudo-gospel of personal affirmation.  No change or repentance is ever really necessary in this pseudo-gospel because the point of Christ’s revelation is simply to affirm us as we are, not to provoke us to change.

Pseudo-gospels are a perennial temptation for Christians.  Every age of the Church’s life has heard the proclamation of a pseudo-gospel.  These false gospels lull us into complacency and excuse our decisions, but they all inevitably fail and they fail precisely because they are a lie.

The true Gospel tells the truth and this is why the Gospel itself always arrives in our lives as the judgment of God.  Faced with the Gospel we are compelled to a decision- will we repent?  Will we change?  That decision is now, not later.

The judgment we face is now, not later.

Second Sunday of Lent (March 17th, 2019)

The Church’s first scripture for today is an excerpt from the first book of the Bible- the Book of Genesis.  The Book of Genesis is a book of beginnings, a book of origins.  From it we learn the beginning of creation, of humanity and of the Israelites.

The Israelites originate as a people from the great Old Testament patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah.  Abraham is called forth by God from the life he knew and sets out on a journey that God promises will take him to lands that will become the homeland for his descendants, who, God promises, will be a great nation “as numerous as a stars in the heavens”.

In today’s scripture this promise is literally cut in a sacrifice and becomes a covenant between God and Abraham.  A covenant is best understood for our purposes as a relationship, a relationship that goes much deeper than merely a legal contract.  The sacrifice indicates the depth of the relationship between God and Abraham- it is a matter of life and death.

In the aftermath of this sacrifice, Abraham has a frightening mystical experience, where God makes his presence known to him, a presence Abraham encounters as a “deep terrifying darkness”.

It is in that terrifying darkness that Abraham comes to terms with the unknowability of God, for the God of the Old Testament is vividly mysterious, an indication that he cannot be confined like the gods of the pagans to a place or manipulated through spells and incantations.  The God of the Bible does not need the sacrifices that are offered and it is not our sacrifices or worship that sustain him, as it did the gods of Abraham’s ancestors.  Instead, the God of the Bible is the subverter of magic or controlled for our own purposes.  His sacrifices are accepted as signs and symbols of the relationship he has with his people and he needs none of them to be who he is.  But we need these sacrifices to remind us who we are and that there is no true love or relationship without sacrifice.  The deep mystery of this God, the one true God, overtakes Abraham with terror.

But this is not the only reason for Abraham’s terror.

Abraham experiences for himself the vulnerability of genuine faith.  We Christians too often pay lip service to faith, making it merely an emotional comfort, or using faith as a declaration of our tribal identity. But while comfort might come to us as a result of faith, and faith can and should order our way of life, it is not in the superficiality of our emotions or our identity, that makes for authentic faith.

Faith is most raw and real when, like the experience of Abraham, we come to terms with the reality of God, rather than the idols of him that we so often create out of our desires and fears.  Further, faith is authentic and true, when, like Abraham’s faith, it is professed as an act of trust in promises that remain outside of our ability to manipulate or control and that have indefinite and unexpected outcomes.

Faith is not magic, it is not a way of currying favor with God so that we can get what we want.  Faith is an expression of our relationship with God, an act of trust, that what he has promised will be fulfilled.

We Christians profess our faith in Christ and the promises he makes to us concern not just our lives in this world, but beyond this world- beyond our death. We become through this act of faith, his chosen people, a new kind of Israelite.  And it is through us, incorporated as spiritual descendants of ancient Abraham, that God’s promises to Abraham are fulfilled.

This act of faith originates in the terrifying darkness of the cross and it is cut in the sacrifice of his Body and his Blood.  We experience this in the Mass, for the Mass is not just our community gathered to pray, or a cultural pageant, but the Mass is the Church, the new Israelites, gathered together in an encounter with the one, true and living God- who makes himself known to us in the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament and gives his sacrifice to us as a new covenant, a new relationship that God presents to us with the gravity and severity of a matter of life and death- his life and death, our life and death.  It is through this life and death that God’s promises to us in Christ are fulfilled.

And in this life and death there is mystery and there is terror, and there is also the presence of the living and true God.

