Homily - Advent 2

 The Jordan River was the “gate” so to speak by which the people of Israel entered the promised land, as told in the book of Joshua. Just like they went through the waters of the Red Sea to be set free from slavery 40 yrs earlier, the Hebrew people go through the Jordan River. When the Messiah is finally among them, hiding and waiting, John the Baptist begins his work of preparing the way at the same Jordan River. He message is clear: he is calling us to conversion from sin through a baptism of repentance.
The Church brings us these readings today to remind us that Advent is not a time to slouch around. That petitionary prayer: “Come, Lord and save us!” is not permission for us to be lazy because God is going to fix everything.

Think of a child sitting on a couch watching television and calling to a parent to go get them some food or drink. They don’t want to get up and do the work. Just bring me this please.

That’s not Advent, friends. “Couch Christianity” is fake Christianity. We need to cooperate with God’s grace, as a bride dancing with her husband must be attentive and responsive to the movements of his lead.

For the next two and a half weeks of this season, and truly for the entire Christian life, that means always hearing again and again the call of Jesus (and first also the call of John the baptist): The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,  repent and believe in the Gospel.

Jesus, the long awaited Messiah, came to free us and save us, but from what? From our sins and the slavery it brings us. The only way to do this is to heal our hearts so that they can actually love. Every sin destroys a bit of the love and justice that the Lord’s kingdom is meant to embody and shine forth. We sometimes confuse sin with self-disgust, a sense of not measuring up to this idea of what we want to be. Sin is not the same as our human poverty - that we are creatures who need God every moment of every day. Jesus isn’t going to take away that need for Him, He only wishes to satisfy it for those who truly open themselves to it - precisely by turning away from sin and turning towards God. That is true conversion.

with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day… he is patient with you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. the day of the Lord will come like a thief. This is the second week in a row the readings mention the image of a thief, last week Jesus said it in the Gospel. This is a scary image. We won’t be ready. We will be surprised terribly if we aren’t trying to pay attention now. The urgency is clear.

In order that we don't become lazy in the spiritual life, it is helpful to make a daily practice of the examination of conscience or of some other technique for reviewing our lives. A different method, called the daily examen of St. Ignatius, is particularly powerful for finding God's hand at work in your life. I highly recommend this practice for "staying awake" and not turning into a "couch christian."

1. Become aware of God’s presence.
2. Review the day with gratitude.
3. Pay attention to your emotions.
4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it.
5. Look toward tomorrow.

links to more info on the EXAMEN PRAYER: https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-examen/

A DAILY EXAMINATION based on 7 capital sins: http://www.standrewsemporia.org/uploads/1/0/9/8/10980758/selfexamination.pdf

Homily - Advent 1

 

Advent – Starts with Christ’s coming at the end of time, then transitions towards Christmas as we get closer.

Prophet Isaiah – crying out to God and to His people. Here is a prayer that can really be on all of our hearts. Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking before you, while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for, such as they had not heard of from of old. No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you doing such deeds for those who wait for him.

Isaiah would never have expected his prayer to be fulfilled in the great mystery we remember in under four weeks, that God would rend the heavens and come down in human flesh. It is certainly unheard of, and for the Jews absolutely unimagined, undreamt. But this is how much God loves His people. Love does whatever it can to unite with the beloved.

Saint Paul himself experienced this in a profound way, when Christ Jesus revealed himself specifically to “Saul” on the road to Damascus, literally tearing the heavens open and crashing into his world. He made him blind temporarily so that Saul could finally see the entire universe from the right perspective: it was all centered around the Gospel of Christ Jesus. That’s why today in the 2^nd reading, Paul is repeating the name of Jesus Christ again and again. In fact ten times in the first ten verses of 1^st Corinthians. He knows who we must build our lives around, and he gives his entire life and his death to this message. A good question as we begin Advent is “How centered is my life on Jesus?”

