October 5, 2014 - 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Homily for October 5, 2014

Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

A Glance at History

 

            Sometimes it’s a good idea to take a step back so we can see the forest for the trees, and look at who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going. Today’s readings give us a pretty darn good chance to do that. So let’s get a bird’s eye view of life and God and everything that brings us together this evening in this church.

            It all started four thousand years ago, with a God who was passionately in love with us and a man who didn’t have any idea of how important he would become. God realized that He wanted humanity to know Him, to love Him, to learn to live according to His teachings, and to spend eternity with Him in Heaven. In order to make Himself and His plan known, God knew that He would have to reveal Himself to us – we couldn’t figure out the Lord on our own. So God broke into human history and invited a man, Abraham, to become his first follower. He took this man on an incredible journey, gave him the promised land, and asked for only one thing in return – that he have faith in the love of the Lord.

            Abraham began to pass on this faith in God to his son Isaac, and soon the clan grew – Jacob, his twelve sons, and finally they multiplied until God had developed a tribe who knew Him and loved Him. But they went down to Egypt seeking food during a famine, and in Egypt they started to follow other gods. So God knew He needed to do something drastic to call them back to Him, so He sent Moses to lead the people out. We all know the story – the ten plagues, the Passover, the crossing of the Red Sea. But even despite the incredible wonders that God did in Egypt, the people were still unfaithful – in the desert, they worshipped a golden calf, and when they got back into their own land, they started to worship the pagan gods of the surrounding nations, especially the god named Baal.

            But God wouldn’t give up on His people. He sent them prophets, He fought with them in battle, He did wonders and miracles in their midst. But as often as God did these amazing deeds, the people continually lived more and more wicked lives, worshipped false gods, and pretty much ignored the Lord Who was their savior.

            God raised up this people, His Chosen People, so that they would witness to the world what a holy life was like. The Lord wanted to reveal Himself, His passionate love, to the world through the Chosen People. But because the Jews were unfaithful, following after false gods and living wicked lives, He was unable to complete His plan with them. Instead of the other nations looking to the Jews and saying, “Ah! Look how holy and wise those people are! Come, let us learn about the Lord!”, it was the Jewish people who looked to the other nations and started to act just like they did.

            So today’s first reading is a parable about how unfaithful these people had been. God compares the Jewish people to a vine – in the first reading, a man planted this beautiful vine, tended it, fertilized it, watered it, but when he came looking for fruit, he found only sour fruit – just like how God guarded, protected, fed, and blessed Israel, but when God wanted to find the good fruit of a holy life from His people, instead He found wickedness and worshipping false gods.

            But God wasn’t done yet. He did one more thing for His people: He sent His beloved Son to the earth in one final, great effort to show the world about His love. But what did they do? They crucified Him – they crucified the perfect reflection of God’s passionate love for the world. They rejected God. And so have we.

            We, as baptized followers of Christ, are the new Chosen People. By baptism we have been set apart for a life of faith in Jesus Christ. But have we produced the fruit of a holy life? Or have we acted just like Israel in rejecting the very God Who has given us everything?

            The basic problem with Israel is that they wanted to be just like the other nations – they wanted to “fit in” – so they worshipped the gods of the other nations. In order for us to fit in, have we worshipped the false gods of our culture: money, sports, political correctness, the god of tolerance? As Christians, we must shape the world in the light of Christ, not become corrupted by the world.

            And since we are the new vine, God has given us abundant graces as well. He has given us the Church to teach us, the Eucharist to feed us, the example of the saints to follow. In giving us these things, the Lord expects us to use them to grow holy. Are we doing that? Are we growing in holiness? Or are we acting just like everybody else when we walk out of these doors, pretending like God doesn’t matter, ignoring Him, living lives of selfishness and wickedness?

            Thousands of years ago, God broke into human history and invited men and women to follow Him in radical love and trust, and their lives were never the same. He now invites us into that same radical love and trust. The response is up to us. Do our lives bear fruit? Are we sincerely trying, with all our hearts, to be holy? If not, what do we need to change to live like the Christians we claim to be?

