Wednesday of the Thirty-first Week in OrdinarFoy Time

 Lectionary: 487

My beloved, obedient as you have always been,
not only when I am present but all the more now when I am absent,
work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

During this season of "death and judgment, heaven and hell," we hear Saint Paul's encouraging and practical assessment of the challenge before us. He knows from his own history of innumerable trials that we must "work out (our) salvation with fear and trembling." 

The project before us is not a new interest, fad, or hobby. If anyone's coming to the Church is only an impulse of fascination or momentary curiosity, they should simply go away. We're very serious about our salvation and the Lord's mission. His agonizing death on a cross isn't something that happened a long time ago in a faraway galaxy. Our Baptism and Eucharist has made this story immediate, personal, and demanding. 

Many of us suffered greatly before we put away the old self of our former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires,. We saw the relief and joy of others who believed in the Lord, and we hoped we might be given the same opportunity. Nor did our putting on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth. (see Ephesians 4:22-24) come immediately or without a struggle. 

Our salvation was and remains a project worked out with fear and trembling in the presence of Almighty God and his Crucified Son, and in the company of the Sorrowful Mother and numberless martyrs. We know the old, discarded attitudes trail us like shadows, like Frodo's Sméagol. If the tempter left Jesus in the wilderness, Saint Luke tells us, it was only for a time; he would return. We are far beyond surprise when we discover the old "grumbling and questioning" occupying the place that should be occupied by the peace of Christ. These habits are far too familiar to surprise anyone.

We hear and take seriously the Lord's demand that we turn away from "father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even [our] own life." As important as these relationships are, we know, respect, and love them within and through the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Some of us had to sever those familial ties as we put on the new self, and were permitted to return to them only years later, with the assurance that we could not belong to them anymore. In many cases, we found that nothing had changed in that Godforsaken world. 

The Lord's parables of building a tower and defending a kingdom assure us that there will be cost overruns. If we cannot know what they are, we will pay them when the time comes. Following the Lord to Calvary will cost more than we expect, and demand more sacrifice than we were prepared to make. And we'll do it; we cannot turn back. 

Tuesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 486

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus...

As far as I can tell we hear this amazing song from Philippians only a few times each year: on Good Friday, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and (every other year) on this Tuesday, late in the liturgical cycle. 

And yet it is so important to our knowledge of Jesus and our calling as disciples of Jesus. We should have "the same attitude" which is humble in God's sight and before all people. 

Catholic theologians like Hans Ur von Balthazar find that the Lord's humility not only models our ideal behavior, it also reflects the life of the Holy Trinity. Just as Jesus obeys the Father in every way, so does the Father empty himself in total love for the Son. He has handed over to Jesus everything in heaven and on earth. The Holy Spirit likewise seems to disappear between the Father and the Son in their love for one another, and yet the Holy Spirit is their love. 

This doctrine of kenosis, the Greek word for emptying, reappeared in our preaching and teaching when Christian theologians disengaged themselves from the pointless feuding of "Protestant vs Catholic" and noticed what was happening elsewhere. Nations had become obsessed with power as they amassed globe-spanning empires and developed weapons to annihilate millions of human beings. Their doctrine of unlimited growth saps resources and starves nations. Their doctrine of "total war" include the killing of noncombatants, livestock, and natural resources along with the destruction of industries, hospitals, schools, markets, and homes. 

The all-powerful God of Christian worship has been eclipsed by the machinery of business and war. Only the corpse of a crucified man remains in silent testimony to the futility of power. They cannot see his resurrected body but they know it threatens their beliefs, practices. and hegemony.

Because of his complete surrender to the will of God, even to the point of dying on a cross. 

...God greatly exalted him

and bestowed on him the name

that is above every name,

that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue confess that

Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

Our faith must reflect Jesus's disavow of power, privilege, and security. If he would not call a dozen legions of angels to shield him from the mob in Gethsemane, we have little excuse for amassing weapons of mass destruction against our fellow earthlings, especially when a total war might destroy all human life on earth. Because we have heard the Lord's command to "Be not afraid" we cannot adopt the warlike attitude of frightened people. 

