Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

 The Divine Arsonist
"I have come to set the wold on fire"--Jesus

         Today’s readings strike us as particularly harsh, especially the passage from Luke’s gospel (paralleled in Matthew) of family division and strife as a consequence of following Christ; how can this be good news? The old phrase, “No cross, no crown” comes to mind.

        Paul’s famous teaching about the kerygma, or preaching, of the cross proclaims “For the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs, and Greeks seek for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block, and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Geeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. . . . God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong . . .” (1 Corinthians 1:18, 21-25, 27).

      The separation of families, the most fundamental element of a stable society, and Jesus’ kerygma of an earth set on fire was a common ancient understanding of the “end times”, of preparation for divine judgment and, subsequently, deliverance and salvation.

Paul’s observes that “those who are perishing” see the cross as foolishness.  What a powerful observation!  A sign of “perishing” is dismissing the cross of Christ as foolish.  This superficial understanding can only be penetrated by faith because “the foolishness of God is wiser than men.”  Men see the destructiveness of fire, God sees what survives the fire, and redeems the ashes.

      The “cloud of witness” of which Paul writes in Hebrews, includes the great Fathers of our church who witness to this “baptism of fire”.  St. Cyril of Alexandria refers to the “fire of baptism” as the Holy Spirit.  St. Ambrose relates the image of Pentecost, with the Holy Spirit appearing like flames above the apostles.  Fire and water, two of the most basic elements, combined in our baptism to signify both the physical purity and spiritual purity of our initiation. Fire is also the sacrifice of martyrdom which is the ultimate test of our love; are we willing to die for the gospel of Christ?  Are we willing to lay down our life in our service to Christ?

      The wildfires that seem so destructive, and indeed destroy many homes, also have a natural function of renewal.  When fires clear the dead underbrush, they can cleanse a forest and actually help it to thrive.  When the fires are artificially delayed by well-intentioned firefighting, the undergrowth accumulates such that when there is a fire, say every fifty years, it burns so hot that it has lost its benefit and destroys the forest rather than helps it to thrive.  So it is in the spiritual life.  When one’s focus is to avoid suffering, to insulate one’s life from the “fire”,  when great suffering comes, we are ill-equipped to face it because we have not endured the suffering of lesser trials and temptations.  Our faith must be nurtured in our daily lives of more endurable sufferings and difficulties for the sake of our journey as ambassadors of God’s love to the world. We must learn early to find our refuge in God’s love among the community of the faithful, so that we can grow to find our refuge in God alone. Among all of this suffering, we are being directed into the embrace of God’s love in the crucified Christ, which delivers us to the resurrected life, the life of forest renewed after fire, of hope rather than despair, of a fire-born faith that can sustain the heat of loving our enemies and keeping the flame of faith alive in our hearts.

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

"Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me." (Ps. 138)

     I recall one of the stories of the Desert Fathers in which a young monk asks his spiritual father, his abba, why his prayers are so ineffective; he prays, but rarely gets what he asks for. The monk asks his disciple to take an old, dusty basket and bring him some water.  The disciple obliges, but gets no farther than a few steps before the basket leaks the entire contents of water out, and so he must return to refill it.  He does this several more times and soon realizes the futility of using the old basket to carry water.  He returns, sullen, unable to accomplish his abba's request.  He explains his great effort to try and keep the water secure, but that the basket will not hold the water.  His abba nods in agreement. He asks the disciple if he noticed anything different about the basket since he took it to the river.  The disciple says "Yes, it is now clean."  The abba says "Yes, it has been cleaned by the water passing through it while you were filling it. God answers our prayers by first purifying our hearts, not granting us our desires. Only a pure heart can say with faith, "Your will be done."
     What we usually mean by "God does not answer prayer" is "I didn't get what I asked for." For some Christians (and anyone in a fix), prayer can be little more than a spiritual ATM.  Not to discount the need to ask God for those things we need, and we desire, but all prayer should be with the proviso Jesus used in the Garden: "Not my will, but your will be done"(Luke 22).  If Jesus, who was in perfect communion with the Father, humbly submitted to his Father's will when scared, anticipating a gruesome death and feeling abandoned, how much more should we be willing to pray under the condition that it is God's will.
     In today's gospel reading from Luke, Jesus is asked how we are to pray, and Jesus follows up with the "Our Father"--a prayer not invented by Jesus but passed along from John the Baptist who taught his disciples a prayer from the wilderness. The Our Father can be used not simply as a text for our prayer, but is a small catechism on how to pray:

"Father hallowed be your name."
Prayer begins with acknowledging God as Father, or more accurately, Jesus uses the word abba---" daddy" to bring into sharp focus the intimacy with which we can approach God.  God is both supremely holy, but though Christ and the Holy Spirit, supremely accessible to us; we should begin every prayer not only with the awareness of God's holiness but with the great gratitude that we are, as St. Paul says,"heirs of God", God's children (God has no grandchildren).