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Sept. 28, 2014

Homily for September 28, 2014

Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Virtue

 

            St. Therese of Lisieux was a nineteenth-century French nun who lived in a small convent in France. She was serious about becoming holy and loving others like Jesus loved them, but there was one other nun in the convent who used to drive her crazy. Every day as they prayed in chapel, the other nun used to click her rosary beads against the church pew – and it drove Therese crazy. Plus, the other nun had an unfriendly personality and no one really liked her.

            So Therese made it her mission to treat her with uncommon kindness. She endured the annoying habits of this other woman, sought to spend time with her and included her in conversations, and did other small acts of kindness for her. After St. Therese had died, all of the nuns were interviewed about her. This particular nun said, “Oh yes, Therese was my best friend. She thought I was so wonderful, she would always try to spend time with me.” It was only after reading Therese’s journal that everyone realized how difficult it was for Therese to befriend this woman, but she had been so effective at loving her that the woman thought she was best friends with Therese!

            To become like Christ – to become a saint – to be the best version of ourselves, we have to practice virtue. What is virtue? A virtue is a good habit that makes us like Christ. St. Paul gives us several examples in the second reading – love, compassion, mercy, joy, humility. I’m sure we can think of many other virtues, such as patience, purity, kindness, courage, perseverance, trust in God, self-control.

            How do we get virtue? In two ways: prayer and practice. First, we pray for any virtue we need, because God wants us to excel in virtue. But God rarely gives us a virtue automatically – He only gives us opportunities to practice the virtue. For example, many people pray for patience. Then we shouldn’t be surprised when we find ourselves stuck in a traffic jam after praying for this virtue – because that’s how we grow in patience! Sometimes that’s frustrating; if you pray for humility, you won’t get the virtue automatically, you’ll instead get embarrassing situations so you can learn humility on your own!

            Look at St. Therese – she did not automatically get the virtue of patience and charity – she had to work at it, every day choosing to react to this difficult woman with kindness. She saw this difficult situation as an opportunity to grow in virtue, instead of seeing it as just another frustration in life.

            How often have we seen a challenges in our life as just negative experiences to grind through, instead of an opportunity to grow in virtue? A flat tire, an annoying coworker, a difficult teacher, a sickness – all of these are a chance to grow in virtue. God desires us to become the best version of ourselves, and as our first reading points out so well, only in living a virtuous life will we find the happiness we desire.

            So this is my challenge for you. Think for a moment about a virtue that you want to grow in. Perhaps you need self-control, or maybe you’re a person who needs to grow in patience. Maybe sexual purity is a struggle for you, or perhaps you want to grow in compassion. Consider what virtue you want to grow in – and consider what ways you will be able to practice this virtue this coming week. Remember, the Lord will give you the grace to grow in any virtue, if you commit this quest to His grace. He alone can transform us to become the best version of ourselves. So what virtue do you need, and what must you do to acquire this virtue through God’s help?

Homily for September 21, 2014 - Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Homily for Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

September 21, 2014

Time and Eternity

 

            There’s a group of hard-core Catholic monks called the Carthusians who live lives of strict penance and prayer, and they have an interesting custom. They always greet one another with the phrase, “Remember your death, brother.” I don’t know about you, but that’s not a greeting I’d like to hear as I come down for coffee in the morning. But it’s a very profound sentiment, because when we keep in mind how short our time is here on earth and how long eternity is, we will hopefully live a better life.

            Have you ever walked through a graveyard and meditated on time and eternity? It always gives me pause to reflect – these people beneath the graves were once as alive as you and I, with cares and anxieties, joys and pleasures…and now they are dust. Someday I too will become like them – and how I live this life here on earth will determine how I spend eternity.

