What More Can I Say?

                I was absolutely stunned when I signed on to the internet this morning to learn that there had been yet another senseless terrorist attack in the world – this time in Brussels.  My heart went out to the victims and their families.  I prayed for them, and I prayed for an end to such horrific violence.  I felt an urge to blog to try to address violence in the context of our faith, but I didn’t know what to say.  In the past six months alone, I’ve blogged twice about terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, about the need to pray, about the power of prayer and about trusting that God will keep his promise of an eternal life of perfect love and happiness.  What more can I say?

                Later in the day, I came across Anthony Esolen’s commentary on the Inferno that discusses Dante’s understanding of violence.  The premise of Dante’s Divine Comedy is the unique opportunity given to a sinner (Dante himself) to get a glimpse of hell, purgatory and heaven so that he can make his earthly choices more wisely before his time is through.  In canto twelve of the Inferno, Dante visits the seventh circle of hell, the circle reserved for the violent, who float along in a boiling river of blood.  They are guarded by the Minotaur and centaurs, who are shooting arrows at the sinners as they try to escape from the river.  The Minotaur and the centaurs are apt images for the bestiality of violence.  As Esolen explains it, “[t]o kill, rape, maim, and pillage is to be as heartless and ferocious as a tiger.  It is unworthy of man.  For the Christian, it violates the rights of God (as all sin does), for it turns the created world into an arena of destruction.”[1]  This is especially true when violence begets violence.

                Faced with violence, we often feel the urge to respond in kind.  This response reflects our bestial nature at work.  Violence is contrary to human nature and human dignity, and it flies in the face of our creation in the image and likeness of God.  Violence can never conquer violence; it simply encourages more violence.  Now I’m not saying that we don’t have a right, indeed, an obligation, to defend ourselves against violence, perhaps even with the use of force, and to bring the perpetrators of violence to justice.  But we have no right to indiscriminate violence against the perpetrators of violence and certainly not against innocent classes of people with whom the perpetrators of violence may be associated.

               So what’s the proper response to violence?  Love.  God became man to free us from the beastly ways of sin and return us to his image and likeness.  God became man to teach us that “love conquers all.”[2]  We conquer violence when we love our neighbor.  We conquer violence when we feed the poor, clothe the naked, comfort the ill and visit the imprisoned.  We conquer violence when we pray for the victims of violence and their families.  We conquer violence when we pray for the violent.  Our reaction to violence must always be horror, because violence is unworthy of man.  But our response to violence must always be love.  As we remember during Holy Week, when faced with violence and death, Jesus loved, and in loving, he conquered sin and death.  What more can I say?

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[1] Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, notes to canto 12, trans. by Anthony Esolen (New York, Random House, 2005) at 451.

[2] Virgil, Ecologue X.

What Are You Waiting For? - A Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

            Over the past few weeks, several people have approached me to share a common frustration.  You see, they live good lives; they go to church; they pray, but they still seem to be challenged by sickness or death in their families, financial trouble or great disappointments of one kind or another.  When these difficulties befall them, they pray all the more.  But sometimes things still don’t turn out as they had hoped, so they get frustrated with God.  It’s probably safe to say that we’ve all shared that frustration at different times in our lives, times when we’ve considered God’s promise of eternal happiness, turned our eyes to the heavens and asked, “What are you waiting for?”  In today’s Gospel, Martha and Mary shared that frustration.  Jesus provides the answer.

          In our Gospel passage, we hear the familiar story of the raising of Lazarus.  Lazarus is dead, and Jesus brings him back to life.  But the story isn’t that simple.  When Jesus learns that Lazarus is ill, he doesn’t rush off to cure Lazarus, as we would expect.  He does something very strange, almost preposterous.  “[H]e remained for two days in the place where he was.”  Lazarus, Martha and Mary are Jesus’ friends and disciples, but when they call on him in their hour of need, Jesus waits.  What was he waiting for?  Not surprisingly, Martha and Mary greet Jesus with frustration and disappointment.  But interestingly, Martha’s and Mary’s identical statements of disappointment, are also “implicit acts of faith.”[1]  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Martha and Mary called on Jesus because they believed that Jesus is the Son of God.  They were disappointed with him because he didn’t do what they expected him to do, but they wouldn’t have had any expectations of him at all, if they hadn’t believed that Jesus was the Messiah in the first place.