"Your kingdom come."
Other gospels add "your will be done, etc..."  To first pray for God's kingdom is to honor Christ's central mission, to make the kingdom realized by his disciples, and to spread this grace to all. We must, as Thomas Merton wrote "will the will of God"; our prayer must first raise our consciousness to seek first the Kingdom before all else.  It is, as my spiritual father said many years ago to me, necessary "to pray for the Kingdom of God to come, not the Kingdom of Todd"!

"Give us each day our daily bread."
The "bread" is understood by biblical scholars to point to the Messianic banquet, the eschaton, the final culmination in history of the establishment of the Kingdom for all eternity.  The prayer asks for that realization to be daily; the eschaton isn't only historical, it is eternally present and accessible by grace. We should earnestly pray for this spiritually sustaining need as we realize the need for physical nourishment.

"Forgive us our sins for we forgive everyone in debt to us."
This part of the prayer isn't so much a quid pro quo as it is an admonition to be mindful of the need to avail ourselves of God's mercy so we can extend it as part of building up of the Kingdom.  We need to continue to seek God's merciful grace, not as a reward for forgiving others, but we need to seek God's grace so that we can forgive others. If we live in the gratitude of God's mercy to us, forgiveness can be genuine because it is an extension of the divine forgiveness of God. If this dynamic was working perfectly, I doubt we'd need to include it in our prayer, but it isn't, and we continue to find forgiveness tough at times; so, our focus ought to be seeking God's mercy for our lack of mercy towards others.  The "Jesus Prayer" is a great help: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner".  This ancient prayer, far from being self-abasing, abounds in the awareness of God's great mercy and our constant need of it.


"Do not subject us to the final test."
The Greek word used for "test" is peirasmos, which suggests the trials of the Messiah; the afflictions of the mission of Christ; it isn't suggesting that God is the source of our temptations (God never is the source of temptation--James 1:13).  We pray to be fortified in the life of trials for the sake of the Kingdom and that we might not "be subject"...or perhaps a better word would be "subjugated" to the final test---be overcome by our struggles.  Make no mistake, anyone seriously considering confronting the evil of the world would do well, to begin with, the evil in one's heart.  Satan rejoices in the self-righteous protester who can use an agenda of "social justice" to embitter the heart, and render it lifeless in the pursuit effectively hating one's enemies, but for a "good cause".  Real spiritual combat takes place in the recesses of one's heart, not on the street facing one's enemies.  Do you want to destroy your enemies?  Love them! Where is the enemy now?

The second part of the gospel sets up the short narrative of one who, because he was persistent in appealing to his friend got what he needed.  So "For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened". We need the persistence in prayer to cleanse our hearts like the water sifting through the dirty basket; it takes a lifetime of seeking and knocking to realize whom we sought was always with us, and the door has always been open.

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

"Mary has chosen the good part."