Isaiah continues: Would that you might meet us doing right, that we were mindful of you in our ways! We know in humility that we are not “ready” for God to come, either at the end of time, or to come tearing through the shell of our lives now, unless we “stay awake” like Jesus asks us in the Gospel today. We “stay awake” by practicing what is right, or as we said in the opening prayer, by “running forth to meet Christ with righteous deeds at his coming.” The righteous deeds are outlined last week, from the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. The sheep and the goats are all surprised in fact, by the king who says to them: “I was hungry, thirsty, naked, ill, a stranger, and in prison, and you treated me well or poorly.” May we not let these four weeks of Advent rush by without us truly getting ready for Christmas by deeds of righteousness and a deeper life of prayer that centers around Jesus.

Homily - Christ the King

Audio:  https://soundcloud.com/stthereselittleflowersb/nov-22nd-solemnity-of-our-lord-christ-jesus-king-of-the-universe 

 

The full title of today's feast is Our Lord, Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. Man that's a rather powerful title. Some of us act like they are king of the world, and many of us think we are king of our own lives, at least part of the time, but Jesus is King of the Universe - of literally every created thing. He is God and man, and the Father "will place all things beneath his feet," even death. We ourselves will also be placed  beneath Jesus' feet. We have no choice. Well, we do have a choice, but it's not what we would expect, the freedom-hungry and self-directing people that we are. Our choice is this: do we receive Jesus as our King now, or is it imposed on us later.

When our lives end, they will be wrapped up with one ultimate defining line in the sand. Everything we do: every action we take, every conversation with another person, every check that we write, every opportunity we take and every one that we turn down, every step toward chasing a goal, every decision for our careers and for our families, every friend we support in good or help steer away from evil, all the most important things in our stories and all the little moments of our lives that no one in the world notices - - all of it will come down to two simple choices: God, or myself. "I will serve" or "I will not serve" are the only two things our lives can say in the end.

St. Augustine outlines this in his masterpiece, the City of God: Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly [city] by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly [city] by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its own head in its own glory; the other says to its God, "Thou art my glory, and the lifter up of mine head." In the one, the princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love, the latter obeying, while the former take thought for all. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the persons of its rulers; the other says to its God, "I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength." 

So which one do we want to be part of?

Although our lips and voices are important, our lives are the real answer we give to to this question. "I will serve the Lord, Jesus Christ, King of the Universe" or "I will not serve this king" is seen in how we follow Jesus' commands. As St. Augustine describes it, do we love God so much that we even despise our own selves (that is, forget ourselves entirely) when He demands it? (This is what Jesus means when He tells us to "deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow after Him") Or do we cling to ourselves so much that we end up despising God for "attacking" us.

Our lives show the answer to this question in a million different ways. But I want you to think about two this week: time, and service.

1. Time: How do I spend my time? Do I ever "waste" time for God? (It's never waste, but the worldly view sees it as useless, so we can say this not to agree, but to remind ourselves of the lie we need to reject). How much time to I "waste" for God? When looking at life from the perspective of our death, we may look back and say we "wasted" a whole lot of time on things that seemed important to us.

2. Service: Is my life mostly about building up "my life" in some way? (career, legacy, family, hobbies). When I say, "that was a good day / great day today," was it great because I spent it on others? because my life was saying "I will serve the Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe"? or for some other reason?

This is hard for me too. I just spend five days on retreat and I feel more than ever that I have a lot of room to grow in this. I have a lot more to give to Jesus. More of my heart, more of my time, more of my life.

As we face this task, Psalm 23 should strengthen us. The Good Shepherd will not abandon us. God will do everything He can to help us if we only ask Him, day after day, to do so. We cannot fail unless we rely on ourselves to do this. Ask Jesus for His help. He wants to hear your voice crying out to him. He loves you so much. He is only waiting for you to turn toward His face so that you can feel the warmth of His love.

