Homily 6-16-2013 Love and Sorrow - Two Signs of Growth in Holiness

Today's Gospel and first reading are cases of a “wake-up call.” Both King David and the unnamed Pharisee needed a huge reality check to remember who they truly were and that they had sinned before God. The temptation is there for us all to think that we have our life all in order, all of our ducks in a row, and are sort of the spiritual elite above the “low-class” sinners around us.

Pride, my friends, is the root of all sin, from the first sin of Adam (to be come like gods) through the angel of light, Lucifer, whose non serviam!, “I will not serve!” is a temptation for us all, all they way to the sins of our own lives, of our world. King David forgets who he was, where he came from. The Pharisee forgets that any virtue he has is not something he created from nothing, but that God had fostered in his heart, probably to a great extent through the help of his parents and friends (and also his religious practices of reading and meditating upon God's law).

Let us turn our pride into the humility of our Lord Jesus, who said Ego serviam!, “I will serve!,” even to the point of the Cross and Death. Let us remember Our Lady, Notre Dame, the only one free from sin, who never held it over others and puffed herself up, but humbly served her cousin Elizabeth in her need. Let us remember that we are dust, that our holiness is not our own, and that we are just as fragile as David – capable of slipping into the worst of sins if we are not faithful to God's will with constancy and perseverance. The spiritual life leaves no room for standing still, we are either moving forward or falling backward. We can't fall into David's trap of complacency.

One trick for growth in holiness is shown in today's Gospel: we need to be like the woman who comes to Jesus with sorrow. Now there are two types of sorrow: a destructive sorrow that leads to discouragement, self-pity, and despair, so that we abandon our regimen of holiness; and a healthy, life-giving sorrow that leads to honest self-awareness, a deep-seated gratitude for God's mercy, and a hopeful vision for the future that inspires us to continue in the struggle.

As we acknowledge our sins, we are called to show this second type, this hopeful sorrow, which can only come from not focusing on ourselves and our pride, but focusing on Our Lord. The woman didn't care about what others were thinking, she knew she was loved, and that relationship with Jesus was the most important thing to her. A healthy sorrow is centered on a relationship of love. Love is the source of true sorrow and of holiness.

This is what Christianity is all about. We won't get far in our spiritual lives without following David's model of humble confession, without taking this woman's example of sorrow and love. We need to keep that sense of sorrow about our past sins, a sort of hatred for what sin is (a slap in the face of God) and what it does. We must allow that healthy sorrow to spur us on to love Christ ever more deeply. The more we love, the more we are forgiven. Let us ask Jesus today to give us sorrow, a healthy sorrow, a hopeful sorrow. Let us show him we love Him.

Homily 6-9-2013 Tragedy and Salvation: God is Stronger

"For we are like olives, only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us."
- excerpt from The Talmud

 Before we reach heaven, we are never free from hard times. All kinds of tragedy can befall us, and the greatest tragedies are physical death and mortal sin, spiritual death.  Yet in both of these, we see God is stronger than death.

The widow of Zarephath and the widow in today's Gospel present us today with the tragedy of physical death. Death is never easy. Death is an evil we must suffer, just as we suffer pain. Evil is an absence of a good that should be present. (All sin is a lack of love and of truth). We can't understand death, nor any evil, because it is inherently against reason.

However, God can create something from nothing – from the shapeless void he made the entire universe. While science can explain the universe, for example the Big Bang, it cannot explain beyond the universe, like where the Big Bang, so to speak, got it's dynamite and fuse. God can create from absolutely nothing. Where there is any evil, any absence of good, such as death, God can bring good through it by his creative power. Thus euthenasia – falsely described as “mercy killing” - is never acceptable because is deprives us of the most foundational gift that God has given us: Life. It is also despair: giving up, rejecting the cross' power to save us.

Saint Paul today presents us with the horror of spiritual death. “ I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it.” The shame that Paul carries for being so tragically wrong about Jesus is only healed by his trust in God's merciful forgiveness. His sins hurt both him and many others, but the Lord God has healed him (and many others) through his creative power. This is why Paul works so tirelessly for the Gospel: to make up for his failings and to share his joy with all.

When Jesus looked upon the funeral procession in today's Gospel and was moved with a gut-wrenching compassion, I can't help but think that he must have thought of his own mother. Mary also would be a widow losing her only Son, seemingly without anyone left in the world to provide for and protect her. No one knows the evil of death and the horror of sin more perfectly than she, just as no one knows the darkness of a cave except those who live under the full radiance of daylight.

