The Heart of the Matter

The secret and lie of self-justification

I saw a terrific movie the other night.  It's a 1995 film, but it's still powerful.  It’s called Secrets and Lies and it’s about a back woman in London who goes seeking for her birth mother. It turns out that the birth mom is a white woman.  The discovery of each other is traumatic and the white mom’s family is saturated in secrets and lies that leave all of the family members at odds with each other.  To make the story short, the breaking of the secret about the black family member opens up a righting of all of the family relationships.  Why?  Because the light of truth breaks open the secrets and lies and produces reconciliation all through the family.

            Our Scriptures today attack a very common secret and lie; and I hope our shining some light on this secret and lie will produce a righting of our relationships with God and with each other.

            What, then, is this very common secret and lie?  To put it in Scriptural terms the secret and lie is that we really, in our heart of hearts, think that we are justified by our works and not by our faith.

            What does this Scriptural term mean?  The secret self-deception many of us operate by is that we really think our salvation comes from our being a good person.  That, my friends, is justification by works, which is no justification at all.  If we, in our heart of hearts think that being a good person is all that we need worry about, then we have missed the boat.  There have been good and decent people since time immemorial.  Think of Noah, or Job, or Abraham and Sarah, or Moses.  If being decent is all that God asks of us, then why on earth did Jesus come among us?  Even more radically, can you see that settling for being decent is a broadside against the necessity of Jesus dying on the cross for our salvation?

            Do you see that being convinced of our own goodness is an act of self deception?  How far in life do we have to get before we realize that being convinced of our own goodness is a deception?  

            Jesus did not die on the cross to make us feel like self-satisfied do-gooders!  He has something far greater in mind for us.  We are to be His presence in the world.  We are to be fed weekly by the Word of God and the Body and Blood of Christ so that we can go out into our world and be the healing, forgiving, challenging presence of Christ.  He has called us to be His justice in the world, righting the wrongs and solving the injustices that plague humanity. 

The Gospel is meant to comfort those who are in trouble and to trouble those who are comfortable.

Resting on our being nice people, or being decent people, or even being genuinely good people is simply not enough.  The chief command of the Lord is to believe in Him and then to put that belief into practice.  There is a curse for those who do not follow the command of the Lord and the curse is a sense of self-justification, which is no justification at all.  That kind of justification is a secret lie that leaves the family of God in sapped of its strength.  Real strength comes from Jesus Christ and the power of His Spirit working within us. 

            This is the justification that comes by faith, not by works.  It’s not our good deeds that make us be in a right relationship with God.  It’s our faith in Christ.  It's our relationship with God in Christ that justifies us.  It’s not me being the great me that makes me justified.  The great me is just me.  The Christ-centered  ambassador of Christ is someone who allows the power of God to do what no one person can do.

            Living a self-congratulating life of thinking, “I’m a good person,” is like building my house on sand.  When the wind of truth comes, and the rains fall, and torrents come and tear down the secret and lie of self-justification, I will see that being convinced of my own goodness cannot stand before the far greater call of the Lord to be His presence in the world.  To be justified by faith means being invested in something far greater than one’s own goodness.  Rather it means being invested in letting Christ work within us to serve the progress of the Kingdom of God, which is a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.  Now that’s building your house on rock!  And that's what justification by faith means.

Pray for our principal, Jan Altevogt

Our school's excellent principal, Jan Altevogt, has discovered that there is a mass in her one remaining kidney.  On Monday she and her husband meet with the doctors to hear what course of action they will recommend to her: excising the mass and hoping the rest of the kidney will self-repair, or undergo a kidney transplant.  So, parishioners, please say a Rosary for Jan.  And school parents, get together with your children and pray the Rosary for her with them. 

Jan has been at Sacred Heart of Jesus School here in Boulder for five years.  She has been an extraordinary principal and is greatly admired by the students and teachers and parents - and by me. 

Being a principal is no easy task, as you can imagine.  Overseeing our exceptional staff of teachers from our Early Learning Center and then all the grades up to the grade is daunting, but our children graduate in such a well prepared way that they excel at whatever high school they go to, and as one Middle School teacher said, "They just turn out to be wonderful people."

Jan should feel like a very accomplished principal and very much loved.  So, our hearts and prayers go with her in her upcoming procedures.   

Why did the people of Anatolia (Turkey) lose their Christian faith?

An after thought from my recent trip that included Istanbul, Ephesus, some Greek Islands, Athens, Sicily, and some of the Balkan countries: why did the people of Anatolia (today's Turkey), formerly a Christian part of the world, lose their Christian faith?

