Eucharist - Are you being fed?

 

DIDACHE – Alexandria, Egypt  ~125AD - On the Lord’s day, when you have been gathered together, break bread and celebrate the Eucharist. But first confess your sins so that your offering may be pure. If anyone has a quarrel with his neighbor, that person should not join you until he has been reconciled. Your sacrifice must not be defiled. In this regard, the Lord has said: In every place and time offer me a pure sacrifice. I am a great king, says the Lord, and my name is great among the nations.

Celebrate the Eucharist as follows: Say over the cup: “we give you thanks, Father, for the holy vine of David, your servant, which you made known to us through Jesus your servant. To you be glory for ever”.  Over the broken bread say: “we give you thanks, Father, for the life and the knowledge which you have revealed to us through Jesus your servant. To you be glory for ever. As this broken bread scattered on the mountains was gathered and became one, so too, may your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom. For glory and power are yours through Jesus Christ for ever.”

ARE YOU BEING FED? One of the main reasons people drift away from the church and/or their faith is that they are spiritually malnourished: they aren’t “being fed.” If you have family or friends who have wandered from the Church, an important part of their distance is that they didn’t have strong ties keeping them alive and healthy in their faith.

Certainly questions, problems, negative experiences, and other specific things can be watershed moments, but they aren’t the whole story. Look at a similar situation: relationships between people. How do relationships weaken? How do relationships get severed? These questions are related, but not the same. Like with others, our faith weakens when we aren’t investing in it and letting it “feed” us, so to speak. If that relationship is not being a benefit to us, helping us grow, filling us with joy and peace, supporting us when we are down, making our joyful times even greater, etc., then we are perhaps going to be tempted to wander away from that relationship.

Andy Dufresne, a Christ-like figure in the famous movie Shawshank Redemption, summarized it well: I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying. So, Are you being fed?

To be spiritually fed by God can come in so many ways. Mass if of course so important, and it is tragic, even if necessary, that so many aren’t attending often for the past year. Certainly every encounter with God in prayer of any form (and there are so many!), reading Scripture, participating in the Sacraments are the most important ways, but I wrote about some others in the bulletin for this week: reading, film, lectures/testimonies. Also retreats, good conversations with spiritual mentors or companions. You need to find ways that work for you. It may take time, but as T of A says: God withholds Himself from no one who perseveres. The crowd today is an example of that. They chased Jesus down, who was in a sense running away from them, but looked on them with pity for their pursuit of Him.

It is important for you to find ways for God to feed your soul – not only for yourself, but for others.

As someone in struggling in their faith, they will be asking the question in their hearts, “why should I stay?” And they may or may not actually say it to you, but they are probably looking at Catholics and asking, “why do they stay? What is keeping them going?”

Your life has to be the answer to that question. But you have to be ready to give an answer as well, to verbalize it. You need to be ready to say why going to Mass is helpful for you. What is it? Do you love the community – worshipping God together and knowing that you are part of something larger than yourself that is ultimately doing good in our world? Or is it the beauty of the liturgy – praying in a way that unites us to the Church over the centuries, collapsing time and space so that we are there with Jesus on Calvary where He offered His life to save us? Or would you say that it is the readings at Mass (or even the homily) that helps you to remember who you are and where you are headed, inspiring and challenging you to something greater? Or is it, above all, the gift of the Lord Jesus in the Eucharist, where you are united to Him in a way that cannot compare with anything else on this earth or in this life?

I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying. If you aren’t pursuing spiritual growth, you are going to be drifting slowly but surely away from God. Let God feed you. Chase him down like the crowd did. He will not let you down if you persevere.

Corpus Christi

 SAINT FRANCIS: “Love is not loved!”

Eucharist - Mass - is the most important thing that we do. All our life is meant to be engaged in what happens at Mass. Everything we do and are should flow from the Mass, and everything we do and are should lead back to the Mass and be something we can offer to God in the Mass. Ultimately we human beings are created to worship God or worship something else. Whatever our lives are centered around is what we worship. May it be LOVE that we in fact love, and nothing less than that.

As we heard in the 1st and 2nd reading today, worship was messy in the old testament: blood everywhere. smelly animal. blood. roasted flesh (grilled meat). Lots going on. Lot of work for us. Nowadays, not so messy. Today’s ordination Mass anointing is the messiest it gets. Sacred Chrism on the palms of the hands of the priests which are meant to “offer sacrifice to God and to bless His people” as the prayer says.