I think there’s a little bit of Martha and Mary in each one of us.  “Who hasn’t felt that God wasn’t doing what God should be doing in a painful situation?”[2]  We serve the Lord, we listen to his word, so we’re disappointed when God doesn’t seem to answer when out of the depths of our sorrow we cry like the psalmist:  “Lord, hear my voice!”  (Psalm 130: 1-2)  Like Martha and Mary, our disappointment arises from an implicit faith – from our hope and expectation that Christ will save us.  We want God’s promises to be true, and we want to believe that God will deliver.  Still, we just can’t help asking, “What are you waiting for?”

Such is the challenge of the spiritual life.  God never stops calling us to life in the spirit, as St. Paul tells us in our second reading.  God calls us to life in the spirit because faith in God gives us the hope of eternal happiness.  “When we believe that God is as Jesus said, we become absolutely sure of his love . . ., [and] we enter into a new relationship with life.”[3]  Believing that God is love gives purpose and meaning to our lives.  Believing that God provides all that we need gives us comfort and security.  Believing that God “will open [our] graves and have [us] rise from them,” (Ezekiel 37:12) frees us from fearing illness and death.  Believing that Jesus is the resurrection and the life gives us the remedy for all of our disappointments.  Jesus is the bridge between the spiritual and physical worlds.  Through Christ’s Spirit dwelling in us, we draw on the eternal joy and peace of the heavens as we face our earthly challenges.  “Christian spirituality is neither escape from real life nor denial of its pain but a way of living that is transfigured even now by the resurrection and the life, which is Jesus.”[4]  Even in their grief and disappointment, Martha and Mary believed in Jesus, and they had hope:  a hope that “keeps [us] from discouragement; sustains [us] during times of abandonment; [and] opens up [our] heart in expectation of eternal beatitude.”[5]

It’s not always easy to believe.  In a world dominated by rationalism, we’re encouraged to ignore spirituality and religion – to ignore God’s call to eternal happiness – and we’re scorned and ridiculed when we dare to express religious belief in the public forum.  We’re told that believing in God is chasing a fiction, and when God doesn’t act the way we want or expect him to act, we begin to believe it.  The sad result is that more and more people eschew religion and live in fear – fear of disappointment, fear of illness and fear of death – “the fear [that] is characteristic of a godless life.”[6] 

Faced with the choice of denying God and living in fear, or believing in God and living in hope, one would think we’d all choose to believe.  But not everyone does, and even those of us who do, aren’t always steadfast in our faith because in making that choice, we have to deal with the Martha and Mary problem:  God doesn’t always act the way we want or expect him to, so we become frustrated and disappointed.  When we choose God, we have to accept that God’s ways aren’t necessarily our ways – that God acts in God’s time and in God’s way – and that God’s ways are the best and the only ways to live.  To have faith, we have to trust God when he tells us, “I have promised, and I will do it.”  (Ezekiel 37: 14)  God always delivers, but he does so in his time and in his way. 

          Life will always have its disappointments.  God never promised that it wouldn’t.  It’s our challenge, then, to work through our frustration and disappointment with God when things don’t go as we want or expect them to.  It’s our challenge to listen for God’s voice and to keep accepting God’s invitation to rise to the new life of hope that he offers us, just as Lazarus did.  God never stops calling us to eternal life in the spirit, a wonderful way of life that’s available to us here and now if we only believe.  The choice is ours, and if we listen really carefully, we might just hear God ask us, “What are you waiting for?”