The faithful have not forgotten; we remember daily the One who would not do evil to do good, who saves us from the insult of sin and death by his own humiliation. 

Memorial of Saint Charles Borromeo, Bishop

Lectionary: 485

Rather, when you hold a banquet,
invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind;
blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.
For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.

You know that the Gospel is getting a bit personal when the honored guest starts teaching about hospitality right there in someone's house. You expect pleasant conversation with perhaps a few points of minor disagreement to keep things interesting. But not direct, unmistakable criticism. 

Shouldn't those remarks be said in the church, or perhaps the street? And not to your face and in your own home and across your table? But, as we back away from the story, we might admit this is the right moment and the right place for saying what needs to be said. 

If the Lord's suggestion in Luke 14 is over the top, the idea is quite doable though unimaginable to most people. Jesus calls for a type of generosity he has already described and promised in Luke 6:38,

Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.”

His assurance evokes the memory of the Hebrew sojourn in the Sinai desert. They were completely dependent upon the God who had remembered his promise to their ancestor Abraham and had delivered them out of Egypt with a mighty hand and outstretched arm. There he cared for them out of his superabundant generosity.. 

He also challenges us to... 

Put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts,

And see if I do not open the floodgates of heaven for you,

and pour down upon you blessing without measure!

I will rebuke the locust for you

so that it will not destroy your crops,

And the vine in the field will not be barren,

says the LORD of hosts.

All the nations will call you blessed,

for you will be a delightful land,

says the LORD of hosts. (Malachi 3: 10-12)

 

Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 152

Jesus replied, "The first is this:
Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God is Lord alone!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul, 
with all your mind,
and with all your strength.
The second is this:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

B ack in the 1970's and 80's some preachers and teachers added a third great commandment to the Lord's solemn pronouncement. They proclaimed, "You shall love yourself!" They had met a lot of people who seemed to loathe themselves, and they reasoned that you cannot love God or anyone else unless you love yourself first. 

Hello? When people got that message, they blew right past the first and second great commandments but excelled in the third. Loving themselves with God's go-ahead! they found they had no need to love anyone else, much less the same God who might not exist. They were really quite content; and "Whether I'm right, or whether I'm wrong, I gotta be me." I have been told on good authority that the most popular song for memorial services – and many Christian memorial services – in the United States is, Old Blue Eyes; "I did it my way." 

Others, agreeing that the second commandment is very important -- "Love your neighbor as yourself," -- insist that God does not need to be loved -- which is true -- and therefore we should not concern ourselves about the love of God. Humanism devotes itself to the love of fellow human beings, or animals, or the Earth.  And then burnout happens, and they realize their sacrifice is neither appreciated nor reciprocated. Their efforts to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless are poured into an ungrateful, bottomless abyss; they and their energies disappear without a trace. 

Our Christian, religious faith teaches us first to love God... 

with all your heart,

with all your soul, 

with all your mind,

and with all your strength.

That is, in some measure, we must reciprocate the superabundant love and mercy the Lord has shown to us. No one can outdo the generosity of God. And even our love for God is a gift he gives to us. We cannot begin to love God if he does not love us first; that is, if he had not poured out his Holy Spirit to awaken and enable our grateful reply.  Only in the unqualified, unlimited, unabashed love of God can we begin to love our neighbors as ourselves, or our unremarkable selves. 

That first Great Commandment encounters a powerful resistance in this world, not unlike that which Saint Michael encountered: 

Then war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels battled against the dragon. 

