PARISH FEAST DAY!

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Fraternal correction - how we reach out in love to help our brothers and sisters to grow in love together - is never easy.  Through the prophet Ezekiel today God calls us to this high demand of speaking the truth in charity to each other.  We are demanded by God to help each other grow, to point out each other's faults.  Marriages who have worked through difficult times know that this is never easy but truly always worth it.  For the false sense of "keeping the peace" is nothing in comparison with true peace.  Whenever I do marriage preparation with an engaged couple we always use a tool for discussion known as the FOCCUS Inventory.  One of the fun questions to discuss is "I prefer 'keeping the peace' at all costs."  I think this is fun because it can really spur true discussion: is "keeping the peace" really worth it no matter what?  Is it better to be open about things that really are robbing us of peace and communion and could ultimately sow seeds of resentment?  Indeed, there needs to be a balance between patiently enduring one another's shortcomings, and truly working for a peaceful communion that works together for a better way.  It may not always be easy to discern, but let us allow the prophet today to remind us of that need to work for building up the kingdom of God in each other's hearts and souls.  This goes for engaged couples, marriages, sibling relationships,, workplaces, and religious communities.  If we are going to do this well, we need humility, love, and justice in a radical way, after the heart of Jesus.

          In her own self-titled little way, Therese herself discovered how to help others to grow in their love.  Knowing that Jesus did not call her to be a leader as a superior to the order of Carmel in Lisieux, and one of the youngest and newest members of her community, Therese tried to quietly infuse love into her daily encounters with people.  "Jesus is my only love" she carved onto the wooden doorpost of her cell, or living quarters.

          She spread her love over the halls of the convent and into the hearts of her sisters in community.  God even gave her a couple special relationships with seminarians and eventually priests whom she took under her wing as pen pals and special recipients of her prayer.  But for Jesus, and for Therese, that was not enough.

          Marie-Francois-Therese (our patroness’ birth name, Mary-Francis-Theresa) fell ill April 1897 at the age of 24 coughing up blood for the first time, a tell-tale sign of tuberculosis.  As a sickly infant whose lungs showed early signs of illness, this was the worst that the family could have expected.  Her older sister, who at the time was abbess of the convent, asked Therese to keep writing more of her spiritual memoirs like she had ordered her (under holy obedience) a couple years ago to write childhood memories.  Without much grumbling, Therese began the work that would be published a year after her death as "the Story of a Soul" and take France and the world by fire, the fire of God's love.

          Her religious name was actually Therese of the Child Jesus of the Holy Face.  She wished to be humble and little like the infant king we adore at Christmas.  But She also honored the holy face of Jesus that was modeled from the shroud of Turin and the ancient descriptions of Jesus.  The Lord, whose face was disfigured by the fullness of love displayed in His Passion, was in these last months bringing to completion the plans He had for Therese: an invitation into the depths of self-emptying love.

          Therese lived the humility of the child Jesus in her little way every day.  And in the last six months of her life more than never, she experienced the love and justice of Jesus' Holy Face.

Saint Paul calls this love a 'Kenosis' - self-emptying.  Jesus "emptied" himself, taking the form of a slave and then being obedient unto the point of death on a cross.  If you look at the blood poured out, you could truly say Jesus emptied himself for us.  Spiritually, the Holy Spirit  is poured out from his open side into our souls.  Therese embraced this self-emptying freely in her own Passion, her own suffering.  And this was, in a mysterious way, how Jesus invited her to change the world.  As Therese wrote her story of a sould and finished her carrying of the cross until September 30th, 1897 at around 7:20pm, just over 7 years into her religious life, she never would have imagined that her words would be read around the world still over a century later and touching the hearts of so many to grow in the love of God.

And that lesson of the fruitfulness of self-emptying and obediently accepting the will of God for her life is the greatest lesson the little flower gave us.  Let us thank God for her birthday into heaven this day and ask her to continue to shower down roses upon us as we grow from her spiritual guidance.  Saint Therese, little flower, pray for us!

Oooops! The last two weeks finally arrive...

All: My apologies for being late in posting the last two weeks audio homilies.  They are found below.

I hope you enjoy them. =)

9-17 Romans Finale! - Click here!

9-24 "Common Goal" (Annual Bishop's Appeal - so a short homily!)  Click here!

Owing Only God

AUDIO (9:30am Mass): CLICK HERE

“Love is the fulfillment of the law.”