Readings:  Ezekiel 37: 12-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8: 8-11; John 11: 1-45

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[1] Sandra M. Schneiders, Written That You May Believe:  Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (New York, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003) at 181.

[2] James Martin, Jesus:  A Pilgrimage (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 2014) at 322.

[3] William Barclay, The Gospel of John, vol. 2 (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 1975) at 95.

[4] Schneiders at 179 (emphasis added).

[5] Catechism of the Catholic Church 1818.

[6] Barclay at 95.

Where Do We Stand? - A Homily for the First Sunday of Lent

        A lion used to prowl around a field in which four oxen would graze.  He tried many times to attack them, but whenever he approached, the oxen turned their tails toward one another so that the lion was met by horns on all sides.  One day, the lion had an idea.  He started spreading rumors among the oxen, lying to them about what one had said about another.  The oxen began to quarrel, and each went off to graze alone in separate corners of the field.  The lion then attacked them one by one and soon made an end of all four.[1]  The moral of this story is “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.”  Our readings challenge us to ask ourselves, “Where do we stand?”

 

          In our Gospel passage, we find Satan trying to tempt Jesus, twisting God’s word for his own evil purposes in an ill-fated attempt to separate Jesus from the Father.  Jesus, of course, resists temptation because he knows that our help is in the Lord, and he knows that when we stand united with God and with each other, Satan doesn’t stand a chance. 

          The devil’s evil ways are evident in his names.  “Satan, ‘Satanas,’ means the accuser.  Devil, ‘diabolus,’ means the one who tears things apart, the divider.”[2]  And so, Satan does everything in his power to accuse us before God and one another, and to divide us, to separate us from God and from each other.  He goes so far as to try to convince Jesus to “play the games of accusation and division.”[3]

Satan failed with Jesus, but unfortunately, he’s had his successes with us.  “Temptation is a universal human experience.”[4]  We find Satan’s strategy of divide et impera – divide and conquer – woven into the fabric of human interaction.  Machiavelli advises in The Art of War “that a Captain should endeavor with every art to divide the forces of the enemy, either by making him suspicious of his men in which he trusted, or by giving him cause that he has to separate his forces, and, because of this, become weaker.”[5]  Sound familiar?  We see the devil’s strategy at work in our world every day.  We see it in politics, in our social interactions, and even in religion.  Let’s face it, how many of us have blamed our assistant when we’ve forgotten a meeting?  How many of us have allowed our spouse to think that our child did something that we did?  And worst of all, how many of us have blamed the dog?  We succumb to temptation; we neglect our Gospel values; we accuse, and we divide.

Why do we do this?  The short answer is that we do it out of a feeling of insecurity that manifests itself in many ways.  When we feel inadequate, we try to elevate ourselves by tearing down our colleagues.  When we’re hurt and angry, we lash out at our loved ones.  When we’re so frustrated that we can’t express ourselves adequately, we resort to name calling and slander.  When we’re guilty, we point fingers at the innocent to deflect attention away from ourselves.  And in the hyper-connected cyber-world we live in, we can accuse and divide incessantly, anonymously and with little accountability, joined by legions of other insecure people who are more than willing to pile on.  We accuse and divide to help ourselves feel better, but the only one we help is Satan.

So what can we do about it?  We have to put our faith in God, as Jesus did.  As in all things, Jesus is our role model for resisting temptation.  Jesus was fully human, so he knew what it meant to be tempted.  And faced with temptation, “Jesus allowed himself to be led by the Spirit.”[6]  He turned to Scripture, knowing that God’s word “is a bulwark against evil and essential for spiritual growth and conversion.”[7]  Scripture calls us to radical trust in God and gives us all the evidence we need to put our trust in Him.  Scripture tells us that God hears the cry of his people and rescues us from slavery.  (Deuteronomy 26: 98-9)  Scriptures tells us that no evil shall befall us for God’s angels guard us in all our ways.  (Psalm 91: 10-11)  Scripture tells us that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”  (Romans 10: 13)  Scripture tells us that we have every reason to feel safe and secure when we stand united with God and with each other against temptation and sin.  “If God is for us, who can be against us?”  (Romans 8:31)  All we need to do is repent and believe the Gospel, which is exactly what we’re called to do during Lent.