The dragon and its angels fought back, but they did not prevail and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The huge dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who deceived the whole world, was thrown down to earth, and its angels were thrown down with it. (Rev 12:7-9)

That last verse explains a lot of our distress: the serpent and its angels were thrown down to earth where we live. But we recognize the serpent, that old tempter who chatted with our Mother Eve there in the Garden. He's grown in size since then, and became a dragon; but his enormous power collapses at the name of Jesus. It is he who insists you should love yourself first and ignore the other commandments. 

November is upon us, that apocalyptic month when we contemplate "death and judgment, heaven and hell." These mysteries remind us that we are the people who live like our God in the past, the present, and the future. We do not forget who we are, where we are, or where we're going. We do not forget who once gave his life for us. We remember the one who still gives us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink during this apparently endless time of temptation. We do not forget the resurrection he enjoys, nor the company of the saints -- our spiritual ancestors -- who live with him in eternity. We keep faith with the past, we love in the present; and, remembering always God’s promise of everlasting life, we await a future of vindication and victory, of mercy and justice for all. 

The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls)

Lectionary: 668

If, then, we have died with Christ,
we believe that we shall also live with him.
We know that Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more;
death no longer has power over him.

GK Chesterton told a tale of a fellow, an expert shot, who routinely challenged those academics who professed no fear of death. These gentlemen had bought into the general cynicism and loss of faith of academia, and insisted that human life is meaningless. 

He'd hold a pistol to their face and watch them cower, beg for mercy, or flee. They'd suddenly discover an unfamiliar desire to live, deep, powerful, and compelling. His point: no one faces the futility of death and non-existence without fear; everyone wants to live, whether they can offer a reason to live or not.   

I have encountered other fictional characters in literature or film, who, finding no purpose in life, act fearlessly in the face of death. Action heroes fearlessly continue shooting amid a hailstorm of bullets because the TV show has another 25 minutes to go. 

Saint Paul and his fellow martyrs face death and act fearlessly out of their faith in the Lord who has embraced them and holds them. They can act with a kind of recklessness because, as he says, they have died with Christ and been raised up with him. Death no longer has power over them. 

Depending upon where you fall on the optimism/pessimism scale, you'll agree that we live in fearful times. But optimism is not hope; and pessimism is not despair. The Christian virtue of hope is a divinely-inspired response to God's promises. We cannot act hopefully without the Holy Spirit rousing us to respond to God's promises. When we hear deep in our hearts, "Remember, I am with you until the end of time." we are given the very confidence of the Risen Jesus who leads us to Jerusalem and Calvary and carries us through to Easter. 

That courage may cower with Jesus in Gethsemane but then rises in confident obedience to face this world's opposition. We find that courage in the stories of our Christian martyrs. Many persevered through prolonged and ferocious torment as their unshakable confidence in the Lord only grew more confident and defiant.  

If we optimistically expect we'll never be faced with martyrdom, we must nonetheless act hopefully -- that is, fearlessly -- in conversation with neighbors, friends, family, and strangers. Because we are holy people, we make sacrifices of time, treasure, and talent even as non-believers insist we should hold back and conserve our resources. We can do that because we know there's plenty where that came from. God has promised and God will provide. We simply ignore those foolish voices who say God has abandoned us, or there is no God. We know better. 

With the Commemoration of the Dead we give our loved ones over to the trustworthy hand of God. We pray with them and for them, for their eternal salvation and our own. We're confident they live in the Lord, and that we shall live with them in eternity. We practice the faith that has persisted these several thousand years, through optimistic and pessimistic times, because God does not fail. He cannot deny himself. 

Solemnity of All Saints

 Lectionary: 667

The reason the world does not know us
is that it did not know him.
Beloved, we are God's children now;
what we shall be has not yet been revealed.

On Tuesday I reflected on the hiddenness of God. I return to that thought on this Solemnity of All Saints. I refer to the frustrating fact that we can prove so little about God; everything we know of God relies on the Mystery who speaks in silence and shines in darkness. 

First, there are our beliefs about Jesus: 

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things came to be through him,

and without him nothing came to be.