Both the parable of the Good Samaritan (last week) and today's story of Martha and Mary are unique to the Gospel of Luke. Preceding both these sections is Jesus' encounter with the scholar of the Law. In this encounter, Jesus' response connects us immediately to the scholar's question "Who is my neighbor?", and provides the foundation for a further meditation on the nature of Christian service in today's gospel account of Mary and Martha. 
     Luke's gospel uniquely combines "Love the Lord your God..." with "Love your neighbor" to be a single expression of what is the greatest commandment; it is the great Commandment of Love.  In the other two gospels, "Love your neighbor" is appended to the first admonition "Love the Lord your God..." as being like the first; Luke makes them identical, which is characteristic of Luke's gospel ethic of loving the least and the last as manifesting the Kingdom.  The parable of the Good Samaritan clearly develops this theme, but on its heels comes the story of Mary and Martha, which attenuates the missionary zeal of "good works" with the realization that the Kingdom made manifest develops from the Kingdom within.  In short, true hospitality begins at the feet of the guest rather than in the kitchen.
     What does hospitality have to do with justice? So often those dedicated to the pursuit of justice for the poor proceed with hatred rather than love and seek to define the needs of the poor rather than first listening and understanding the needs of the poor. It is easier to organize a march than listen to the poor; experiencing the poverty of my neighbor does not lead me to hate the rich, but should lead me to understand better my connection to their impoverishment. 
    So too does Jesus admonish Martha not to stop what she is doing, but avoid being contemptuous of Mary, who has done the right thing: first listening to the one who is being welcomed.  Genuine hospitality is connected to justice because before "restoring" what has been lost, the true servant endeavors to discover what the guest needs.  William Sloan-Coffin, a great Christian and proponent of social justice, remarked that "The Bible is less concerned with alleviating the effects of injustice than in eliminating the causes of it."
   Christian action must, necessarily, spring from a profound connection to a sense of personal grace experienced as an encounter with the Word, Jesus Christ. Our non-profits, acts of charity and political action committees must spring from this core reality of orienting ourselves as servants towards those we serve first, or we risk becoming jaded do-gooders whose mission to accomplish something worthwhile is done on the backs of those we deem impediments to our mission statements.
     If we truly desire to serve the poor and seek justice for the oppressed, it cannot begin on the streets with signs, but it should start at the foot of the Christ, in the heart of Mary, the listening servant.

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Is Your Faith a Wall or a Door?

"The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love"(Gal.5:6).

     Every Christian will likely recount when he or she the made the conscious decision to follow Christ.  Some of the stories are quite dramatic, the classic sinner to saint repentance; these are narratives of great clarity and inspiration.  However, not many of us have had such conversions.  Most conversions could be likened to an extended dating between couples, when at some point total commitment becomes imperative.  For us Catholics, that is usually Confirmation.
     The calling of Elisha in 1Kings and Jesus' call in Luke provide a couple of notable differences as outlined by theologian Reginald Fuller. Elisha's call was not the complete abandonment of his life, but rather an added responsibility to serve God as prophet.  Jesus' call was absolute and urgent.  One had to immediately respond to the desire to follow Christ and completely ("No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God"-Lk.9:62).  Another important difference noted by Fuller was that Elisha was not called to follow Elijah, but to succeed him as prophet.  Jesus' disciples were not called to replace him, or even to succeed him, as much as continue to be led by him through the presence of the Spirit. Despite the tendency to set up structures of hierarchy and obedience in the institutional Church, every Christian from Pope to the most despised criminal who hears God's voice is accountable to Christ. We all minister as servants, but possess the baptized nature of priest, prophet and king for the mission.
     As we continue in our reading of St.Paul's letter to the Galatians, he negotiates the concept of the nature of our freedom in Christ in responding to our call.  Paul uses the highly-charged terms flesh and spirit.  In this context, Paul uses the term flesh to mean our human natures---instinctual and rational (lower and higher, respectively), not the carnal appetite alone as so many misread. Spirit is capitalized and refers to the Holy Spirit.  Paul associates this "flesh nature" as that which seeks to justify oneself before God in following rules and thus meriting justification; rather, Paul speaks of being led by the Spirit.  The Spirit is liberation from law, from the futility of realizing righteousness through observance of rules of spiritual discipline (Law) alone.  As Christ came "not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it, so Paul preaches freedom from finding righteousness in the Law in declaring that "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love". The Spirit releases us not from practicing the Law, but from the necessity of finding salvation through observance of the Law. 
     Our calling is to a relationship with a living God through Christ.  We don't have to abandon the Law, but it must serve, first and foremost, the chief commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.  Jesus adds the ethical necessity of expressing this love "and your neighbor as yourself".  Paul's "only thing that counts" is our inherent freedom from placing observance before relationship; relationship always comes first, and that is why faith and discernment and connection to a community of professed believers is essential.  In seeking God, we seek Him as a community of believers.
     Faith, misunderstood as short-sighted obedience to rules rather than relationship, is a wall to our spiritual life and prevents us from accessing God's love and grace.  As Paul writes in Romans about the futility of this struggle: "For what I want to do I do not, but what I hate I do".  He is speaking of the futility of overcoming our "flesh" without the Spirit---reaching God by rules rather than by responding to a direct overture of God through Christ.  For it is in this relationship in the Spirit that Paul proclaims "...if you are led by the Spirit you are no longer under the Law".  To be "under" the Law means that to be "walled in" by the Law, prevented by the Law--The Wall.  The Spirit is the door Christ opened in his sacrifice, and we are asked to step through it.  Liberation can be a scary thing, though, because it is not possible to always know the nature of this transformation, where it will lead once we are committed. But that is the nature of faith. Consider the words of St. Paul: All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything (1Cor. 13:17).

