First Sunday of Lent

 Follow Me.  I Know the Way Out.

Hunger, powerlessness, and inadequacy are the weak spots Jesus struggled with.  We often focus on the battle and Jesus’s subsequent victory and overlook the temptation of the desert itself.

For us, going into the desert for forty days would involve a backpack full of food and an ample supply of water. Jesus had no such store of supplies. He was alone and fasting.  Fasting allowed him to experience need.  On a deeper level, Jesus experiences the profound understanding that, though the Son of God, he needs other people and that centering one’s life around physical desires is a great deprivation (Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God). Bread is a figure for the communion of friendship and community. This deprivation of human contact is a crucial part of his “desert experience”. He could turn those rocks to bread, but he would eat alone. Notice Satan does not want to give Jesus bread (communion) he simply is tempting Jesus to assuage his physical hunger.

 Jesus’s next vulnerability was his feeling of powerlessness.  Exploiting this, Satan offers Jesus complete domination over the world’s countries in exchange for devotion.  Look at what being submissive to God had gotten him: hunger pangs and loneliness. Milton’s Satan would have whispered into Jesus’ ear: “Better to rule in hell than serve in Heaven”.  He replies to Satan, quoting again from Deuteronomy: “You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.”   How often our fear of being powerless leads us to believe that getting power is the answer rather than seeking the Kingdom and serving God. Too often, even “good causes” can become soiled with the ego of creating a utopia.

 The final temptation came in a form quite unlike all the others.  It was the showdown.  In the desert of despair, with no visible sign of God’s presence and Satan close at hand, the desire to experience God’s care and concern in some manifestation becomes Jesus’ greatest vulnerability.  Just give me a sign of your love!  Everyone feels this, especially when things are not going well.  Satan’s answer was to call God’s hand and turn Jesus’ test into God’s test.  Now it is Satan who is quoting Scripture:

“He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,”
and “With their hands, they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”

Satan quotes from Psalm 91, and Jesus responds with a third passage from Deuteronomy: You shall not put your Lord God to the test”.  The very source of his reasoning---Holy Scripture—was turned against him.  How often do foes of God’s love and unconditional grace bend scripture to turn it from a source of healing love to a weapon? 

This round of Bible Darts over, Satan departs “for a time” suggesting that the tenacity of Satan grows, not diminishes, with defeat.  Being holy and being hounded has a long tradition of being paired. But like Jesus, we may be for a time in the desert; however, simply because the journey gets tough doesn’t mean we walk it alone.  At every turn, the community, animated by the Spirit, joins us and reminds us that we follow Christ into the desert. Consider the well-known story among those in recovery from addiction:

A man had fallen into a pit and could not escape. The first person who passes by offers him comforting words and moves on. The second person writes a prayer for the man, drops it into the pit, and also leaves. The third person jumps into the pit with the man. Astonished, the man in the pit yells, “How is this supposed to help?! Now we are both stuck here.” The man replies, “Yes. But I have been down here before, and I know the way out”.  

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

 

Fishermen or Fishers-of-Men?

        I wonder how many of us have felt as Simon Peter did in today’s gospel when he complains “Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing . . . .”  Hard work never guarantees success.  In fact, Peter had lent Jesus the use of his boat as a platform for preaching because the crowds along the shore grew so large.  He did this after a long night of unsuccessful fishing. But Peter’s comment that began with despair ended with “…but at your command, I will lower the nets.”  What faith!  Jesus wasn’t even a fisherman!  Of course, the story ends with the boat being almost swamped with fish, to the extent that other boats needed to assist in recovering the catch.  Jesus remarks that he will make them “fishers of men.” Peter and the two brothers James and John left their nets to follow Jesus.  What a remarkable morning, and what a remarkable insight into our life in Christ.

            Our calling is not us to success, but is to a life of faith, to paraphrase Mother Teresa of Calcutta.  Just as last week’s gospel suggested a path of “seeking” rather than “building” the Kingdom of God, this week’s gospel suggests obedience to Christ over obedience to tradition, because tradition wants to use the status quo to reference the past to guide the future. The Spirit, on the other hand, wants to use the energy and drive of the present to work with God to create the future: “Behold, I am doing something new” (Isaiah 43:19).  What propels us forward in the life of faith isn’t concerned with success, but responsiveness to a lover---God loves us!  We are called to a living, dynamic relationship, where God is asking us to be a part of His creating acts.

            Too often our evangelical efforts to be good news become subject to cost-benefit analysis, but such a model is foreign to a God who courts His creation and actively seeks communion with us who, like the priest of Isaiah proclaims

Woe is me, I am doomed!
For I am a man of unclean lips,
living among a people of unclean lips;
yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!