Remember, this section of Saint Paul's letter is his general instruction of moral norms: that is, how does my faith affect every aspect of my life - how do I live as a Christian and not as a pagan worshipper of idols or of myself.  "Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice...your spiritual worship" effects everything: your calendar, your check book, your social life, your family life, your sex life, your recreation, your work.  If I keep first things first (meaning God is on the throne of my heart and not myself or anyone or anything else), then my life will look radically different than what is the norm in our society.

Today's first piece of advice, "owe no one anything" could easily be translated into the American culture in financial terms: "Have no debt."  I wonder how many fewer lives would be lost each year, how many relationships would still be intact, how many fights we would avoid with other people if we would simply fulfill this one sense of Saint Paul's words.  If you haven't heard of it, Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University is a wonderful program offered in church communities around the U.S. that really allows us to put God at the center of our finances.  I highly recommend this Christian-based approach to escaping the traps of our consumerist culture which you can find at his website (daveramsey.com), which also has many other helpful resources resources for various ages, including books and online tools.  If you feel like your finances are choking your ability to grow spiritually because you are constantly worrying and trying to stay afloat, this could be the way to learn the wisdom behind the advice of Saint Paul "owe no one anything."  And when we do that, then we can truly put into practice the rest of the verse, "except to love on another."  The word love is that same root as our english word "charity."  When we aren't slaves to our consumerist culture, we can finally practice generosity and allow our treasures to build up others.  A great gift.

            But the truth is Paul isn't referring merely to finances in this passage.  In some ways he is talking about where our allegiances lie, and the intangible kinds of "debt" we can find ourselves caught in.

            One way to discover some of our allegiances, or what we might call our "ties" to things in this world, is to simply review how we spend our so-called "free time."  For the Christian, of course, there is no such thing: our time, like our lives, like our gifts, like our breath, is not our own.  I didn't earn even one hour of life on this earth.  It's a gift from God.  My time is His - or it should be.  But still, the term can refer to those periods of time when we are able to choose more how it is ordered.  So what do we do?  What do I think about?  What do I read about or watch or play when I am "free"?  For me it is usually pretty boring: exercise, sleep, read a book, play music, listen to religious podcasts, visit with my family.  But I gotta be honest, sometimes I don't use that time as well as I should.  Sometimes that free time is spent more on me than on God, and at my worst, I can end up skimping on my prayer (doing only the "minimum" for a priest).  It is in those times I can see that I still have some serious allegiances, serious "ties" to selfish things that do not build up others.

            A saint owes no one and no thing, "except to love on another."  If "love is the fulfillment of the law," then the saint is the one who loves perfectly.

Romans Series #9 - - 12:1-2 Spiritual Worship - The Christian Challeng

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G.K. Chesterton did a great job expressing to our world the reality of so-called Christianized areas of Europe and the Americas when he said: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”  And the fact of our culture is that many people leave it at that.  We often don’t try, since there’s more than enough interesting things out there to keep our attention and distract us from the fact that our lives are really not satisfying and fulfilling without God.  Most of our culture only knows that Christianity, especially Catholics, simply have some very firm stances on things like human life (abortion, euthanasia, etc), sexuality, marriage, and poor, and just about no one outside the Church agrees with these teachings as a whole.  But they are truly a part of who we are, and we can’t sidestep them.

In chapters 12-15 we have the final section of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and it is focused on moral exhortation.  This is not some last chance to squeeze things in and take care of business, but rather Paul is keeping things in proper order: the Gospel first, and the moral life second.  Relationship to Jesus always has a priority to Christian morality, even though the two can never be totally separated.  Thus Jesus tells us today: Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. In other words, we cannot truly love God without trying to follow his commands and live as Christ lived (take up our cross), and as we learn to follow the moral demands of Christianity we grow in our love of God (and neighbor). 

All of Chapter 12 is worth reading and re-reading, but I would encourage you to begin memorizing today’s two verses, which are a short summary of vocation of the Christian life.  When Paul tells us to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.  Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind – he is contrasting Christian worship against not only the pagan sacrifices of the day, but also the Jewish rituals of the Old Covenant that have been fulfilled in the work of Christ Jesus.  Hebrews 10:5 Therefore, when Christ came into the world, He said: "Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You prepared for me.