In the Gospel today we see that Jesus prepares the Passover for us. Unlike the OT, now God has done all the work, and we only have to cooperate with it. No longer a bloody sacrifice, but the fulfillment of what it foreshadowed, we have to come, with our full selves, and offer that sacrifice that no one else can: our heart and soul. The priest, in the person of Jesus, does the rest. He takes our gifts, brings them to the father.

St. Mother Teresa of Kolkata - In the cross you see how much Jesus loved you in the past. In the Eucharist you see how much Jesus loves you now.

HOW DO YOU RESPOND TO THAT LOVE?

In Sinu Iesu - visits to the blessed Sacrament.
I want to visit to the blessed sacrament to become once again a part of ordinary catholic life, and instinct of the believing heart, an expression of gratitude in reparation to me who am forsaken and spurned in so many places. Let my priests set the example and the faithful will follow it.
The priest who approaches me and remains with me in the sacrament of my love is not losing his time; he is at the very source of every good thing, and I will bless his priesthood with a wonderful apostolic fruitfulness. This was the secret of so many of my saints.

sign of cross passing a church. short prayer to Jesus: O Sacrament most holy, O Sacrament Divine, all praise and all thanksgiving, be every moment Thine.
Notice this prayer speaks to the Eucharist as a person.

Pentecost - Holy Spirit is the Author!

 We have color-coordinated tape through the church this weekend in honor of Pentecost. This church decoration, which won’t be here next weekend, is required this weekend for the final time. In the next days we will have carpet down and we will be ready to roam free once again, and we can hopefully say farewell to all of the dust for good!

The Holy Spirit is the sanctifier. This is the one who makes us into saints. Thus we can say that the whole work of the Trinity is summarized well in this phrase: The Father sends His Son to give us the Spirit. The gift of the Holy Spirit is the goal of God’s work, and the beginning of our journey home. Our mission, which started at Baptism when the Holy Spirit was poured into our hearts, is quite an adventure when we embrace it.
Imagine if you tried to write a book about your own life all by yourself: You the author and you’re the main character. Depending on your abilities it might be bad, might be tolerable, or even quite enjoyable.
But what if the best writer in the world was also your close friend, and that person helped you to write the story? Do you think you would like it better? I imagine you might not only because it has better structure, literary style, and powerful imagery, but perhaps above all because of the fact that many of those ideas were not your own. The fact that you could sit back and admire at how things went in directions you didn’t plan or expect - that appreciation for the beauty of the story of your own life would make it more beautiful, and thus you would like it much more.
The Christian life is precisely that: letting the Holy Spirit, who knows us better than we know ourselves, be the co-author, and indeed primary author, of our stories.
To appreciate this, I ask you to consider finding online and reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s short story: Leaf by Niggle. I don’t want to spoil it, but I will simply say that it is one of the most beautiful short stories I have ever heard. I pray you enjoy it.
Don’t be afraid of letting the Holy Spirit lead and guide your life. He will make you a saint. He will lead you to heaven. He will write a beautiful story.

sunday homily - 6th Sun. of Easter

 Peter baptizes "gentiles" (non-Jews), because "the Lord has revealed to the nations His saving power." Throughout the Old Testament this promise has waited, for God to bless all peoples through Israel, through the Jewish people. Now in Christianity, this is true. 

Baptized into Christ, we are transformed by His gift of love. We die to this world, we enter the tomb with Him and come out with Him transformed. Thus we have a "new" commandment: to love as He loves us. In keeping this commandment, we are friends of Jesus and He begins to live in us. Baptism allows this process to begin for us, and the only requirement for us to be open to the salvation God has given us is to truly live this new commandment. "No greater love than to lay down your life for one's friends." Jesus thought we were worth dying for. We are His friends. Will we show Him the same love back? What way do you need to "lay down your life" for Jesus? 

Your king loves you deeply. All He wants is your love. Will you deny him?

4th Easter

 This Sunday, known as Good Shepherd Sunday, points out the unique role of Jesus in salvation, because He is the one true shepherd, as God come in the flesh.  Saint Peter said today in the first reading that "there is no other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved." Jesus is the one and only savior we have, and we can only be saved through Him, whether we are aware of it or not.

G.K. Chesterton, an adult convert to Catholicism after being an atheist in his college years, and one of the sharpest minds of his day in early 20th century England, eventually came to profess the Christian faith because, as he simply put it, he believed it all to be true. Indeed it is. Our faith is ultimately a faith about the person of Jesus, about who He is and what God has revealed and established through Him and through the Church he founded. In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton describes the faith as a key, that transforms human history.