Greece was also under Muslim occupation for 400 years, but they did not lose their Christian faith.  The same was true of Sicily.  The picture above is of the ancient basilica, Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), originally built by Constantine in the early 300's AD, and the existing structure built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 500's AD.  Early Ecumenical Councils took place in this extraordinary structure, councils that defined the faith we hold maintain to this day.  When the Turks conquered the Byzantine Empire in the 1400's AD, they changed the name of Constantinople into Istanbul and turned the basilica into a mosque.  When Ataturk took Istanbul over after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the time of World War I, he secularized the state of Turkey and changed Hagia Sophia into a museum. 

Standing in Hagia Sophia, I could help but feel a sadness that the once noble Christian Byzantine Empire gave way to a loss of the Christian faith to the Muslim faith.  Why?  Even more importantly for our time, why did Greece hold on to their Christian faith?  Was Turkey ethnically cleansed but Greece was not?  Or was the faith more profoundly felt in Greece than in Anatolia?  Why did the Armenians and the Croatians and other such countries hold on to their faith?  We have much to learn from these people.

Black Mountain

Black Mountain is the English for Montenegro, a tiny republic of the former Yugoslavia, situated on the Adriatic Sea between Croatia and Albania.  It was the greatest surprise in my cruise of the Mediterranean.  It's beauty is so extraordinary that I can say that I have never seen so much exceptional beauty in one place.   

As we cruised into the fjord and headed to the walled medieval city of Kotor I kept saying aloud, "Stunning!  Stunning!"

The name Black Mountain comes from the appearance of the color of the mountainous surroundings of the most southern fjord in that part of the world.  Kotor is a place I must return to.  Put it on your "must do" list.

Click this link for a taste of the beauty: "http://www.youtube.com/v/ejBS18Y5tk0&hl=en" 

The Colder Bolder Boulder

A fabulous event for Boulder, even though it was shivvering cold.  Since the Bolder Boulder's race course runs right along our school's property, I love gathering friends together to cheer the runners and walkers on.  This is one of Boulder's best events that make this town so special. 

Every year, right across 13th Street a lady, who had to be a cheerleader as a youngster, does the best job ever of encouraging the runners to keep at it. 

And, right by our school, using our electricity by my OK, we had a great band adding rhythm and excitement to engage the runners and walkers to move to the beat of the uplifting music.  Check out the band: Sue Schnitzer's Interactive Music for Children -  www.weebeemusic.com 

To all the 52,000 participants: attaway!

There is no chaining the Word of God

The cruise is over, but, since the universal church is starting a year of reflection on the life of the great apostle,St. Paul, let me share some Pauline connections with this trip.  (What the Church is marking is the 2000^th anniversary of the birth of St. Paul.)

   

At Ephesus, St. Paul stayed for a goodly amount of time building on a Christian community that had been started earlier by some other unnamed apostle.  Ephesus was a city of a quarter of a million people and Paul was eventually able to speak to about 25,000 people at one time in the theater there.  His speech provoked a riot because the silver workers realized that his success there would endanger their industry of making silver statues of the false goddess, Artemis.

  

At Athens, Paul spoke to the intellectuals at the hill next to the Acropolis where all the philosophers would gather to listen to new ideas.  Surely St. Paul thought that if he could convert the deep thinkers, the very influential people of the time, a large number of people could be won to faith in Jesus.  Alas, they laughed him away with his "silly" ideas about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. 

   

Imagine how discouraged Paul was.  He writes about his failure in First Corinthians.  This failure provoked him to abandon an approach of trying to win people over to Christ by “worldly wisdom.”  His new approach would be to focus on the suffering people experience and make the connection with “Christ crucified.”  So, after Paul left Athens he went to Corinth for the first time, preaching “Christ crucified” and he was wildly successful.  The lesson for our time: shying away from the difficult parts of the Gospel does not win converts.  The hard truths of the Gospel are what win people to faith in Christ.

 

We then sailed below Greece and then below the boot of Italy as we made our way to Sicily.  St. Paul traveled this route as well.  Since this part of the trip is a lot of time at sea, it occurred to me that St. Paul used this “down time” to pray, reflect, rest, and share the faith with with his shipmates.  He was in chains at this point, on his way to Rome where he would be beheaded in his most perfect witness to Christ. 

   

Though in chains, “there is no chaining the word of God.”  After all, St. Paul wrote two thirds of the New Testament.    

What beauty; and what an intention!

Today our ship arrived at the Amalfi Coast of Italy.  What spectacular beauty we took in as we sailed in a small boat from Amalfi to Positano and back to Amalfi.  In Amalfi we toured the church of St. Andrew, the Apostle.  St. Andrew was the first to be called by Jesus to be an apostle.  (See the end of the first chapter of the Gospel according to John.)  St. Andrew was the first one to bring others to Christ, the first one being his brother, St. Peter.  St. Andrew, therefore, is a patron saint for those who wish to bring other people to Jesus.