What can we do when we have experienced God’s great grace and love and realize we are no worthier than the rest of humanity to merit God’s favor? We love others as God has loved us. We see God’s universal love poured out, in the elegant words of William Sloane Coffin “…universally for everyone from Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet. . . .”(Credo). In this model of love, we don't love from fear or shame, but from the awesome realization of being loved.

            The conversion of the fishermen to fishers-of-men didn’t begin with Jesus excoriating them but loving them.  It was from that grace-filled love that Peter and the priest in Isaiah dropped to their knees Too often the church shames people to their knees; however, God's universal love doesn't send the faithful to their knees out of shame, but out of awe.

            The message to the Church is clear: put out into the deeper waters of grace and stop messing around in the tide pools of shame. 

Third Sunday after Epiphany

 

Got Good News?

Luke's gospel puts Jesus' declaring his mission at the beginning:

“He has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free . . . .”

Jesus proclaims good news, like Ezra standing before the people who have become disheartened at the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple after returning from captivity in Babylon. Ezra, the great priest who inspired the rebuilding of the Temple in fifty days after returning to Jerusalem from being held captive in Babylon, reads from the writings of Moses (probably Deuteronomy) as a way to energize a dis-spirited people returning from exile only to find their homeland in ruins.  From this and with Nehemiah's leadership, the Temple is rebuilt in an amazing act of the community like Americans experienced immediately after 9/11.  Rebuilding the Temple was a metaphor for rebuilding a relationship with God through their tradition; it was the proto-Good News of the gospels.

After a week contemplating (celebrating?) Christian unity, Paul's letter to the Corinthians strikes me as good news as well; so in today's readings we have Ezra proclaiming good news, Jesus proclaiming good news, and Paul writing to the church at Corinth of unity that, if taken to heart, is certainly good news for such a difficult group of relatively wealthy, first-century Christians.

Got Good News?

Luke's gospel puts Jesus' declaring his mission at the beginning:

“He has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free . . . .”

Jesus proclaims good news, like Ezra standing before the people who have become disheartened at the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple after returning from captivity in Babylon. Ezra, the great priest who inspired the rebuilding of the Temple in fifty days after returning to Jerusalem from being held captive in Babylon, reads from the writings of Moses (probably Deuteronomy) as a way to energize a dis-spirited people returning from exile only to find their homeland in ruins.  From this and with Nehemiah's leadership, the Temple is rebuilt in an amazing act of the community like Americans experienced immediately after 9/11.  Rebuilding the Temple was a metaphor for rebuilding a relationship with God through their tradition; it was the proto-Good News of the gospels.

After a week contemplating (celebrating?) Christian unity, Paul's letter to the Corinthians strikes me as good news as well; so in today's readings we have Ezra proclaiming good news, Jesus proclaiming good news, and Paul writing to the church at Corinth of unity that, if taken to heart, is certainly good news for such a difficult group of relatively wealthy, first-century Christians.

Often, the reason why people don't react with overwhelming enthusiasm for the Gospel is that very often the promise of liberation, and of healing---two essential elements of Jesus' ministry come at the cost of realizing you are not well (or at the very least, not fit), and you are essentially a "dis-eased" by sin.  Want the good news now?  Some have characterized this realization as the "good news-bad news" of the Gospel.  While I believe that humility is essential for spiritual growth, the big mistake of much evangelization is that the Gospel is presented as a tool of humiliation rather than healing. There are essentially two models of evangelization I've witnessed in my life:

1. Evangelization as Persuasion to Join
2. Evangelization as Acts of Selfless, Healing Love

Jack London in his non-fiction work "People of the Abyss" wanders the streets of early 20th century London to gain insight into the plight of the poor.  He finds himself hungry and drawn to seek help from a Christian organization that provides food at the cost of standing for what seems like an eternity listening to a sermon, the "Good News" while hunger pangs persist, before being fed.  Essentially, the idea behind this rather misguided attempt at proclaiming Good News is that one must be fed spiritually before being fed physically; classical Christian fail.  Good News must be good news.

God becoming human is at the heart of all Christian understandings of true evangelization.  Because of this central truth, what we, purveyors of Good News must accept, is that meeting the immediate need of the one who seeks our help is the Good News of the Gospel.  Opening soup kitchens to increase church membership, planting tracts with a handy three-step process of "accepting Christ as your Lord and Savior" are all variations of meeting people where you would like them to be rather than where they are. The power of Christ to change lives is betrayed when we expect conversion as the end product of our help.  The old adage "let go and let God" is appropriate in these circumstances.  As evangelical Christians (there really are no other types, I suppose), the Good News is that true salvation does not lie at the conclusion of a tract, a testimonial, or a creed; it lies at the bottom of a bowl of soup.