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Hill of Crosses in Lithuania

"Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ"  Gal. 6:2

     The Old Testament reading in Zechariah has been understood by Christians in two distinct ways as exemplified in John 19:37 as the one "pierced" alluding to Jesus, while Revelation 1:17 uses this image of being pierced as referring to the suffering of the ungodly in Christ's Second Coming and subsequent judgement (Parousia).  These two seemingly divergent allusions work together in our understanding of our salvation journey as a pilgrim church, a people on the way.
     Today's gospel event in Luke comes on the heels of Jesus feeding the five thousand and leads to Jesus' questioning the disciples as to who people think he must be. After a litany of prophets, Peter's confession that Jesus was "the Christ of God" suggests Jesus' identity as a servant Messiah (he just got done feeding people!) rather than the ruler Messiah, and reveals Jesus as anointed of God rather than anointed by a prophet of God. The direct and close association is unmistakable and eventually becomes the inchoate understanding of Jesus as God in the Trinity.  Jesus' admonition not to reveal this understanding springs from the need to complete his mission by the ultimate expression of his servant-mission of healing: to give his life in perfect obedience to a love-stricken God.  This love is brought to perfection in Christ's sacrificial love; Christ's mission could only be finally understood, and the Messiah revealed, after the crucifixion and subsequent resurrection.
     As Zechariah is bringing the hope of Messiah, Jesus fulfills this great hope from engendering faith that God's love transforms crucifixion to resurrection.  Jesus living and walking among humanity was God's great presence among his creation, or a parousia, which is Greek for "presence". Jesus was God's presence among his people.  The Parousia (capital P) references Christ's second coming in Christianity, but also connects with a key word in Luke's gospel: daily.  Luke and Matthew write from the identical source material (Mark and an unknown document, Q); however, unlike Matthew's account, Luke has Jesus telling his disciples that anyone who wishes to follow him must "take up his cross daily."  It is in this word that we make the connection to the Parousia allusion from Zechariah recorded in Revelation, but instead of Christ return at the end of time, the daily parousia is our mission.
     In this sense, we make present Christ as we "take up our cross".  We know there is no shortage of crosses.  Very often we look to some immediate burden we didn't ask for as our cross, but I would like to suggest we look beyond the crosses we bear not by choice and the single cross we are asked to bear.  After all, Christ didn't say we must take up our crosses, but rather our cross. The cross of Christ is the cross of our neighbor.
    Paul, in Galatians, references "bearing the burden" of others as that which fulfills the law of Christ.  What is the law of Christ?  Jesus' commandment to love one another. When we bear the burden of our neighbor, the loving presence of Christ is made present.  Parousia is made real now, not some distant time in the future, and what brings people to worship God no longer is fear of being slung into hell, but the experience of the awe-filled experience of God's love. Christ's ultimate judgment in the Parousia may not fall on those who refuse to believe or live lives of dissipation but rest most heavily on those who know Christ but refuse to love.
  

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

The Heart of Grace: Love

Christian grace is the undeserved favor of God towards us; we don’t deserve God’s love because of what we have achieved, the good we have done.  God loves us because he desires communion with us.  In other words, God’s love exists independent of our actions, or even of our awareness of Him.  As we respond to this love over time, this becomes our story of salvation.  Christ’s death and resurrection was God’s greatest act of love, “for no one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for a friend”(John 15:13).  We are the friends of God when we show our love for one another; this is God’s “command” expressed in Jesus’ great command, but more importantly, revealed in his actions. It's not so much "What would Jesus do", but rather "What did Jesus do?"

In today’s reading from 1 Samuel, Nathan, the prophet who succeeded Samuel, helped David face his great sin of abusing his power by taking his loyal friend’s wife as his secret lover while his friend was away at war fighting for Israel.  How does one tell a king he is a great sinner effectively?  He does it with a story.  Likewise, Jesus in today’s gospel tells a story of the Pharisee, Simon.  In both instances, a painful truth had to be communicated, and because both King David and Simon had a sense of God’s love, Nathan and Jesus used parable rather than condemnation to reveal the need for repentance.