The second scripture is an excerpt from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians and in this text the Apostle Paul reminds us of the promises of Christ- that in Christ we are given a life beyond the life that we have now- this life, this world, indeed our very bodies are not ends in themselves, but are a means by which God will grant to us an even greater life, even greater world and an even greater bodies than what we currently possess.  We Christians call this heaven, which is not merely a place, but the event of our transformation from death to glory.  It is the resurrection of the Lord Jesus from the dead that engenders in us trust that God in Christ will accomplish for us what he revealed in his body risen from the dead.

St. Paul also testifies that this act of faith in Christ makes us different, and this difference should be evident in the manner that we live, in our unique way of life.  Christians are not meant to be like everyone else, but also hold to specific values and behaviors that mark us as being different from the cultures in which we live, values that are meant to indicate to ourselves and others that our faith is not in politics, economics, or culture, but in Christ.

This is unsettling to many people, indeed, it is unsettling to many Christians.  The great temptation in every age of the Church’s life is accommodate ourselves to the cultures in which we live, to make ourselves acceptable and our way of life no different than the cultural, political or economic expectations of our time and place.  We Christians do this out of fear or frustration or even because we think it makes our faith more acceptable to those who might refuse or misunderstand us.  But whatever our reasons and justifications, St. Paul insists that we lose much, indeed the world loses much, if we Christians are unwilling to be who Christ intends for us to be.

Finally, the disciples of the Lord Jesus witness an extraordinary revelation.  Christ reveals his glory, which is the Glory of God.  Remember, Christians, the great mystery of Christ is not the revelation of a spiritual teaching or political reform, but the mysterious revelation that God has accepted for himself a human nature and lived a real, human life.  This is who the Lord Jesus is- not a social reformer or religious guru- Christ is God in our flesh.  God in a human body.  God become man. Jesus Christ is God who meets us face to face.

The mystical experience of Abraham from the Book of Genesis foreshadows what today’s Gospel describes.  Christ’s disciples take the place of Abraham and God in Christ reveals himself not in darkness, but in radiant light.

Christians are meant to be witnesses to the truth of God in Christ.  This truth is not a concept or an idea, but it is testimony to his person, testimony to who Jesus Christ really and truly is.  Christians are meant to be the ones who God has assigned the mission of inviting the world to know who he really and truly is and sharing with others the gifts God gives to us in Christ.  The greatest of these gifts is a relationship, a covenant with Christ that he gives to us in the Church.

If we Christians are to be true to who God intends for us to be then we must set about knowing Jesus, and knowing him, not just as a significant historical figure, but as a living, divine person, as the one, true God.  There is no other Jesus than this.  We might be more comfortable with a Jesus of our own making or a Jesus much less than who he reveals himself to be.  But the truth of Christ’s revelation is not meant to make us comfortable, but to make us holy, to transform us, to make us who God intends for us to be.

If we do not know Christ, we cannot truly be Christians.  If we cannot accept Christ for who he really and truly is, then we will not accept the way of life he offers.  Knowing and accepting Jesus for who he really and truly is- this is the challenge the Gospel places before us today.

First Sunday of Lent (March 10th, 2019)

The Church’s first scripture for today is an excerpt from the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy.  The word “deuteronomy” means “second law” and that signals to us the purpose of the text- this book is about Moses giving the Israelites the law that which will order their unique way of life. The “second law” means that this law follows from the law that was delivered at Mt. Sinai.  It is through the practices of the law that the Israelites will realize their God given mission, which is to serve as witnesses to the one, true God, and through their way of life, provide the world with a means by which those who are not Israelites can know the one, true God and perhaps even share in the Israelite way of life.

In this particular text from the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses reminds the Israelites that they originate, not in worldly glory or privilege or in power, but in suffering, in what the world despised and considered of no real importance.  Even when they grew in great numbers, they remained oppressed and unable to free themselves from their afflictions.  All that they have and are, all that they have accomplished is not because of their own greatness or ingenuity, but instead, it is all because God intervened in their lives in an extraordinary way.  The Israelites owe their survival, indeed their very lives to God, and their history demonstrates that without his intervention, they would have surely perished.