Last Sunday (Oct. 11) homily

 audio - click here

You may remember I talked about parables giving us glimpses of heaven, because Jesus wants to transform our minds to see life from the true perspective, and not from the lies that the enemy sows down here in the darkness. Today’s parable speaks to us about heaven, but it also works on another level, giving a sort of outline for how Christianity will spread throughout the world. You may recall Jesus telling his disciples to “shake the dust” off their feet and take the Good News to other towns whenever they are rejected – this is exactly what happens in the life of the early church, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and beyond, where after proclaiming in the synagogues, Paul and others eventually bring the Gospel to the Gentiles.

This works also for us too: God is constantly inviting us to something great. But like the invited guests, we often do not listen to the invitation. Sometimes this is really our fault. Other times, it is because the enemy has flown in like a bird to snatch the seed away from us, having made our ears deaf to the word of proclamation.

Our society constantly, and often implicitly, promotes values that make us spiritual zombies, numb to the things that matter. In order to hear God’s invitation, what we need is a transformed vision of our world.

When someone asks you “How’s life?” “How are you doing?” “Are you happy with the way things are going?” what do you use to measure that? Surely such a complicated question has many ways to look at it. 1. Career. 2. Health. 3. Family. 4. Friendships. 5. Faith. 6. Legacy. 7. Fame/popularity/honor. 8. Wealth. 9. Pleasure (do what I want to do).

The way you measure it tells you what you value, and helps you to understand the story you are a part of.

Our vision needs to be transformed. We live in a society that makes us numb to the invisible by constantly throwing our face into the visible.

 

CS LEWIS’ Weight of Glory is like reading two or three chapters of the the Gospels. It is not long. But it is worth it. (Just like the Gospels are totally worth it!) And like the Gospels, this will help to change your vision of the world. Here are some highlights:

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

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We have within us a desire for our own faroff country. I feel a certain shyness speaking about it. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Another solution is to try to identify it with certain moments in one’s own past. But all this is a cheat. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but are ultimately dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever.

... A man’s physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a [world without romance].

 

Paradise exists, and in the Gospel today it is described as a great wedding feast (imagine an endless Thanksgiving that is all joy and no awkward!) That feast is available to us in a foretaste on this earth. It reaches out and gently touches us in prayer. We catch a glimpse of it in the sacraments. We hear it whispering in the Mass.

Listen to the ache within you, the hunger, the desire for heaven. It is God’s invitation to the wedding feast.

Forgiveness in a "cancel culture"

 

Audio: click here

A not-so-new element in popular society has a newly minted phrase: “cancel culture.” 

 

EVERY WEEK at Mass, with the Lord Jesus truly present among us in the Eucharist, we say His prayer, which includes the words “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

 

Anger/unforgiveness is drinking poison and hoping the other will die.

 

Resentment: In choosing to chain the other, we are always and every time chaining ourselves.

Even worse, we only chain a false other.

 

CS Lewis - Great Divorce, which is set in the afterlife. One character meets an old friend who has repented of a murder, but the man cannot forgive the murderer.

This unforgiving spirit repeats again and again: “I just want my rights.”

(It’s a good thing we don’t get our rights. Otherwise we’d all be way worse off than we are in God’s providential design.)

 

Whoever was more righteously angry than Jesus on the Cross? And yet what did He do? We can’t match that.

 

FORGIVENESS turns pain into compassion.

 

It takes courage and faith in the cross of Jesus to forgive. He never said it is easy. He just said do it.

 

2843 Thus the Lord's words on forgiveness, the love that loves to the end, become a living reality. the parable of the merciless servant, which crowns the Lord's teaching on ecclesial communion, ends with these words: "So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart." It is there, in fact, "in the depths of the heart," that everything is bound and loosed. It is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense; but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession.

 

Everybody needs to forgive somebody. Who is it for you? Who do you need to free? What are you chaining yourself to?

 

Who is Jesus to you?

Last week we asked the question what does God think of us. But today, based on the Gospel story, we flip it and think about what we think of God.