Lent is a call to conversion; it’s a time to examine our consciences; it’s a time to find and eliminate everything that separates us from God.  It’s a time to renounce Satan and all his works and all his empty show.  We’ve just witnessed a beautiful Lenten conversion this past Friday when Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill held the first-ever meeting between a Roman Pontiff and a Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in the more than 950 years since the Great Schism.  Their embrace in Havana International Airport has been billed as the “hug heard ‘round the world,” but I can assure it was felt most profoundly in hell, as nearly a millennium of accusation and division was conquered by a moment of unity in Christ.  Let’s follow the example of Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill this Lent.  Let’s use this Lent to set aside accusation and division and adopt forgiveness and reconciliation.  Let’s use this Lent to stand united with God and with each other, resisting temptation as Jesus did.    

          Our Gospel reading “is a strong reminder that  . . . there is a cosmic agōn or struggle taking place for the human soul.”[8]  United with God and with each other, we stand together tails turned inward to meet Satan with horns on all sides.  Separated from God and divided from each other, we fall prey to the devil’s temptations.  The question that remains for each one of us, then, is, “Where do we stand?”

Readings:  Deuteronomy 26: 4-10; Psalm 91; Romans 10: 8-13; Luke 4:1-13

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[1] Aesop, The Lion and the Four Oxen.

[2] John Shea, The Relentless Widow:  The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers, Luke Year C (Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 2006) at 65.

[3] Id.

[4] R. Alan Culpepper, “The Gospel of Luke,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. IX (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1995) at 100.

[5] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Art of War, Book VI, http://www.constitution.org/mac/artofwar6.htm.

[6] Shea at 101.

[7] John W. Martens, “God Alone,” America, vol. 214, no. 4 (February 8, 2016) at 39.

[8] David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (Grand Rapids, Brazos Press, 2012) at 66.

A Trying Time – An Ash Wednesday Reflection

In recent years, I’ve grown to appreciate Ash Wednesday much more than I ever did as a young adult.  You see, I used to think that Ash Wednesday was just a day when the super pious would walk around with dust on their foreheads to remind everyone else how super pious they are.  But once I started receiving ashes myself, and especially when I began distributing ashes as a deacon, I came to realize how wrong I was.  From my new vantage point, I see people from every walk and circumstance of life – the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the super-religious and those who may just be hedging their bets –  humbly submitting themselves to the sobering rite where we remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return.  I see people who are trying – trying to be humble; trying to connect with God; trying to change for the better.  Lent is exactly that:  a trying time.

During Lent we’re called to conversion.  We’re called to change – to set aside our bad habits, repent, and believe the Gospel.  But truly believing the Gospel isn’t simply a matter of words; it’s a way of living.  To believe in the Gospel, we need to live the Gospel values.  That means we need to place ourselves in proper orientation with God our creator and at the service of our fellow man.  In other words, we need to love God and love our neighbor. Through the disciplines of prayer, fasting and alms-giving, Lent offers us a special opportunity to try a little harder to be a little better in our relationships with God and our neighbor.

 

Lent also offers us the opportunity to acknowledge that others are trying, too.  Let’s face it, It’s a lot easier to be judgmental than trying to figure out another person’s circumstances, motivations and intentions.  So we spend a good part of our day angry:  angry at the slow driver who made me late for work; angry at the store clerk who once again forgot to double-bag my groceries; angry at the guy who hogged the stepper at the gym.  It’s easy to assume that others are being the way they are just to tick us off.  But maybe, just maybe, that slow driver was bringing her newborn home from the hospital for the first time; or that store clerk has special needs; or that guy on the stepper was recently told that if he didn’t lose weight soon, he’d have serious health issues.  Maybe, they’re all just trying, too.