            Eternity is long! It’s a hard concept to grasp – the concept of “forever”. An analogy might help – let us say that a bird comes along once every thousand years and takes one speck of dust from the top of Mount Everest. Once Mount Everest is worn away and becomes as flat as sea level, then eternity…begins. Compared to eternity, our lives are as quick as the snap of a finger. Where will we choose to spend it? Will we respond to the Lord’s invitation, will we become holy and seek after Him with all our hearts, and be ready for Heaven? Or will we waste our time here in selfish pursuits and spend eternity separated from God in Hell? Ultimately there are only two options. God has extended the invitation for everyone to spend eternity with Him in heaven, but not everyone chooses to accept this invitation.

            I was thinking about this because today’s first reading has a lot of urgency in it. “Seek the Lord while He may be found, call to Him while He is near.” In other words, we don’t get a second chance at life – this is it, we must choose God today! While we’re alive and breathing and on this side of the dirt, we shouldn’t waste any time in choosing the Lord! I know it’s a temptation to think, “Oh, I’ll get more into my faith when I’m older,” or, “When I retire, then I’ll have time to read the Bible.” But don’t procrastinate! Tomorrow never comes! Choose Christ, choose a life of holiness now! It’s not too late – and it’s definitely not too early. We’ve only got this one life.

I hope none of you listened to the rapper Drake who did the famous…and dirty…song back in 2011 called “The Motto” which featured the popular catchphrase, ”YOLO” which means “You Only Live Once.” Kind of an interesting motto, and it can go both ways – “You only live once, so I might as well live it up and do crazy things and live for today,” or it can mean, “You only live once, so you’d better make it count.” As a friend of mine quipped right around the time this song became popular, “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”

            We only have this one life to determine eternity. Heck, we may only have this one DAY to determine eternity. None of us is guaranteed to see tomorrow. There’s a sign in the sacristy of St. Mary’s that reads, “Priest of God: celebrate this Mass as if it were your first Mass, as if it were your last Mass, as if it were your only Mass.” I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to say Mass tomorrow – I could die tonight. Although that sounds morbid, it also helps me focus on THIS Mass, because how I celebrate THIS Mass will impact my eternity. How YOU pray at this Mass will impact where you spend eternity. How you act when you go home will impact your eternity. How you act when you go to work or school tomorrow will impact your eternity. A stunning thought! Eternity is coming, and every choice we make in our ordinary, mundane lives will determine where we spend it!

            When I first moved into the rectory of St. Mary’s, I was…shall we say…shocked to find my room covered in skeletons. There was a giant plastic skeleton on the wall, a skeleton-shaped key, a skeleton candleholder. The first thing I did when I got here was got rid of the skeletons! After asking around, it seemed like Fr. Arthur liked to keep death always on his mind so that he would live his life in such a way that he’d be prepared for eternity. Although creepy, it isn’t without precedent – it was said that St. Jerome used to keep a human skull on his desk so that he would always consider the shortness of this life and the length of eternity. I think I could do without such a visual demonstration…a stroll through a graveyard is usually enough for me.

            So, I suppose the point of this homily is to remind us that life is very short when compared with eternity. Every choice we make impacts where we will spend forever – in the loving embrace of God, or separated from Him in eternal agony. TODAY is the day, NOW is the proper hour: turn from your sin and seek the Lord. We may not get tomorrow…and eternity is only a breath away.

Homily for September 14, 2014 - Feast of the Triumph of the Cross

Homily for September 14, 2014

Feast of the Triumph of the Cross

Be Not Afraid

 

            The old story goes that a man one night was burdened with many sufferings: health problems, financial problems, family problems. Before going to bed, he complains to God about all of his crosses: “Lord, why have you given me so many difficulties and sufferings in life? It isn’t fair!” So that night as he sleeps, he has a dream and Jesus comes up to him and says, “Come with me. You say your cross is too heavy – let us pick out another one.” So Jesus leads the man into a huge room, as big as a warehouse. The Lord says, “You can lay down your cross here and pick up another one. Your choice.”

            The man begins to wander the room, and he is stunned by how big many of the crosses are. Some are ten feet tall, others look like they weigh two hundred pounds. Finally, there in the corner, the man finds a small cross that looks manageable. “Lord, I’ll take that one,” he says.

            Jesus picks it up and lays it on his shoulders and tells him, “This is the cross you laid down when you came in here.”