Jack London in his non-fiction work "People of the Abyss" wanders the streets of early 20th century London to gain insight into the plight of the poor.  He finds himself hungry and drawn to seek help from a Christian organization that provides food at the cost of standing for what seems like an eternity listening to a sermon, the "Good News" while hunger pangs persist, before being fed.  Essentially, the idea behind this rather misguided attempt at proclaiming Good News is that one must be fed spiritually before being fed physically; classical Christian fail.  Good News must be good news.

God becoming human is at the heart of all Christian understandings of true evangelization.  Because of this central truth, what we, purveyors of Good News must accept, is that meeting the immediate need of the one who seeks our help is the Good News of the Gospel.  Opening soup kitchens to increase church membership, planting tracts with a handy three-step process of "accepting Christ as your Lord and Savior" are all variations of meeting people where you would like them to be rather than where they are. The power of Christ to change lives is betrayed when we expect conversion as the end product of our help.  The old adage "let go and let God" is appropriate in these circumstances.  As evangelical Christians (there really are no other types, I suppose), the Good News is that true salvation does not lie at the conclusion of a tract, a testimonial, or a creed; it lies at the bottom of a bowl of soup.

The Second Sunday after Epiphany

 

“Everyone serves the good wine first,
and then when people have drunk freely an inferior one;
but you have kept the good wine until now.”

One thing that strikes me as odd in this parable, aside from turning water into wine, is that Jesus associates new wine with superior wine.  Everyone knows newer wine is inferior to wine that has had time to ferment and age.  Why, then, is this “new wine” Jesus has transformed from water superior?

The account is that the head server tasted the newly created wine, not knowing its source, and declared it superior.  Had he been told this wine was just created a few minutes ago, he would have probably not even tasted it, confident in its inferior quality.

As Jesus’ first recorded “sign”, which is the terminology John uses rather than “miracle”, its significance lies in its link to Jesus’ passion.  In verse 4, Jesus responds rather strangely to Mary’s revelation that the wine has run out with “Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.”  Jesus implies that his only concern is with the fulfillment of his mission, and the miracle becomes a sign of this mission of transformation.

At the level of symbol, the water—the fundamental association being humanity—is transformed into wine, the symbol associated with divinity.  In the Mass, the priest says as he pours the water into the wine: “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity”.  This symbolic act is charged with Christ’s mission to “divinize” humanity, to use an Orthodox term.  The forming of God into our human existence wasn’t so much the humanization of God, but the divinization of humanity; God didn’t need to experience us, we needed to experience God.

This “in-breaking” of divinity into our world as God who martyred Himself for His people out of love is the great sign and pathway to our divinization.  If we wish to follow Christ, we must be caught up in a life of sacrificial love.  In a world full of martyrs who blow themselves up for a political cause masked by pseudo-religion hobbled by hatred, God’s martyrdom was borne of perfect love that sought not the destruction of sinners but their salvation.

The “old wine” now becomes the wine of hatred of the other--- whatever the label: sinner, infidel, terrorist.  The “new wine” is the transformation of this self-seeking love of tribe, of country, of religion over that of neighbor to be transformed into a love that seeks out the other in an act of selfless love.  Jesus’ miracle at the wedding resonates with Isaiah’s imagery of God’s people as the bride, God as supreme lover---the promise that “As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride so shall your God rejoice in you.”  

            The great revelation of the Gospel is the good news that God’s love is the counter-intuitive truth that the new wine is superior to the old.  Behold, God is doing something new!

 

"This is my beloved Son, with Whom I am well pleased"

            It is easy to treat today’s Baptism of the Lord as an historical feast.  Indeed, there are good historical reasons to believe Jesus was baptized by John since there has always been a controversy between the Christians and “Baptists”(those who continued to follow John the Baptist) over this event; however, what is at work in today’s readings is connected with epiphany, God’s healing presence in the world shown in Jesus. God acts through Jesus and is therefore made manifest to the world.

            In the scripture reading from Isaiah, we learn of the servant-messiah.  Jesus, as this servant-messiah, will extend God’s covenant between his chosen as “a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.”  Jesus’ baptism is a mandate of healing and a drawing together of the nations. In Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, which was originally a second part of the Gospel of Luke, it is God acting through Jesus, not Jesus simply obeying orders from on high; Jesus is in perfect relationship with the Father, and his life among us brings God’s blessings. This gives us a crucial insight as to what it means to be a follower of Christ.