 

          Lent, then, is also a great time to love God and neighbor by trying to add a little more forbearance and forgiveness to our repertoire.  We can’t always know a person’s circumstances, motivations or intentions.  So maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt.  If we do, we’ll certainly be a lot less angry, and maybe we’ll grow to appreciate that we’re all living in a trying time.

It’s the Humility

          When I was a little boy, I remember my father taking me to Henry’s Fine Foods, a family-owned deli in my hometown of Verona.  Every once in a while we’d run into a man at Henry’s who seemed to know everyone, my father included.  He was a short, stocky, self-deprecating man of obvious Italian-American descent - not an uncommon look in a town called Verona.  He always smiled, said hello and asked how we were as he bought his morning cup of coffee.  As I grew in age and wisdom, I came to realize that that little man was none other than Baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra.  As a young boy, I didn’t know who Yogi Berra was, but he made a lasting impression on me anyway.  What stood out to me about Yogi Berra so many years ago is the same thing that stands out about Jesus in today’s Gospel.  It’s the humility.

          At first glance, today’s readings seem to emphasize the stark contrast between divinity and humanity.  Our first reading and our psalm set the stage with magnificent images of the awesome power of God, while Saint Paul, in our second reading, reminds us of the simple, devout life that God calls us to.  In our Gospel, John the Baptist contrasts his own lowliness with one who’s coming who’s mightier than he.  And then something strange happens.  In Jesus, God’s power and might doesn’t stand in contrast with human lowliness.  When the mighty one comes, he humbly presents himself to John for baptism.  In Jesus, God’s power and might is expressed perfectly through humility. 

          Much ink has been spilled over the centuries trying to figure out why Jesus would need to be baptized.  He’s the Messiah, the sinless Son of God.   But rather than talk about why Jesus is seeking baptism, I’d like to focus on what Jesus is doing.  “For Jesus, the emergence of John was God’s call to action; and his first step was to identify himself with the people in their search for God.”[1]  In other words, in launching his earthly ministry, Jesus’ first step wasn’t to announce his divinity, but to declare his humanity.  As Saint Paul said, Jesus “emptied himself . . . coming in human likeness; and found in human appearance, he humbled himself.” (Philippians 2: 7-8)  Jesus is a model of humility, and as the Yogi-ism goes, “You can observe a lot by watching.”[2]  By presenting himself for baptism, Jesus humbly acknowledges that he “could not have done what he did apart from God’s empowerment and blessing.”[3]  By presenting himself for baptism, Jesus teaches us that our mission in life, the mission we assume in baptism, begins with humility.

Baptism, then, can be understood as God’s gift to the humble.  As Saint Gregory of Nazianzus explained, “Baptism is God’s beautiful and magnificent gift. . . .  It’s called a gift because it’s conferred on those who bring nothing of their own.”[4]  And what does baptism do for us?  It makes us nothing less than sons and daughters of God.  We bring nothing to the baptismal font that God needs, and yet we leave it as God’s beloved sons and daughters empowered with all the grace we need to carry out our baptismal mission as priest, prophet and king.  If that’s not humbling, I don’t know what is.

The call to live our baptismal mission with humility may not seem so easy in a world that exalts the high, the mighty, the wealthy and the beautiful.  I’ll admit that humility’s not my strongest virtue.  I seem to live more by the words of Ted Turner:  “If I only had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”[5]  It seems that we “possess[] two very different kinds of life:  [our] real life and the imaginary one in which [we] live[] in [our] own mind or in the opinion of others.  We labor unceasingly to embellish and preserve our imaginary existence, and we neglect the real one.”[6]   But real success isn’t measured in terms of status, wealth, or even beauty.  As a certain successful baseball player once said, “I’m ugly.  So what?  I never saw anyone hit with his face.”[7]  Real success in life is all about being authentically human, living simply and humbly as the real person that God created us to be.  Jesus calls us to be humble because “It is human to be humble.”[8]