Although this Gospel gives a great account of the authority Christ gave to Peter and the twelve apostles as the foundation of the Church, I want to focus on that question: Who do you say the Son of Man is?

The amazing thing is that God wants you to love Him, so he gives us absolute freedom, and here's the crazy part: Jesus will be as much or as little as you think He is.

So many people have different ideas of who Jesus is. The Gospel today shares just a few. I came up with some more.

To Pontius Pilate, He was an innocent victim sacrificed to the mob for starting such great unrest. To Caiaphas the high priest, He was blasphemer who made himself equal to God, the worst possible false Messiah who was leading the people astray. It was necessary that one should die instead of the whole people.

But to the woman at the well and to Nicodemus, He slowly became something more and more. And to John the Baptist, He was the lamb of God.

But to Herod Antipas, He was a crazy man, or John the Baptist come back from the dead to haunt him. To many in the crowds, He was a great miracle man, and probably nothing more.

But to those who listened well, He was a great teacher, one who spoke with a substantial authority different from the scribes. To Mary and Joseph, He was the one promised Messiah who would save the Lord's people from their sins.

But to Barabbas, he was a free ticket out of prison. And to the soldiers who scourged Him, He was just another pathetic Jew.

But to the centurion who oversaw the crucifixion, this man was truly a son of God. To even the demons who recognized Him, He was the Son of God. To the disciples, for whom Simon Peter speaks today, Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.

Many different opinions. Some very contradictory. So many of them want to put Him into a box so that He can be easily controlled, dealt with, and mostly just moved aside. This is no different from what people think of Jesus today. There are so many opposing answers to that question: "Who do you say the Son of Man is?"

The amazing thing is that until our end arrives, Jesus will be as much or as little as you think He is. After we die or He comes back as universal king, the Lord will not hide the truth, for He cannot deny Himself. He cannot lie about anything, especially his own identity. But until then, God gives us a dangerous freedom, just as Jesus gave to Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas and the soldiers and the crowds and the disciples: He lets us decide how we picture Him. And because He respects our freedom, often that means He does not show His power in our lives. If we push God out, He lets us. If we say, "okay God only this far," then He doesn't cross that line.

We show who God is to us by how we treat Him. If we treat our family like they aren't important to us except around holidays, or like someone we want to keep at arm's length (metaphorically - not a COVID reference!), or like intimate friends, then that is who they become to us. This goes for our friends and for all relationships, including Jesus.

What does my prayer life say about who God is to me?

What does my calendar say about who God is to me?

What do my bank statements and my bills say about who God is to me?

What do my hobbies say about who God is to me?

"What does God think when He looks at you?" (Aug 16th)

One of the things that ends up affecting us Christians more than anything else is how we would answer this simple question: “What does God think when He looks at you?” This really ends up being a strong driving force in our life.

Should be how God thinks of us.

How we think God thinks of us.

That can often end up being very different.  Like the father of the prodigal son, what we think God is thinking about us of often so much less than what is actually in His heart. A child may be ashamed of their mistakes when their parents punish them, but the parents still gaze upon them with a deep love.

If I imagine God like a harsh sports coach or a mean teacher or a demanding parent… I’m gonna live in fear of failing Him, of upsetting him, etc.

But as we saw in today’s Gospel, God doesn’t treat us that way. Jesus, in testing this woman’s faith, also gives his disciples a chance to see things from God’s perspective instead of their own fallen one. He helps us all to see, in the example of this woman, that no one is unimportant to God. All are his children.

God doesn’t think we are bad or evil; He doesn’t think we are damaged goods; He doesn’t define us by our mistakes, our failures, or our sins.

HOW DO YOU THINK OF GOD? WHAT BAD IMAGES OF AUTHORITY HAVE CORRUPTED YOUR IDEA OF GOD’S LOVE FOR YOU?

“What does God think when He looks at you?” If you don’t see Him gazing upon you with love, you have the wrong image. Ask the Lord to help heal that and transform it.