Our entire Christian life is summarized here.  Worship is the center of religion, and thus is the sort of pinnacle of religious practice.  But you see here that Paul makes it impossible for us to compartmentalize our religious practice from the rest of our lives.  Because we cannot simply go buy a goat and roast it (which might take a few hours) and leave it at that, and move on with life.  No, Paul makes it clear that it is we ourselves that our being sacrificed. 

And he also makes it clear that it isn’t just external or physical requirements that God is looking for – that was already included in the Old Covenant of Judaism.  Rather, God wants spiritual worship, and a renewal of our minds.  This is the whole person: body and soul.  Our entire person is what we are to offer.  Wow, that’s not easy. 

You know, the real problem with a “living sacrifice” (thanks especially our fallen human nature) is that a living sacrifice is able to get up and walk off the altar.  If the goat had known ahead of time, I’m sure it would passionately object to the proposal of sacrifice, and this is why Christianity is so challenging!  We, like Saint Peter, would rather things be quite different: God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen! But that living sacrifice is exactly what makes us Christians. 

When we offer the bread and wine, as well as the collection basket and our gifts for the food pantry, we are offering symbolically our entire selves.  This is an outward sign of our spiritual worship.  Let us pray that every day we truly allow this Eucharist to transform and renew our minds, so we can carry our crosses behind the Lord.

Romans #8

SORRY that I didn't get last week's homily to you, but here we continue with our series...

AUDIO: CLICK HERE! (9:30am Mass)

Saint Paul’s section on Judaism and the Church concludes today with this great praise of God’s wisdom, a wisdom that is greater than our own and in a real sense quite beyond us.  Saint Paul’s attempts to explain the way that God’s providence has worked only reveals the great surprises of God.  There is always some new twist that we didn’t see coming, and this is true more than ever with the great “Gospel” of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Who would have guessed God would save the world by dying as a criminal?  How could powerlessness and humility overcome humanity’s vain flaunt of strength and pride?  How would death be destroyed by death?  That is the mystery that Paul praises today.

Perhaps no one knows each other better that an old married couple.  The book I’ve been reading in August, until school got into full-speed and has made it difficult to finish, has revolved around a simple marriage and family.  The husband and wife (Stephen and came from pretty different backgrounds, and the reality is that they are often mysteries to each other.  Perhaps another way to say it is “they are inscrutable” and “unsearchable.”  This is only compounded by the fact that Stephen is very quiet, wrestling with a dark past, and Anne seems to spend years trying to force him to open up, to no avail.  However, this is not the norm.  I heard story from a priest recently about a married couple he knew.  The wife prepared dinner and said “when my husband comes home the first thing he’s going to say is ‘brussel sprouts: barf!’”  And what do you know, he fit the bill and did exactly as expected soon after I arrived. But even when people do open up, the reality is we are still mysteries to each other.  We are even mysteries to ourselves at times.  We might catch ourselves saying: “why did I do that?” or “What was I thinking?” We may have changed so much from an earlier age that we consider ourselves a totally different person.  Perhaps the teenage son is right after all when he gives that shrugging, mumbled response: “I dunno.”

The point of all this simple: if I’m a mystery to myself sometimes, and other persons are mysteries to me a lot of the time, how much more will God be a mystery to me – all the time!  But the fact is, mystery is not a bad thing.  It’s a good thing.  It keeps us engaged, diving deeper, seeking more and more.

Stephen tells his wife Anne that this is exactly how life should be, how marriage should be.  It may be scary for us at times to know that we don’t have a full grasp on things, but that is how persons work: they are free, they have an infinite depth to them, and we can only ponder them through a relationship.  Jesus invites us like Peter into a relationship today, to discover more and more about him.  Peter confesses something he knows about Jesus, but doesn’t have it all figured out.  Paul, after years of prayer, knows Jesus even more intimately, and yet he is still “inscrutable and unsearchable”.

Don’t let the fear and confusion and messiness of God’s mystery cloud you from a relationship with him.  Get out of your boat and go to him.

Romans #6 - God, the Jews, and surprises

Audio (Sat. Eve): Click Here!

IN ROMANS 9 PAUL SWITCHES THE FOCUS from God’s universal desire for everyone’s salvation to how that salvation is played out in his day: namely, how God plans to save both the Jews who awaited (and mostly rejected) the Messiah, and the Gentiles, who did not know God and now have the Gospel presented to them.  In chapters 9-11, Paul refers more to the Old Testament than anywhere else in his writings.  In fact, on commentary says that these three chapters (out of the 100 Paul has written) contain a third of all Paul’s OT references.