Moses insists that the Israelites recall this during their worship and this is important, for it reminds us the kind of worship that God wants, not just from the Israelites, but from us.

Worship can degenerate into merely a form of our own self-expression, a method of self-aggrandizement.  This distortion happens when our focus in on ourselves, on our experiences, on how worship pleases us and makes us feel important. When this is the case, the true object of our worship, God, is displaced with idols of our own making.  Thus, Moses, whose spiritual vision is so perceptive, seeks to inoculate the Israelites from this tendency by insisting that as they worship they understand that what they are doing is not simply about themselves, but about God, and specifically, an act of appreciation for what God has accomplished for them.

The worship of the Church is intended to draw us out of ourselves, while it proclaims our exultation in Christ, it is not meant to build up our self-esteem or be an exercise in self-expression.  Instead, it is an act of praise, of appreciation, for what God has done for us in Christ.  Thus, Moses’ advice about worship is necessary for us to take to heart.  We also need to remember as we gather to worship God that who we are as Christians originates in suffering, in what the world despised and continues to despise, and that our glory is not in what we have accomplished, but what God accomplishes for us and through us.

If we bring to our worship this disposition of humility, then the mysteries of our worship will be revealed.

The Church’s second scripture is an excerpt from the “magnum opus” of the Apostle Paul- his letter to the Romans.  The letter to the Romans seems to have been written by St. Paul as an introduction to the Christians of early Church in Rome.  These Christians were Israelites, and thus the concern of St. Paul to clarify how he understands the relationship of Christ to Israelites and the Church to Israel.  Not being Israelites ourselves, much of the letter to Romans might seem obtuse to us, but there remains great spiritual benefit in our coming to understand what St. Paul has to say.

St. Paul testifies that both Israelites and Gentiles can share a relationship with God because of what God has accomplished in Christ.  In fact, what God has accomplished in Christ is to create a new kind of Israel called the Church which gathers both Israelites and Gentiles in a relationship with God.  There was a tendency among Israelites to absolutize their unique culture, to make it not so much an invitation to others to know God, but a hindrance to God.  Being an Israelite was the priority and the absolute, not God in Christ.  Such an emphasis was placed on Israelite identity and culture, that it signaled to the Gentiles that a relationship with the one, true God was simply impossible for them.  This is the attitude that Christ himself criticizes as being prevalent among the Pharisees- Israel becomes not a bridge over which people may cross to come to know God, but a blockade to prevent access to him.

St. Paul insists that through coming to know Christ, one is also invited into a new kind of relationship with God that is called the Church.  The Church is a new kind of Israel, a bridge over which people are invited to cross so that they might have a relationship with God and enjoy the gift of a new way of life.  This is the meaning of his words about there now being “no distinction between Jew and Greek” for God in Christ wills all to know him and to be “saved”.

The Israelites were not the only ones who ever fell into the temptation to absolutize their culture or to create blocks instead of bridges to those seeking a relationship with the one, true God.  We can fall into that temptation ourselves when we elevate our own culture to an absolute or when we see our own faith as stick to beat people back with rather than an outstretched hand that invites people to know Christ in the Church.  Indeed, the tribalism that infects our culture also infects the Church!  How often does our identity as Catholics become not a matter of knowing and serving the Lord but about choosing sides!  How often do we seek to reduce people to the categories that appeal to our sense of what we think to be acceptable!  How many times does our worship seems more a pageant for cultures or an expression of our ideologies rather than a visible sign that our relationship with Christ is the priority and the absolute!

Our relationship with Christ is the absolute, not our culture, tribe, race, ethnicity, political affiliation, economic status, or any of the “identity markers” that have become our culture’s new and secular profession of faith.  This priority of Christ was a revolution when St. Paul proclaimed it centuries ago and it remains a revolution today.

Finally, the Gospel presents the Lord Jesus “tempted” by the devil.  The solidarity of God in Christ with us is such that he submits himself to the temptings of the devil, knowing for himself how humanity experiences the evil one’s cunning power, cruel accusations, and malevolent insinuations.