            Human beings almost always think that the grass is greener on the other side, because we don’t like the Cross. We don’t like to suffer. We don’t like sickness, and failure, and all of the other unpleasant things that come with life. Nobody does. And many times, we try everything possible to avoid the Cross – we try to get a new job, we try to use anti-aging products to help us feel younger, we do anything to avoid the Cross.

            And it is certainly legitimate to avoid some suffering. But we can never avoid it all. A friend of mine is in the military and a while back we were having a conversation. His wife had just conceived their third child, and he found out that he was heading out to a nine-month tour of duty in Iraq. I told him how sorry I was that he wouldn’t be around to witness the birth of his child, and how much stress that must be on his marriage. He just shrugged and said, “Yes, I suppose it’s tough, but everyone has their crosses to bear.”

            He had accepted that with his choice of life, there would be certain crosses that were unavoidable. Instead, he chose to grind through them, knowing that by bearing the Cross he is drawing closer to Jesus.

            Every choice, every commitment, every goal we pursue involves crosses. In order to live out our commitments, in order to become the best version of ourselves, we’ve got to grind through the Crosses. For example, in order to be a good husband or wife, we have to sacrifice for our spouse, put their needs first, and learn to compromise. If we desire to be a good student, we have to endure the cross of studying. To live out our commitment to being a parent, that requires embracing lots of crosses, like patience with our teenage kids, or taking care of a child who is sick. If we are committed to succeeding in our jobs, we have to make the sacrifice of working late sometimes. If we are committed to good health, we have to deny ourselves the third helping of pie and actually exercise once in a while.

            These crosses aren’t easy, but they help us to become the best version of ourselves. I love what the Protestant pastor Rick Warren had to say: “God cares more about your character than your comfort.” So true! God is interested in helping you become a man or woman who loves like Christ loves – and how did He love? By embracing the Cross. You see, when we embrace our crosses, and we don’t try to cut corners or take the easy road out, then we become stronger – more courageous, more compassionate, more kind, more patient, more giving – in a word, more like Christ. So do not be afraid of the Cross!

            This is especially true of our biggest commitment, the commitment to being a disciple of Jesus Christ. He did not promise that it would be easy to follow His commandments – instead, He promised the exact opposite, when He said, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Following Christ isn’t easy. It takes the sacrifice of our time – making time to seek His heart in the Scriptures and daily prayer. It takes the sacrifice of our reputation – some people may think us simple-minded for being followers of Christ, and often we have to take unpopular stands when we follow Christ. It takes the sacrifice of the daily struggle to avoid sin – it’s tough to follow the commands of Christ.

            But this feast is about the TRIUMPH of the cross – because through the Cross, Jesus conquered death and opened Heaven for us. He showed us that the Cross comes before the Resurrection. This is true, not just for Him, but for us as well. If we want to be a great husband or wife, a great parent, a great employee, a great student, a great athlete, a great person, we need to embrace the Cross. Don’t be afraid to embrace the crosses. It’s what helps us to become the best version of ourselves – which is another way of saying, it helps us become saints.

Homily for September 7, 2014 - Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

            The Ancient Greeks were very intelligent people, evidenced by their inventions of the gyro sandwich and the toga, which I think we would all agree are some of the most important inventions in history. But perhaps on par with that is their contribution to the philosophy of love.

            We hear a lot about love in the second reading – St. Paul says essentially, echoing John Lennon, all you need is love – love is the fulfillment of the Law. All of the Old Testament precepts – from such exalted commands as “Have no other God besides Me” to the rather mundane command not to eat bacon – are all summed up in the idea of love.

            But all love is not created equal. In our common parlance, we say that we love pizza, and we say that we love our wives, and we say that we love God…but clearly we do not love them all the same, or in the same way. We sing about love all the time, but often we don’t know what love is. So what does love got to do with it?