 The creed was like a key in three respects. First, a key is above all things a thing with a shape. It is a thing that depends entirely upon keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness…
Second, the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape. Someone who has never seen a key before would have no idea what this thing was about until they saw it put to use.  It either fits the lock and opens the door, or it does not…

And thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so this was one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. ...because the world had not only got into a hole, but had got into a whole maze of holes and corners…

The Early Christian (really every one of us) was very precisely a person carrying about a key, or what be said was a key. The whole Christian movement consisted in claiming to possess that key. It definitely asserted that there was a key and that it possessed that key and that no other key was like it; in that sense it was as narrow as you please. Only it happened to be the key that could unlock the prison of the whole world; and let in the white daylight of liberty. (not so narrow after all)

The only way to understand history is to understand the deepest human questions, and this faith we own is the key to unlocking the questions in our hearts.

About a month ago I was at someone's house for my day off and I went for a long run. It felt great to be out exercising but by the end of it (over an hour), I was totally worn out. The big problem I then discovered was that I had locked myself out of their house. No one was around. Huge problems immediately arose: 1 - My body needed food. 2 - I needed a shower. and 3 - All my stuff was inside. Luckily a neighbor was able to get me in: they had the key, the one answer to all the longings I had at that moment.

Every longing in our heart is answered and fulfilled by God in Christ Jesus and our Catholic faith. Jesus' resurrection is the most mysterious, peculiar, but absolutely right answer to the questions of human existence. Why do I have a longing for things that this world never fully satisfies? Why do I feel like I am my own worst enemy at times, and carry around inside me a voice that calls me to something greater than myself? Why do I feel like I can't get out of this myself and need someone to draw me further?

All of this is answered in the fact that God looks upon our fallen state with mercy, comes to us, and dies and rises for us, so that we may be raised from the dead and brought into the eternal life of heaven.

Our world doesn't like absolutes, and claims to truth. But Our Catholic faith is the one key answer to the mystery of our life. Other religions may have part of the naswer, but we are the ones with the whole answer. We hold this not in arrogance, but in humble submission to the truth.

Scott Hahn (who was here in the are this weekend) has a new book It is Right and Just that emphasizes the importance of worshipping God.

I've seen a lot of momentum in my lifetime and in recent years of meditation, "mindfulness" and other eastern spirituality avenues that may have some good things in them, but ultimately lack a hugely important thing: they do not put Jesus at the center, and thus they truly to not worship God as we truly should.

However, there is a solution to this that can allow you to incorporate these practices in a Christian context: The Hallow app.

homily

 Jesus doesn’t look appealing unless we realize that we need Him. The joy of Easter doesn’t mean as much unless we realize the situation we are in.

About a year ago I was worried about my heart. I was experiencing some tightness after exercise but only every once in a while. I had known in the past that I needed to be exercising regularly, but I had wondered if I was doing it right or if I was setting myself up for some kind of tragedy. Ultimately, after a couple stress tests, the doctors said things looked fine, which gave me great joy as I can go back to the wild ride of coffee once again.

But if I never experienced these symptoms and got them checked out, both eight years ago and this past year, then I would never have thought to look into it. It could have meant something very different, and I don’t think I would like the end of that story as much.

Our world sometimes looks over the fact of our weakness and brokenness. While it isn’t good to dwell only on our problems, it also doesn’t help to ignore them or to pass all the blame onto things outside of us.

Saint Peter’s message of the Good News must include the reality of what the people did to Jesus. But we should not think that being born in a different time and place means that we have nothing to regret in our lives and are just peachy-keen with Jesus. Our consciences are always tuned to tell us to do good and avoid evil, even if they are malformed and get some things wrong, and even if we try to rationalize away our culpability.

But getting back to the start of this homily: if we don’t realize we need a savior, then why look to Jesus? If he is just a self-help guru, then we can run to many others for self-fulfillment and self-actualization. There’s all kinds of life¬-coaches out there.

No, the only point of talking about Jesus is because we need a savior, and that means we need to be saved from something. Let’s not fall into the trap of the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable with the tax collector, who thinks the only thing he needs to be saved from is this fallen world of messed up people. When you can face something, you can deal with something. We need to face our sinfulness and let Jesus deal with it as he desires so much, like we heard last week on Divine Mercy Sunday.