The evil one presents all the wealth, pleasure, power and honors that is at his disposal and promises to grant all the Lord Jesus if he would but serve him.

Of course, the devil reveals not only his own malice, but his foolishness, as nothing he can offer compares to what Christ in his divinity already possesses.

The temptations show the limits of the devil’s power, for hidden from him is the full extent of who precisely he is dealing with.

Christ refuses the devil’s temptings, in the end, dispelling the evil one by asserting who he really is- the Lord himself!

Wealth, pleasure, power and honors are not in themselves evil, for properly understood and used, they can all do much good.  But it is precisely what is good for us that the devil seeks to pervert and he does so by promising us the good things we desire but under the condition that we use those good things to serve his own malicious and destructive ends.

When we give into this temptation, we are destroyed.  That is the devil’s end.  The evil one hates us because she hates everything and everyone that God loves and this is why all his promises to us are false and empty and though attractive, always lead to our destruction.

The evil one, who was bold enough to tempt Christ, is also tempting all of us.  He seeks to destroy us, not through the ridiculous displays of special effects that movies and television show us as evidence of his power, but through our decisions, through our own exercise of our own will to choose and to decide.  Thus, he makes us agents of our own destruction, and as we are destroyed by our choices, by our decisions, he accuses us of being worth nothing but damnation.  We can, of course, refuse him, as Christ did, but that means living with less than what we often desire in terms of wealth, pleasure, power and honors.  Accepting less when we could have more is hard for us, especially when we think that we are somehow strong enough to overcome the devil’s bargains and turn his evil into something good.  It is this kind of pride that comes before our fall.

The consolation in this Gospel is that in the midst of the devil’s temptings, Christ the Lord is with us.  We are very limited in our power to fight the devil and often too weak to resist his temptings, and this is why Christ has entered into our condition, accepted a human nature, and lived a real, human life.  Christ did this to be with, even in that dark moment when the evil emerges from the shadows and insists to us he has the power to give us everything that we desire.

Christ inserts himself into the terrifying confrontation with Satan that all of us will inevitably face.  In the midst of that evil, Christ is present and willing to lead us from the wasteland of temptation and to deliver us from evil.

  

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time (March 3rd, 2019)

The Bible is a collection of books, a library so to speak. The literature of the Bible includes all manner of literary forms- histories, poetry, essays, prophecies (just to name a few examples). While the Bible is the word of God, the word of God in the Bible is delivered to us in the words of men- distinctly human words. These human words and their authors are inspired by God, meaning that God is in a true sense the author of the scriptures, for he is the reason for which the sacred texts of the Bible have been written. God did not inspire the authors of the Biblical texts to write so that he could have a book for himself. The Bible is for us and God intends for the Bible to be for us, so that we might come to know him through the Bible, and knowing him, come to learn what he asks us to do.

Thus, when the Church presents the Bible to us, the intention is not to provide us with a course in ancient literature or to provide us with a kind of divinely inspired self-help manual or to provide the preacher with platform for his personal anecdotes or stories, but to help us to come to know God so that we can live the kind of lives that God reveals will lead to our flourishing.

Preaching, if it is authentic and truly biblical, should not stand in way of the revelation of God but direct our attention to God. When in our great creed that we profess at Mass we testify to Christ who is the fulfillment of the Scriptures, we are signaling what we believe the Bible is all about and what we need to hear from the Church in terms of preaching. Great Christian preachers are not entertaining us, they are speaking to us of the reality of God, a reality that the Bible directs our attention towards and a reality that Jesus Christ reveals in all its fullness. The great Christian preacher speaks of God, and not just any god, but the God who makes himself known through the great story that he communicates through the Bible. It is from the many books of the Bible that this story emerges and we see this story culminate in not the revelation of a book, but in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ.

For the Bible, the word of God revealed in the words of men, is not the last and final word- the word of God in its fulfillment is Eternal Word that God speaks to us in the human voice of Jesus Christ. Because of this, the culmination of great Christian preaching is not how the preacher uses rhetoric or theatrics to inspire us to listen to him, but how the preacher inspires us to listen to Word of God, a Word that speaks to us in Jesus Christ.