Our Lord's miracle and the miracle of the prophet Elijah both reflect the glory of the resurrection and foretell it. It shows us that in God, the Cross transcends time, even in reverse, but also into the future, into our own time and place.

“God has visited His People.” This is the same thing we proclaim when remembering the gift of the Eucharist.

Here our Lord Jesus come to us in our tragedies, bringing the pain of the cross but also the victory of the Resurrection. If we are faithful and seek the Lord's healing, than God who created something from nothing can bring the good of His Love into the darkness of our pain and tragedy. May we have the faith to let our Lord touch us, and may the Blessed Mother encourage us in that faith.

Homily 6-2-1013 The Body of the Lord - Give & Take

Ordination

Stewardship

Give & Take

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

adoration with Pope

Blessing: God blesses us, we bless God.

Tues: Think of Mother Teresa: what does the spirit of the world say of Mother Teresa? 'Ah, Blessed Teresa is a beautiful woman, she did a lot of good things for others ...'. The spirit of the world never says that the Blessed Teresa spent, every day, many hours, in adoration ... Never! It reduces Christian activity to doing social good. As if Christian life was a gloss, a veneer of Christianity. The proclamation of Jesus is not a veneer: the proclamation of Jesus goes straight to the bones, heart, goes deep within and change us.

[http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/05/28/pope_at_mass:_following_christ_is_not_a_career,_it_is_the_way_of_th/en1-696136]

Thurs:

...
Jesus this evening gives Himself to us in the Eucharist, shares our same journey – indeed, He becomes food, real food that sustains our life even at times when the going is rough, when obstacles slow down our steps. The Lord in the Eucharist makes us follow His path, that of service, of sharing, of giving – and what little we have, what little we are, if shared, becomes wealth, because the power of God, which is that of love, descends into our poverty to transform it.

Let us ask ourselves this evening, adoring the Christ truly present in the Eucharist: do I let myself be transformed by Him? Do I let the Lord who gives Himself to me, guide me to come out more and more from my little fence to get out and be not afraid to give, to share, to love Him and others?

Discipleship, communion and sharing. Let us pray that participation in the Eucharist move us always to follow the Lord every day, to be instruments of communion, to share with Him and with our neighbor who we are. Then our lives will be truly fruitful. Amen. [http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/05/30/pope:_homily_for_corpus_christi_[full_text]/en1-696991]

Homily 5-26-2013 Trinity and Family

 Every year we dedicate one day to the central mystery of our faith: the Blessed Trinity. With the Gift of the Holy Spirit, in which God Himself is thus poured into our hearts, we are able to profess that Jesus Christ, who is the fulness of revelation, is also Lord, that is, the one God Himself who has in these last days revealed His own internal mystery to us. This mystery is profoundly important for us because it is the foundation of everything: who we are, what we believe, the meaning of life, the existence of the universe.

Looking for an image of the Trinity on earth is easy in some ways (anything with three equal but united parts, such as a clover), but it is also in some ways very difficult, since every analogy falls short in its comparison particulary since God is certainly greater than this world he created. However, the family is a great place to look to see the Trinity present. Pope John Paul II tells us that the primordial model of the family is to be sought in God himself, in the Trinitarian mystery of his life. [LF #6]

This comes from the 1994 Letter to Families that I can guarantee is longer than any letter any of us has ever written. It expresses his love and concern for the family, seen also in that he declared 1994 a special Year for the Family. I strongly recommend you read this letter in its entirety, perhaps using it as a method of prayer for two or three weeks. Much of it is drawn from his earlier encyclical on the family in 1981, Familiaris Consortio. From that encyclical I would like us to reflect on how the Trinity informs our family life.

First, because of the Trinity we are Called to Love: God created man in his own image and likeness: calling him to existence through love, he called him at the same time for love. … As an incarnate spirit,..., man is called to love in his unified totality. Love includes the human body, and the body is made a sharer in spiritual love... It is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and a woman commit themselves totally to one another until death...The only "place" in which this self-giving in its whole truth is made possible is marriage, the covenant of conjugal love freely and consciously chosen, whereby man and woman accept the intimate community of life and love willed by God himself, which only in this light manifests its true meaning. [#11] This is why the Church emphatically discourages cohabitation: you can't “pretend” marriage – you are either absolutely committed, or you are not.