It’s no coincidence that the words “human” and “humility” are derived from the same Latin root.  Humus, meaning dirt, reminds us that God formed man “out of the dust of the ground.”  (Genesis 2:7)  To be humble, then, we must heed the ominous words that we hear every year on Ash Wednesday:  “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Humility reminds us that we’re not God; we’re lowly creatures.  Humility reminds us that God doesn’t need us, but he loves us anyway.  Jesus calls us to be humble because humility “creates in us a capacity for the closest possible intimacy with God.”[9]  The more we humbly empty ourselves of ego and pride, the closer we become with the one who humbled himself to share in our humanity, and the more we’re filled with his love and divinity.  Just think of the humblest people you know.  I’ll bet God’s love shines right through them, doesn’t it?  That’s what we see in Jesus, and that’s what I saw so many years ago in Yogi Berra.

Much later in my life, I asked my father how he knew Yogi Berra.  He smiled and said, “I didn’t.”  It seems that Yogi Berra was a humble man who treated everyone like a friend he’d known all his life.  The testimonials that followed his death last September attest to the fact that what friends and family remember most about Yogi Berra isn’t his illustrious baseball career, but his desire to remain one of us.  Yogi Berra never forgot the secret to real success in life.  To borrow his words, “It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.”[10]

Readings: Isaiah 40: 1-5, 9-11; Psalm 104; Titus 2: 11-14, 3: 4-7; Luke 3: 15-16, 21-22

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[1] William Barclay, The Gospel of Luke (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2001) at 45.

[2] Yogi Berra.

[3]R. Alan Culpepper, “The Gospel of Luke,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. IX (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1995) at 92.

[4] St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio, 40, 3-4: PG 36, 361C.

[5] Fizra Pirani, “Happy 77^th Birthday, Ted Turner:  13 Things You May Not Know about the Media Mogul,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 19, 2015, http://www.myajc.com/news/entertainment/celebrity-news/happy-76th-birthday-ted-turner/npQtn/.

[6] Raniero Cantalamessa, Life in Christ:  The Spiritual Message of the Letter to the Romans (Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 1990) at 165.

[7] Yogi Berra.

[8] Cantalamessa.

[9] Monica Baldwin, I Leap Over the Wall:  A Return to the World after Twenty-eight Years in a Convent.

[10] Yogi Berra.

Come, Let’s Adore Him! - A Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family

As I was setting up our Nativity Scene last week, I couldn’t help but notice how everyone and everything in our household is drawn to the manger.  My family loves to help set it up, each of us with our favorite pieces, and for some strange reason, our cats LOVE the Nativity Scene.  Every morning without fail, I find the telltale signs that our cats had spent the night in and around the manger – pieces knocked over, straw tracked across the rug and cat hair on Mary’s dress.  Why should she be any different from the rest of us?  It seems that both man and beast are called by God to come and adore him, and that’s the message of today’s readings.

In our first reading, a faithful woman named Hannah returns to the Temple after the birth Samuel to praise and thank God for the gift of a son in her barrenness.  Our psalm speaks so beautifully of how our soul “yearns and pines for the courts of the Lord” and how our “heart and flesh cry out for the living God.”  And in our Gospel, we find the Holy Family on a Passover pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem, where Jesus lingers a while longer in his Father’s house.  Together, these readings teach us what we already know in our hearts:  there’s something in our very being that draws us to God. 