A popular mentality in our world today is to affirm our entire selves along the lines of “I’m okay, your okay… It’s all good… Nothing wrong here, nothing to see…” whereas the reality is “I’m not okay, and you’re not okay, but that’s okay.” The reason it’s okay is because Jesus chases into our lives as He did in the upper room and brings His mercy and peace. He will help us to heal. We just need to admit our brokenness. He will forgive us. We just need to face our sins and repent.

Jesus doesn’t look appealing unless we realize that we need Him. The joy of Easter doesn’t mean as much unless we realize the situation we are in.

Living in real freedom is available to us. It’s not easy; it’s scary a lot of the time; but it is worth it.

If you haven’t been to Confession in a long time or have been holding back something from the Lord, ask the Holy Spirit for the courage to show your wounds to Jesus, so He can show you His and set you free.

Divine Mercy

 As we conclude the Easter octave today with Divine Mercy Sunday, the message of mercy that was revealed trough St. Faustina about 100 yrs ago in a very particular way, the image she had painted to her approval (of how Jesus appeared to her) is a reminder to us of this day.

We continue our Easter joy, unfolding the mystery of the Lord Jesus’ resurrection and what it means for all of us.

One thing it shows us is how different God is from all of us. If one of us were in Jesus shoes, we may come back very different than Jesus did; unjustly condemned, horrifically murdered and shamed, betrayed by your disciples. You may come back a little angry. We all can sense the temptation in our hearts to return with vengeance and wrath. But what does Jesus do? He returns with mercy, to put an end to evil, pain, suffering, scapegoating, and sin. To put an end to death.

This is the g greatest message of mercy that we can receive. We are also called to live this as well. We are called to put this into practice.

Jesus speaking to the apostles to day says “receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven. Whose sins are retained are retained.” This is certainly first and foremost a sign of the sacrament of Confession where through the priest we can receive the forgiveness and mercy of the Lord Jesus through the priest. I the words of absolution, we know it is the Lord Jesus saying “your sins are forgiven, go and sin no more.” But also, as Jesus gives that spirit not only to the apostles but to every single one of us through baptism and Confirmation, we are called as well in some way to participate in that ministry of mercy, of reconciliation, of restoring the unity of the human family under Christ the king.

In the 1st reading we see the early christians doing this and living this in a very concrete way. They were “of one heart and mind” the reading tells us, and they had “everything in common” to take care of each other, to support and lift up each other. In order to be of one heart and mind among sinful people, that means being people of mercy and forgiveness.

So we must do the same in our world today. How do we live this out? Jesus never says forgiveness is easy, but he does say we must do it. When we pray the Our Father, that is one of the most important things that we pray for: that we may be forgiven in the same way that we forgive others. It is a challenge and a great demand that is renewed every single time we come to Mass and pray the Our Father, and receive the Lord Jesus i the Eucharist and profess to be like Him, and promise to be worthy vessels of His body blood soul and divinity.

If we think that forgiveness is something that we must do solely on our own, we will certainly fall short. But if we rely on the Lord, on His Holy Spirit to help us, then we will be able to be people that, along with Jesus, put an end to the cycle of pain, of hurting others with sin and evil.

For us to be able to do so, we must follow the example of the apostles today. They were terrified but transformed by Jesus. The only reason they are able to witness to the world is because they have met Jesus, alive and full of mercy.

Today, Thomas, the week after Easter, meets Christ. Jesus invites him to put his fingers in the nail marks and hand into His side. We will find, brothers and sister, the healing that we need to strengthen us to forgive and reconcile, through the blood of Jesus and encountering His wounds. Imagine yourself in Thomas’ shoes, imagine yourself encountering Christ, meeting him alive and still bearing his wounds. Imagine placing your fingers into His nail marks and putting your hand into His side. Remembering not only what happened, but why it happened, and what it means, what came from that for all of us.

Jesus died for us when we were sinners, not when we were perfected by our own powers.

After we encounter the living Jesus, and let His blood wash over us, then we will be ready to forgive, ready to be vessels of Jesus’ mercy in our world, which everyone needs.

We all of us, have someone in our life that we need to forgive. We all have a relationship that needs deeper reconciliation. Think right now what relationship(s) right now in your life needs that, and bring it to the Lord Jesus in this Mass, asking for His merciful healing and strengthening of your own heart, so that you can go forth in the power of the Holy Spirit that He breathes upon, to be an instrument of that mercy in our world today. That transformation of your own heart and in your own actions, is how the world will know that Jesus is very much alive today.