Jack Kavanaugh, a Jesuit scholar aptly observes that “Our resistance to repentance parallels our resistance to love. If we experience ourselves unable to trust fully that God could love us unconditionally, the indirect method of parables sometimes is the most efficient strategy to help us accept the mystery of our redemption.”

Paul, likewise, recounted his salvation in sharing a story, not providing a scholarly treatise on grace. He recounts God’s love revealed to him while he was persecuting the Church,  

"how I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it, and progressed in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my race, since I was, even more, a zealot for my ancestral traditions. But when God, who from my mother’s womb had set me apart and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me,  so that I might proclaim him to the Gentiles…."

We witness to the truth of God’s love by striving to love one another as God loves us.  This is our liberation from the Law.  It isn’t that we can just disregard the commandments of God as revealed in earlier times (we can’t simply commit adultery by claiming not to be bound by the Law), but rather we fulfill the Law in loving one another as we have been loved by God.

Our confronting the sinners in this world begins not with condemnation, but with the story of our graced lives.  We share our table with sinners because we all have sinned and fallen short of meriting God’s favor. We gather to worship not because we are saints, but because we are sinners striving for sainthood.

Third Sunday after Pentecost

Do This in Remembrance of Me

Today’s readings from the Old Testament and the gospels seem to focus on the miracle of resurrecting the dead; Elijah in 1Kings and Jesus in the Gospel of Luke are both miracle workers.  To be sure, these readings do deal with resurrection, but the resurrection of the two dead sons is only temporary.  In time, these young men will again succumb to death as does every human.  What, then, is the author of Luke and 1 Kings trying to get us to understand?

Each story is really begins around a mother’s experience of abandonment by her son’s death.  In 1 Kings, the mother who has hosted Elijah the prophet is filled with anguish believing that the prophet’s visit has brought God’s retribution upon her for some undisclosed sin by killing her only son.  Likewise, in Luke, the widow’s son has passed away and the woman is now alone.  The widow-mother in 1 Kings laments to Elijah

“Why have you done this to me, O man of God?
Have you come to me to call attention to my guilt
and to kill my son?” 

The phrase “to call attention” is more literally translated “to bring my sin to remembrance”(RSV). The Greek phrase for remembrance is key; the word is anamesis and suggests more than bringing up a past thought.  The word carries with it the connotation of bringing a past reality to the present---resurrecting an old wound of an undisclosed sin.  Elijah immediately passes the buck and blames God, but he also pleads “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again”.  The boy is resurrected and the story ends with the widow joyfully announcing:  “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.” This realization is the crux of the story, and the concept of "word" is crucial.  The Hebrew notion of "word", dabar suggests the “word-action” of God.  The same essential meaning of the Greek logos of John’s gospel that created the world.  God’s word brings life, not death.

In the literal rendering of this story the truth could be easily eclipsed by focusing on the extraordinary event of the raising of the dead. The truly eternal life, though, is the revitalization of the widow’s faith that God’s love is real and present in her world, now, through the prophet's "mouthing" the "word".  In Luke, Jesus’ deep seated compassion for the widow brought her son back to life, but also gave the woman the eternal gift of hope and trust in God’s goodness.  The proclamation that “God has come to help his people” is the crowds response, not unlike the widow’s in 1 Kings. Both stories turn on the faithful response of God's chosen ones (Elijah and Jesus).  Would that each person you meet recall the encounter with such joy!

Each Sunday we participate in an “anamesis” in the memorial of the Mass when we proclaim: “Christ has died.  Christ has risen.  Christ will come again””.  These phrases engender hope in the faithful.  For as St. Paul reminds us “If we have died with Christ, then we shall live with Christ”.  They can be an occasion for us to participate in the Thanksgiving that is called Eucharist, as we recall the crucifixions Christ has raised us from, so we can secure the hope of Christ's coming into the lives of so many who wait patiently for hope.

We too share in some part of the vulnerability of the widows when we can’t see God’s will in the mess of our lives, in its pain and seemingly arbitrariness of destruction.  This “widow’s soul” of feeling vulnerable and abandoned is like a great beacon for God and the faithful.  In our grief, God’s great compassion is at work around us like God’s call to Elijah, and Jesus’ profound feeling of compassion.  It is precisely when we feel abandoned that we need to draw near to our community, the Church, and the Mass.  Christ’s healing sacrificial power made present at every Mass begins this great healing and salvation. Never underestimate the power of the faithful’s gratitude in being able to work God’s great healing power in our lives.