JPII then outlines four main tasks for the family:
1. Forming a Community of Persons: The unity of God manifests itself in the family, starting with spouses. All members of the family, each according to his or her own gift, have the grace and responsibility of building day by day the communion of persons, making the family "a school of deeper humanity": This happens where there is care and love for the little ones, the sick, the aged; where there is mutual service every day; when there is a sharing of goods, of joys and of sorrows. [# 21]
2. Serving Life: The life-giving example of the Trinity is modeled in the family by accepting life as a gift, protecting it, nurturing it at all times (even beyond).
3. Development of Society: drawing others into the communion it shares.
   The human family, disunited by sin, is reconstituted in its unity by the redemptive power of the death and resurrection of Christ. Christian marriage, by participating in the salvific efficacy of this event, constitutes the natural setting in which the human person is introduced into the great family of the church. [#15]
4. Sharing in Life and Mission of the Church – building up God's Kingdom

By virtue of the sacramentality of their marriage, spouses are bound to one another in the most profoundly indissoluble manner. Their belonging to each other is the real representation, by means of the sacramental sign, of the very relationship of Christ with the church. Spouses are therefore the permanent reminder to the church of what happened on the cross; they are for one another and for the children witnesses to the salvation in which the sacrament makes them sharers. [#13]

Since the married couple manifests to the world the free, total, and unending love of Christ the bridegroom for his one and only bride, the Church, they are drawn to the Eucharistic banquet in a more powerful way: it is here in Holy Communion, if spouses choose to abandon themselves to our Lord Jesus hidden in this sacrament, where they will find the witness to and support for their own married love.

Finally, we let John Paul II conclude: I entrust each family to Our Lord Jesus, to Mary and to Joseph. To their hands and their hearts I offer this exhortation: May they present to you, beloved sons and daughters, and may they open your hearts to the light that the Gospel sheds on every family.

Blessed Trinity, teach us to love in our families.

Homily 5-18-2013 Manifold Manifestations of the one Holy Spirit

My pastor growing up always called Pentecost the birthday of the Church: it is here that the mission of Christ is truly complete. It is here at Pentecost that the Church receives all that she needs to live the Gospel, to proclaim in various united ways the glory of the Lord in the Gospel and in our world. God sent His only begotten Son into our world that we may believe in Him and have eternal life, but this is accomplished only within the Holy Spirit. In some way, we can summarize the mystery God's work in the world this way, including all three persons of the Blessed Trinity: The Father sends the Son to give us the Spirit.

Think of the event of Pentecost as recorded in the Catechism, par. 2623 On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit of the Promise was poured out on the disciples, gathered "together in one place."⁹² While awaiting the Spirit, "all these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer."⁹³ The Spirit who teaches the Church and recalls for her everything that Jesus said⁹⁴ was also to form her in the life of prayer.

Here in the upper room, united in prayer around the Blessed Mother, the Church receives the strength she needs to carry out her mission. Prayer in the Holy Spirit drives us into the world with the gifts we need to carry out our vocation.

Peter was not able to convert 3,000 people in one day with the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Terry is not able to celebrate Mass without the Holy Spirit.

Your parents are not able to fulfill their role as teachers of the faith without the Holy Spirit.

You will not be able to live a Holy marriage without the Holy Spirit.

Only through the Holy Spirit are we able to fulfill these vocations, which come to us especially in our prayer.

2672 The Holy Spirit, whose anointing permeates our whole being, is the interior Master of Christian prayer. He is the artisan of the living tradition of prayer. To be sure, there are as many paths of prayer as there are persons who pray, but it is the same Spirit acting in all and with all. It is in the communion of the Holy Spirit that Christian prayer is prayer in the Church.
Each vocation is unique. Yet all are fueled by the same Spirit. Think of how water satisfied all the different plants and animals of our planet, yet it suits itself to so many various needs. The same rain sustains them all, but they all put it to use in distinct ways. The same goes for Christians. Although we are united by the Holy Spirit, we are also sent out in particular ways.
Two years ago today, on the Saturday before Pentecost (June 11th of that year) the Holy Spirit came upon me to fill me with the grace of the Priesthood of Jesus Christ. I thank God for this gift and beg the Spirit to continue to empower me with the Grace I need to live my life for Him alone. As we pray for more priests, I invite on of our parish's seminarians to share a few words of his own.

Homily 5-12-2013 Ascension A Deeper Presence

When Jesus died on the cross they weep and mourn, but now, 40 days later, as the disciples witness the departing of Our Lord Jesus from the world, they act completely different! Did you notice their peculiar response?: “full of joy, they are continually in the temple praising God.” The Resurrection, those Easter days with the disciples, and the final moments we celebrate today somehow change their perspective. Perhaps now they have understood what Jesus had promised them in the Gospel of John: “I am going away, but I will come back to you.” Perhaps they know more fully what St. Matthew records: “I am with you always, until the end of the age.”