            In Greek, there are four different words for love – because the ancient Greeks realized that there were four different types of love. First, we have storge – love of things. I love my car. I love my mom’s home cooking. Second, there is another type of love called eros, which is romantic love, the love we share with our spouses – it’s that “chemistry” between two people that we often speak about. Third, we have philia – as in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. This is the type of love between friends, between family members. But finally we have agape – complete and total self-giving love, the love where we’re ready and willing to sacrifice everything for the Beloved. This is the type of love that Christ showed us on the Cross.

            You may have noticed that these four types of love – love of things, romantic love, brotherly love, and total self-giving love – are very different responses. The first two are based on the emotions. You can’t really control it. Just try to get a little kid to love Brussel sprouts – it probably won’t work well. We just either like it or we don’t. Same with romance – we’re either emotionally attracted to the other person or we’re not.

            But the other two types of love are very different. They aren’t emotions – they are choices. We CHOOSE to love because it’s the right thing to do. Also, notice that while the first two types of love are all about pleasing me – I love pizza because it is pleasing to me to eat it – the latter two types of love are about benefitting the other person – I love you and I want to choose to benefit you.

            One could really say that genuine love is only the latter two types of love – the love of family and friends, and the total self-giving love. A good definition of love, then, could be: love is self-giving to benefit the other. It is a choice to lay down our desires, our wants, our very selves so that another person can flourish. Real love requires sacrifice.

            And that is a far cry from what our culture says is love. Our culture believes that love is nothing more than an emotion, a warm-fuzzy-feeling towards another person. Love is neither warm nor fuzzy – it’s as hard and cold as nails being driven through a crucified man’s wrists and feet.

            To truly love another person, we have to be willing to choose their good over our own. And love is always directly related to truth. When St. Paul says that love sums up the law, he isn’t saying that the rest of the law is abolished. Love must be directed to what is truly good for the person. Thus, we don’t toss out the law – rather, laws like the Ten Commandments and the moral teachings of the Church teach us HOW to love, what genuine love consists in. Some things by their very nature are incompatible with love. For example, to commit adultery is always and in every case incompatible with love.

            This is really a different vantage point from our culture. Have you ever seen those bumper stickers that spell out the word “Coexist” using symbols from the different religions? I appreciate part of the thought behind it – we should indeed love our brothers and sisters from another faith. But there’s also an implicit falsehood beneath the veneer – that in order to love each other, we have to deny the truths of our faith, and see our faith as just one opinion among many. But love and truth aren’t opposites – they go together. The true teachings of our Catholic faith about humanity, our relationship to God, marriage, family, social justice – these truths guide us into love. Only if we love according to truth do we truly love. After all, love isn’t just an emotion of well-being – it’s a choice to sacrifice ourselves for the wellbeing of others.

            Love proves itself in deeds. I want to close with the beautiful story of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Some of you might be familiar with him – he was a Polish priest who was arrested by the Nazis in the early 1940s and was imprisoned in Auschwitz concentration camp. Whenever one of the men would escape, in punishment, the SS Guards used to select ten men from the escapee’s cell block to die in of starvation in an underground cement bunker. Well, one day, a man from Fr. Kolbe’s cell block escaped, so all of the prisoners were lined up outside, as the SS Guard went down the line picking out ten men to die in his stead. As he reached one man and called out his name, the man fell to his knees, crying out, “Please don’t take me! I have a wife, I have children! I will never see them again!”

            From out of the ranks stepped Fr. Kolbe. “I will take that man’s place,” he declared. The guards were shocked – no one had ever volunteered to enter the starvation bunker. And yet here was this man, this priest – offering his life for another. The guards accepted the replacement, and Fr. Kolbe, with nine other men were starved to death in an underground bunker. But when the guards would come down periodically to check on them, they were surprised to see – not men crying out in agony or pleading for mercy – but men singing hymns, praying the Rosary, and radiating peace and joy. Fr. Kolbe was strengthening them all. Finally, he was the last one to die, having given his life to save another man – who was eventually freed from the concentration camp when the war was over, reunited with his family, and was present in St. Peter’s Square in Rome when Maximilian Kolbe was declared a saint. St. Maximilian Kolbe - here was a man who knew what love was, and lived it. Go and do likewise.