He starts today by making it clear that he loves the Jewish people, and that it grieves his heart most deeply that they are (for the most part) not accepting of the Gospel, since Jesus doesn’t seem to fit into their sense of how God worked in the past.

Paul even goes to the point of wishing to be “accursed and cut off” from God.  That Greek word anathema – literally means “placed above”:  Aquinas “for when they found among the spoils of war something they did not wish men to use, they hung it in the temple.  From this, the custom arose that things cut off from the common use of men were said to be anathema; hence, it says in Joshua: let this city be anathema, and all things that are in it, to the Lord. (6:17)” But what Paul is probably referring to is not his own condemnation and eternal separation from God, but rather that he would give up any material or spiritual benefits if it meant the conversion of the Jewish race.

This desire actually echoes what Moses himself declared in Exodus 32: Moses returned to the LORD and said, “Ah, this people has committed a grave sin in making a god of gold for themselves! Now if you would only forgive their sin! But if you will not, then blot me out of the book that you have written.” In this self-denial for the sake of others, Paul and Jesus model the self-gift of Christ Jesus, who in a sense “became sin” although righteous in himself so as to save the condemned and sinful.  It shows how profound and pure is their love for the Hebrew people, and how closely united their hearts are to God, since God Himself ultimately carries out the same desire to save the guilty.  We must pray that we can grow in the same love for our family and friends who are not truly living their lives for God.  Indeed, it is our vocation to pray for others and work to spread the good news.

But as Paul is writing Romans, unfortunately the Gospel is really only making significant ground among the Gentiles (non-Jews).  Thus Paul describes Jesus as a “scandal,” a “stumbling block” to the Jews, because 1. God is not human (as Jesus seems to be, and indeed is – fully human and fully divine), and also 2. God cannot “win” by dying on the cross. Or can he? The collective wisdom among the Jews (and Muslims by the way) says that God would never allow that to happen to one of His own, a prophet, etc.

Well brothers and sisters, as far as this is concerned, it is quite clear in the other readings today that God is a God of surprises, and we need to learn to not put Him in a box.  Indeed God will do things in His own way, and He will manifest Himself in smallness and weakness just as often as in the power of a storm.  He comes to Elijah in silence, not in fury, and Jesus calms the sea and the winds.

Do not expect God to be boring, and don’t put Him in a box.  Let Him save you, but according to HIS plan and not your own.

The main thing is to keep your eyes on Him, and not on anything else.  Recall that Peter walks on the water, something he is naturally not capable of doing, because of his faith in Jesus.  It is only when he takes his eyes off him that he starts to sink and needs to cry for help.  May this Eucharist help us to keep our eyes on Jesus, to allow God to surprise us, and to expand our love for our family and friends who are far from the faith.

Transfiguration - God's Dreams are Bigger than our own

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A beautiful novel called Strangers and Sojourners, following a young British lady who chases a romantic dream to the middle of nowhere Canada and eventually makes a family with an Irish man who sort of ran away from his past to the same place.  “WHAT IS A MAN?” her husband once asked an imposing visitor to their home, and that question is a mystery that Stephen’s wife Anne is still haunted by even after twenty some years of marriage.

Gaudium et Spes  paragraph 22 (VATICAN II’s document on the Church and the world)

The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come,(20) namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown.

            This is not too different from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans.  (I know, you’re thinking: “No break from Romans even on this feast day?”)  Jesus transforms everything.

            ASK OURSELVES: Who / What do I let teach me about life?  How has my vision for happiness been shaped by things other than God’s vision?

            But the most important point of today’s feast is that God’s dreams for us are bigger than our own.

Most of you have probably seen the ocean, or if not that, hopefully Lake Michigan.  It is hard to describe to someone how amazing it is, until they see it.  As a kid, I never went to either.  My first trip to the ocean was probably in high school or just before, when my friend brought me with his family on Spring Break.  I couldn’t believe it.  It’s just so vast.

That is like what God wants to do with us humans.

He’s got bigger dreams than our own.  (Theosis – Deification) BECOME LIKE GOD!

Don’t sell yourselves short.    Let this Eucharist draw you into His eternal love, His bigger dreams for your happiness.