Philosophy and Theology agree that “man is a relational being.”[1]  As Aristotle put it so succinctly, “man is by nature a social animal.”[2]  This fact is played out in our family relationships, in our friendships, in our cultural and political structures and in our associations through organizations and corporations.  Why are we social beings?  Well, we’re created that way.  Our social nature comes from our creation in the image and likeness of God, who is himself in relationship in the divine Trinity.  So “[t]he desire for God is written in the human heart.”[3]  We’re created to be in relationship with God.  As Saint John reminds us in our second reading, we’re all children of a God who created us to share in his divine life.  For this reason God draws close to man at every time and in every place.  He calls us to seek him, to know him, [and] to love him with all our strength.[4] 

Our relationship with God is our first and most fundamental relationship.  If our relationship with God is disturbed, “then nothing else can be truly in order.”[5]  So our relationship with God has to be nurtured.  It needs care and feeding because we need care and feeding.  And where can we get that care and feeding?  In prayer and liturgy.  Prayer, of course, “is the elevation of the mind and heart to God in praise of his glory.”[6]  Through prayer we enter into dialogue with God, we share our inner most thoughts and concerns, and we listen for God’s response.  Liturgy is the work of the people where we join together in fellowship as Christ our High Priest continues the work of our redemption through the celebration of the Paschal Mystery.  In liturgy we’re nourished by God in his Word and in the Eucharist.  In prayer and liturgy, we respond to God’s call to come and adore him.  Through prayer and liturgy we receive all that we need to live in wonderful relationship with God and with each other.

Unfortunately, we don’t always take the time to pray and to go to Mass.  We’re too distracted and too busy.  This problem has become so severe that today only about 30% of people regularly attend religious services.  In my opinion, that sobering statistic explains many of the problems we face today because when our relationship with God is neglected, then everything else in our lives becomes disordered.  When our relationship with God is set aside like the latest toy in which we’ve lost interest, we become spiritually anemic, we become slaves to a routine of drudgery, and we give little thought or care to the true meaning of life and our purpose in it.  Worse yet, we lose hope.

As if that weren’t bad enough, we’re raising a generation of children who’ve never set foot in a Church.  The sad fact is that a day will come when those poor children will face the challenges of this life without their parents to shelter them, and they’ll think that they’re all alone.  Without a relationship with God, they’ll stand hopeless in the face of sickness and death, and they’ll never find the truth and happiness they yearn for because they were never taught that truth and happiness can only be found in God.

Fortunately, there’s good news because with God there’s always good news.  The good news is that God never stops calling us.  God never stops trying to be in relationship with us.  You may have noticed that the Church was a little more crowded than usual on Christmas.  Well, before we condemn the infrequent fliers who fill the pews just a few times a year, let’s congratulate them for listening to God’s call and welcome them home to God’s house.  I love a packed Church, even if it happens only once or twice a year, because it’s proof that God never stops calling us to come and adore him.  And when we do come, we advance in the wisdom and understanding that we’re never alone.  God is with us, and that, of course, is the message of Christmas.

        As I was setting up for the children’s Mass on Christmas Eve, I couldn’t help but notice how everyone is drawn to the manger.  Parents were dragged by their children to the sanctuary to look at their favorite pieces, families gathered before the crèche in their Sunday best to take next-year’s Christmas card photo, and there were the telltale signs that little ones had spent some time in and around the manger – pieces knocked over, straw tracked across the rug, and cat hair from someone’s clothes on Mary’s dress.  She just can’t get a break.  It seems that both man and beast respond to God’s call to come and adore him.  At one point, I saw a small boy kneeling on the sanctuary steps before the manger.  As I approached, I heard him saying, “I love you, Baby Jesus.  I love you, Baby Jesus.”  Prayer and liturgy – it’s as simple as that.  Come, let’s adore him.

Readings:  1 Samuel 1: 20-22, 24-28; Psalm 84; 1 John 3: 1-2, 21-24; Luke 2: 41-52

Click here for a moving rendition of O Come All Ye Faithful sung at Midnight Mass at the Vatican

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[1] Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives (New York, Image, 2013) at 44.

[2] Aristotle, Politics, Book 1.

[3] Catechism of the Catholic Church at 27.

[4] Id. at 1.

[5] Pope Benedict XVI at 33.

[6] Catechism of the Catholic Church at glossary.