            To follow Christ is more than an imitation of Jesus’ actions; it is a call to a deepening relationship with God the Father.  As Christians, we must become animated with God’s love for humanity, and that animation is only possible through God’s Holy Spirit.  As apprentices in our spiritual journey, we begin like all good apprentices: by imitation. We learn to love, to heal and represent ourselves as ethical and moral people with a high calling, but this is not our end.  Our end is perfect communion with God.  What we imitate in Christ goes beyond his actions on earth and focuses on his relationship with the Father.  It is only from this fuller communion with God the Father that our true vocation as Christians is being fulfilled.  While living a life based on high moral and ethical standards is important, the much more enduring significance of Jesus’ baptism resides in coming into full communion with God the Father from whom we have been estranged since Eden.

            This need for a deeper, fuller communion is achieved only through prayer and God’s grace received in the Spirit.  That is why baptism is so essential; it invites the Holy Spirit to enable this essential communion.  To put it a different way, Thomas Merton, a monk, and mystic wrote that the Christian must do more than simply do the will of God.  He or she must will the will of God.  We cannot have this deeper communion without the Holy Spirit and the baptism that bestows upon us the calling to move beyond imitation and to manifest God to the world as Jesus made God known to the world.

Fourth Sunday of Advent

 “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”

Mary believed the words of the angel.  She didn’t demand proof, sign a contract to cover all reasonable contingencies in case the whole mother-of-the-Messiah thing didn’t work out.  Her response to the word: “May it be it done to me according to your word.” In our faith, we have Jesus as the Word--the embodiment of God as human—Emmanuel, “God with us”. 

We also have the word of holy scripture that is our link to the living tradition of our brothers and sisters in faith, used by the Church as a tool of furthering the inspiration of the original community of believers. Unlike Mary’s time, we are overwhelmed with words.  It is estimated that nearly 300 million books will have been published this year alone!  That doesn’t include the words of advertising spoken on television, splashed across computer screens, covering bus shelters, billboards, and car bumpers.  It is hard to set your eyes on an object that doesn’t ask you to read something.  We are awash in more words than at any other time in history, yet we seem to have less and less to say. 

Cutting through this clutter is one righteous quest to enter the Christmas season that begins Saturday. In today’s gospel, John the Baptist as an infant still inside Elizabeth, responds to Elizabeth’s hearing of Mary’s greeting.  This chain of events reveals something important about how we exist in relationship to God and to one another.  

 Since baptism, each of us has been comforted, protected, educated by, and imbued with the presence of the Holy Spirit residing within us.  Like Mary and Elizabeth, pregnant with promise and God’s Spirit, our bond with God and one another is powerful. Our spiritual journey of Advent, distinct from Lent, is essentially communal—we prepare as a community, much the way both Elizabeth and Mary were in a strong bond of having received and believed God’s promise.  Each gave birth to the fulfillment of that promise, but also had to be sustained by it because of the difficulty to remain faithful during the rough times ahead for each woman.

We receive the Word if we are open to its life within us as a community who listens, who is attentive to God's promises.  Holy Scripture can only become Word through the ministry of the Holy Spirit and our willingness to, like Mary, have it transform our lives.  With Mary, our faith-filled response is "May it be done to me according to your Word".

All Saints and All Souls

 

"Hope Never Disappoints" St. Paul, Rom. 5:5

     Paul’s powerful declaration is one of the most powerful statements, in my opinion, that he makes among all the letters of his that we have. It is a bold statement that someone who has lost hope can sneer at as being hopelessly inept, naïve, and somewhat insulting.

     Today, our celebration of All Saints and All Souls is all about hope.  Jesus, in comforting his disciples for his impending death proclaims “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid”(Jn.14:27). The peace of Christ is a supernatural gift; it doesn’t come under our control and use. It is bestowed upon us by God through Christ. Our hope then is founded on this supernatural trust in Christ’s peace. It is a peace that does not shelter us from the world’s tempests and changes, it is a place where we can stand in the midst of turmoil and still have hope.

     Henri Nouwen, the great spiritual writer, observes that “…hope born of faith becomes matured and purified through difficulty. The surprise we experience in hope, then, is not that, unexpectedly, things turn out better than expected. For even when they do not, we can still live with a keen hope. The basis of our hope has to do with the One who is stronger than life and suffering. Faith opens us up to God’s sustaining, healing presence. A person in difficulty can trust because of a belief that something else is possible. To trust is to allow for hope”(Turn my Mourning into Dancing).

     One very real sign of our hope is our prayers today to and for the ones we love, and who have died, that for them and for us death is not a final separation, but only a delay that calls for hope in the Resurrection. A resurrection that plays out each day in the setting and rising of the sun; in the seasons that move from the birth of spring to the death of winter, and again to the birth of new growth; in the healing sacrament of reconciliation where death is sown in our sins and resurrection happens through forgiveness, and in Christ’s victory over death. All around us, God’s abundant love is present and anchors us in the sure hope of the resurrection.