How can this be? Jesus is gone, but He is with us? The answer is to be found in something deeper, like what C.S. Lewis speaks of in the Chronicles of Narnia as “deep magic,” a part of reality that is harder to perceive but is greater that the world we see. I speak of the mystery of God Himself, which we are given in the image of the clouds today.

Let us listen to these words of Pope Benedict XVI: The cloud reminds us of the hour of the Transfiguration, in which the bright cloud falls on Jesus and the disciples. It reminds us of the hour of Mary's encounter with God's messenger, Gabriel, who announces to her the “overshadowing” with the power of the Most High. It reminds us of the holy tent of God in the Old Covenant, where the cloud signified the Lord's presence, the same Lord who, in the form of a cloud, led the people of Israel during their journey in the desert, and from which Moses received the Ten Commandments of the Covenant.

This is perhaps the most important meaning of the use of incense for Christians: it reminds us that God is near, God is truly here in a mysterious and somewhat blinding kind of way.

BXVI continues: This reference to the cloud is unambiguously theological language. It presents Jesus' departure, not as a journey to the starts, but as his entry into the mystery of God. It evokes an entirely different order of magnitude, a different dimension of being. … God is not in one space alongside other spaces. God is God – he is the premise and the ground of all the space there is, but he himself is not part of it...His presence is not spatial, but divine. In this way, Jesus' going away is in this sense a coming, a new form of closeness, of continuing presence. ...through his power over space, he is present and accessible to all – throughout history and in every place.

Jesus, whose entire mission and life was absolutely a gift for our salvation, has now taken our human nature to where it was created to be: united with God perfectly and forever. He never ceases to bring us to the Father and His Grace to us. One of the titles of the Pope is the Pontifex Maximus, or great bridge-builder, a pagan term used originally for the emperor, but speaking real truth about the role of the Pope, who stands in the person of Christ for us. Through the Ascension, The Lord Jesus is truly a bridge-builder between us and God.

CCC 662: Jesus Christ, the one priest of the new and eternal Covenant, "entered, not into a sanctuary made by human hands. . . but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf."543 There Christ permanently exercises his priesthood, for he "always lives to make intercession" for "those who draw near to God through him".544 As "high priest of the good things to come" he is the center and the principal actor of the liturgy that honors the Father in heaven.545

In our lives, wherever and whenever, Our Lord Jesus is with us, “always, to the end of time.” Especially here in the new Temple, the Church, where through the sacraments Christ reaches out, touches us, and blesses us. As the Apostles, so also should we joyfully live our lives, giving Praise to God for His marvelous achievement.

Homily 5-5-2013 Holy Spirit: Captain of the Ship

 Today we see that God works through the Holy Spirit to lead the Church into all truth. If the Church is a ship guiding us across the seas of life to the everlasting shores of heaven, then our captain is the Holy Spirit, working through our Bishops.  This guidance of the Holy Spirit is played out very clearly in the First Reading from Acts of the Apostles, where the Church must make perhaps the greatest decision it has ever had to: whether Christianity was one and the same with Judaism or whether it had developed from it organically into something new. The Council of Jerusalem (as this episode is sometimes called) ultimately determined that, in keeping with the preaching of Paul and Barnabas, it was not necessary to observe Jewish ritual practices.

As important as this decision is in itself, it is equally important for us how the decision was made: the apostles were sought out, and then met together to determine how God was working in the world.

CCC 76 In keeping with the Lord's command, the Gospel was handed on in two ways:

- orally "by the apostles who handed on, by the spoken word of their preaching, by the example they gave, by the institutions they established, what they themselves had received - whether from the lips of Christ, from his way of life and his works, or whether they had learned it at the prompting of the Holy Spirit";^{(DV 7)}

- in writing "by those apostles and other men associated with the apostles who, under the inspiration of the same Holy Spirit, committed the message of salvation to writing". ^{(DV 7)}

And just as then, so also now do we need the Holy Spirit to guide the Church to answer the questions we have in our own time and place. We need the teaching authority of the Church, always subject to the work and direction of the Holy Spirit, to lead us into all truth as Jesus promised.

CCC 78 This living transmission, accomplished in the Holy Spirit, is called Tradition, since it is distinct from Sacred Scripture, though closely connected to it. Through Tradition, "the Church, in her doctrine, life and worship, perpetuates and transmits to every generation all that she herself is, all that she believes." ^{(DV 8)}

The Holy Spirit still guides and directs the Church today not only in these universal ways but also individually – according to our specific vocations, our roles in the Body of Christ. Today as we renew our Stewardship of Service, I invite Barb Williams to share with you how the Spirit has prepared, empowered, and invited her to serve the parish and wider community.