A Man of the People

                My first challenge on arriving for the 4 pm Vigil Mass on Christmas Eve was to figure out if we had an altar server who could handle the incense (we did).  My second challenge was learning that my pastor wanted me to proclaim the “long form” of the designated Gospel at Mass.  My third challenge was learning that our visiting priest wanted to use the same Gospel on Christmas morning.  This passage from Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus Christ starting with Abraham and ending with Jesus’ birth.  It’s informally known as Matthews Begats because its more classic iteration goes like this:  “Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob.  Jacob begat Judah and his brothers.”  (Matthew 1: 2)  Thirty-nine generations later, we hear of Jesus’ birth.  This reading isn’t challenging solely for its length; the most difficult part is slogging through 48 Hebrew names without falling into a guttural, saliva-laden tongue twister.  You try reading names like Jeconiah, Shealtiel and Zerrubabbel in front of nearly 800 parishioners whose most likely thought is, “When is this going to end?”  I’ve been tempted to throw Huey, Dewey and Louie into the mix just to see if people are still listening.

                Bible scholars largely agree that Matthew’s Gospel was written to prove to a Jewish audience that Jesus is the Messiah promised for centuries by the prophets of old.  In that light, Matthew’s Begats establishes Jesus’ Jewish lineage from Abraham, their father in faith, to the tribe of Judah and down through the descendants of King David, just as the prophets foretold.  But we also believe that Scripture speaks to all people in all times.  In that light, Matthew’s Begats takes on a much more universal meaning.  It teaches us that Jesus had a rich, human history filled with peasants and kings, saints and sinners and a whole lot of folks in between.  In short, it tells us that Jesus truly is a man of the people.  And that says a lot about God.

                 We humans have been pondering God for as long as we’ve been pondering.  Is there one God, or many gods?  What is God like?  Is God a passive or active player in our lives?  Matthew’s Begats addresses this last question.  You see, Judeo-Christian tradition speaks of a God who not only created the universe but who has lovingly and persistently guided creation back to him, notwithstanding humanity’s sinful fall from grace.  A God who humbled himself to take human form, to join the human family tree, certainly is intimately active in our lives. 

By contrast, a deist believes that God created the universe but remains apart from it, allowing creation to plod through time without God’s intervention.  The typical analogy for the deist understanding of God is that of a clock-maker who makes the clock, sets it in motion and lets it run by itself.  One of the many flaws in the deist perspective is that it fails to account for love.  This point will take a little explaining, so bear with me.  If one understands God as the supreme creator above all else, then one must concede that God needs nothing (if God needed anything, he wouldn’t be above all else).  So if God needs nothing, then his only motivation for creating us and everything else must be love (the only other possible motivation would be a need in one form or another).  God creates not because he needs to, but because he loves.  And a God who is supreme also can’t change (the only possible change from being supreme would be to become something less than supreme).  Therefore, if God creates out of love, he can’t stop loving his creation (that would be a change).  Since love is active, not static, God’s love for his creation is itself an active intervention in our lives that can’t stop because stopping would be change, and God can’t change.  Thus, the deist approach fails because if God were not active in our lives (as the deist believes), then God would not love creation; if God did not love creation, then God would not be supreme; and if God were not supreme, then God would not be God.  I’ll pause a moment in case you need a breather after all of that.

 

                As challenging as the passage may be, Matthew’s Begat’s speaks so beautifully and profoundly of God’s active and loving intervention in our lives.  It teaches us that God loves us so much that he humbled himself to take human form, to share earthly life with us, to live with us, work with us, play with us, laugh with us, cry with us, suffer with us, rejoice with us and ultimately to die with and for us.  Matthew’s Begats teaches us that God’s divinity and our humanity are united in Jesus Christ, notwithstanding a family tree with a few nicks and scars on its trunk and branches.  Matthew’s Begats teaches us that God, through Jesus Christ, truly is a man the people.  That’s the message of Christmas, and that’s the message that brings joy to the world.

Reading:  Matthew 1: 1-25

Follow this link for a clever rendition of Matthew's Begats.