Our first scripture for today’s Mass is from the Old Testament Book of Sirach. The Book of Sirach is from a section of the Bible called “Wisdom Literature”, which means that it includes advice for us that is both profound and practical. The wisdom literature of Bible is about insight, how to best to negotiate our place in the world and the often conflictual and perplexing reality of human relationships.

Thus, today’s excerpt from the Book of Sirach is about how our words to one another impact our relationships and reveal our character. Our words have power, power to express affection and concern, but also have the power to express our darkest desires and wreak havoc in the lives of others. Therefore, the Book of Sirach advises that our speech will reveal much about who we are, and will reveal the hidden motives and desires that we often labor so intensely to conceal.

Language does not just shape our reality, it creates our reality, and indeed can destroy our own lives and the lives of others. Through our speech, our words, we reveal who we really and truly are.

The Church’s second scripture for today’s Mass is from the New Testament, from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.

The apostle Paul speaks about a controversial topic- our mortality, the fact that each and every one of us will die and while we can defer ever thinking about this fact in the interest of maintaining “positive emotions” we cannot evade death’s inevitability. St. Paul also boldly associates death with sin, meaning that death is something that God opposes. God’s opposition to death and sin reveals the great truth about his love for us- he does not want either death or sin to be the last word about human existence and will intervene radically so as to defeat their power over us.

This is what God’s revelation in Christ is about, wherein the cross of Jesus he demonstrates his willingness to forgive what seems to be unforgiveable and in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead proves that his power over death is absolute. God offers us in Christ possibilities that can overcome the sin that afflicts us and the death that we fear. Christians are meant to be the bearers or these God-given possibilities into the world. This is St. Paul’s message and lesson for us today- reminding us what we have received from God in Christ, and further reminding us, that the possibilities we have received as Christians from God in Christ are meant for others and we are the means by which God in Christ wants to deliver them.

It is not the purpose of the Church to be a faith-based clubhouse that supports our religious themed interests or provides us with faith-based entertainment. The Church is meant to be Christ’s way of offering to the world a chance, a second chance, a new possibility for our lives that is greater than sin and death. This is the “work of the Lord” that the apostle Paul references in the scripture for today. This is the work of the Church. Is it truly our work? The work of this parish? Or have we become enamored and preoccupied with projects and plans that rarely, if ever, are genuinely the work of the Lord- inviting others to know that God in Christ offers us a power, a possibility, greater than that of our sin and greater than that of our death.

Finally, in his Gospel, the Lord Jesus speaks to the reality of our own hypocrisy, the tendency to call out others for their lack, their sin, while never attending to our own. If we are to speak the truth, we should only do so out of charity and with a willingness to name our own sin. If we do not do this, we are perpetrating a hoax and using the truths of our faith as an obfuscation, a distraction from what we ourselves have done and failed to do.

Christ reminds us that “no disciple is superior to his teacher and that the fully trained disciple will be like his teacher”. This means that we should not aspire to sit in the judgement seat of Christ, appropriating his authority for ourselves for our own purposes and agendas. The appearance of Christ, having his power, is not the goal, our relationship with the Lord is not meant to be about appearances, but about reality. Appearing to be a Christian fuels our tendency towards hypocrisy, for at hypocrisy is really appearing to be someone that we are not and leveraging this lie to further our own ego driven purposes.

Mastery in the Christian life does not means that my own ego driven desires and motivations supplant the will and purposes of Christ. Being a Christian is not merely a matter of appearances but of truth. And the truth of our Christianity is so often revealed in the manner that we speak of others, especially others who seem to us to fall short of our expectations.

Mastery of the Christian life means a death to self through which we become ever more like Christ. This is what the Lord intends for us to understand in his insight that the disciple must become like his teacher. It is this “Christ-likeness” that we see in the saints and it is aspiring to be like Christ that has the power to deliver us from our own hypocrisy.

The Christian way of life is an invitation for us to become less like ourselves and ever more like Christ.