None of that is obvious or demonstrable. That the Lord God of heaven and earth was born of a virgin and laid in a manger; that he was an exile in Egypt; homeless in Israel; died like a common criminal; has no grave; and finally disappeared like Elijah into the sky: these memories demonstrate the obscurity of the Object of our faith. (Elijah had least had the decency to be taken aloft in a fiery chariot with angelic horses, while Elisha and the guild prophets watched.) The whole story of Jesus is pretty ludicrous when you think about it, and we think about it often. Did anyone see his resurrection? And where exactly is his risen body anyway? 

Secondly, God's hiddenness is manifest in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, when the Lord is consumed by the devout under the forms of bread and wine. "Look at the humility of God!" Saint Francis shouted as he pointed to the Eucharist. Skeptics see nothing, while the devout bow down in worship. 

Finally, there is the hiddenness of God in the Church. We might be tempted to point, as proof of God's presence, to our cathedrals, basilicas, churches, and chapels ranged all over the world. (Many are neglected, collapsing, or in ruins.) And many of the grandest churches are architectural wonders, but -- again -- they prove nothing to skeptics. Our God is hidden; and is discovered only by faith. 

As we celebrate All Saints Day, we have only a few who measure up to the world's standards of greatness. Some, like Theresa of Calcutta, had their fifteen minutes of fame, but none have the instant, universal recognition of a Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, or Putin. 

Our Saints do their best work in silence and darkness, unnoticed and unrecognized. Like Jesus, they often withdraw to a deserted place to pray. They do not let their left hands know what their right hands are doing. And when we ask them about their mystical experiences of God -- expecting some wonderful stories because they are heroic after all -- they speak only of the dark night of the soul! Well, who needs that?

But All Saints Day is a great feast for us. We observe it (those who remember) as a holy day of obligation, and hope more than the usual suspects will appear for this weekday Mass. 

The Church does its best work in silence. The miraculous cures of organized religion are not often recognized by organized health care. Our prayers are not usually heard in the streets like the "thoughts and prayers" of the hypocrites. Our sacrifices are routine, often habitual, and are taken for granted. That's as it should be. 

Because, our Church with its many saints and innumerable sinners, is holy as the Lord our God is holy. 

Thursday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 482

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you,
how many times I yearned to gather your children together
as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,
but you were unwilling!

We sinners often prefer to sidestep or defer the truth, and this story of the Lord's grief as he approached Jerusalem is a case in point. Christians can miss the point entirely as they speculate about what God might "think" about the Jews -- as if God thinks in some kind of remotely recognizable human fashion. 

If we recognize Jesus's sadness and allow it to creep into our own souls we must recognize its origin in our own behavior. The Bible means nothing to us if we do not hear our own history -- our sinful attitudes and behaviors as well as our blessed compliance with God's sovereignty -- in the Old and New Testaments. 

Luke 4 describes the popular response to Jesus's inaugural address to the synagogue in Capernaum: 

All spoke highly of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They also asked, “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?”

But they could not stop and remain in their initial amazement at his gracious words; they had to go beyond amazement and begin questioning him. "Isn't this the son of Joseph? Who does he think he is? Coming in here all high and mighty, and telling us what to do and what's wrong with us!" 

The sinful mind is unwilling to stay in Eden but wants to ask irrelevant questions about the inexplicably, inexhaustibly beautiful. We are like "the woman [who] saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom." She did not remain in that wonderful state of wonder, but "took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it."

Saint Luke describes several people who model the right response to God's great works, 

All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds. And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart. Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told to them. (Luke 2:18-20)

Those three groups -- all who heard it, Mary, and the shepherds -- stilled their brains for a while. They let themselves be amazed and, "Let God be God." We call that contemplation. 

The invitation remains for us as we approach Jerusalem with the Lord, and as we feel his sadness. We remember the city's history of sin and our part in it. And then we are astonished by the promise of a New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven as beautiful as a bride prepared to meet her husband.