Tradition has it that he died as a martyr in Greece, crucified to a cross set up in an "X" form.  When Constantinople was made the capital of the Roman Empire in the 300's St. Andrew's bones were taken there to be enshrined as the relics of the martyr of the Church that eventually came to be called the Orthodox Church.  During the Crusades, these relics were taken to Amalfi and enshrined in the church there. 

So, in the crypt of the church where St. Andew's relics are I prayed for this intention for me and my parishioners: that the Lord, through the intercession of St. Andrew, would give us the grace of wisdom, prudence and skill in evangelizing Boulder.   That's my greatest dsire at this point in my pastorate of Sacred Heart of Jesus in Boulder, Colorado.

Ephesus

Today I saw Ephesus, where St. Paul preached to 24,000 people in an open theater.  Where St. John the Evangelist brought the Virgin Mary ("'Behold your mother' and from that day he took her into his home.")  Where St. John wrote the Gospel according to John, and where he died and was buried.  Where Mary lived out the last years of her life in a home high on a hill above the bustling city.  Where the Council of Ephesus decided in 431 AD to acclaim Mary as "theotokos," as the Mother of God, as a way of describing exactly who Jesus is: one person (not 2) who is both God and man, therefore it is right and proper to call Mary the "Mother of God."  Ephesus, a huge city of a quarter of a million people at the time of Paul, John and the Virgin Mary.  Ephesus, a very ancient city, had a very long history before Christianity of devotion to a mother goddess, Artemis of the Ephesians.  Such an ancient devotion was turned upside down by the advent of belief in Jesus Christ.  How fitting that God so arranged it that the Mother of God would come to live in this city so the new Christians could switch their devotion to the Lord Jesus and have His mother as one of their residents!  After the city was destroyed by a series of earthquakes and the advance of Islam into the area, the local resisdents had such a devotion to Mary that even to this day the Muslims have as strong devotion to Mary and visit the site of her home on top of the nearby high hill.  By the way, in the Book of Revelation Ephesus is one of the 7 churches of the Apocalypse.  Ephesus is commened by the Lord and then told to repent, and if not, her lampstand would be removed.  Ephesus is no longer a Christian city.  In fact, the city was destroyed.  A somber thought, n'est pas?

Istanbul

Greetings from Istanbul.  (If you are checking on my blog for information about SHJ parish's restructuring, scroll down the page and you'll find what you're looking for.)

The Istanbul area is where many of the early Church councils took place defining our faith for the ages.  Every Sunday we recite the Nicene Creed which was formulted just a few miles from here and put into its final form right here in Istanbul, then known as Constantinople.  The largest church in the Church's first millennium was right here.  It was called Hagia Sophia, i.e. Holy Wisdom, referring to the second person of the Holy Trinity because Jesus is the Wisdom of the Father.  The original Hagia Sophia was built by Constantine in the early 300's AD.  The present building was build by the Emperor Justinian in 532 AD.  And it looks that old.  When the Muslims took over Constantinople in the 1300's they made Hagia Sophia a mosque and changed the name of the city to Istanbul, meaning something like "plenty of Islam."  In the 1920's Attaturk made the remains of the Ottoman Empire into a secularist country, Turkey.  He also turned the Hagia Sophia into a museum.  That's all for now.

Saying good-bye to my great friend Malachy

It was my privilege to preach at Father Malchy McBride's funeral this morning at Queen of Peace Parish in Aurora, where I served for 14 years some time ago.  Here's some of what I said.  At least this is what I wrote ahead of time.  A few other things came in as well.

            One of the best decisions I ever made in my life was to go to St. Louis in 1995 to persuade a recently returned Capuchin missionary to accede to his provincial’s offer for him to work with me in serving the people of Queen of Peace Parish in Aurora.  Little did I know during that trip that I had just met someone who would be one of my most treasured friends in life. 

            You know that he went to Papua New Guinea in 1963 to serve people whose meager clothing was made out of grass and who were only recently aware that there were people who had white skin, who wore clothing their whole bodies, who wore shoes, and who believed that God became a human being.  He, and other Capuchins like him, would hike into “the bush” to find clusters of people, wherever he could find them, make friends with them, learn their language, love them, and teach them about Jesus. 

Father Malachy McBride spent 30 years among the natives of PNG teaching about Christ, initiating people in the sacraments of the Church, building hospitals and churches and schools - for and with them.  He became a ham radio operator so as to be able to connect with other mission compounds since travel between communities took days and days of hiking, before there were roads.  He learned how to make electricity and set up mini power plants to flood the compounds with light and all that can happen thanks to electricity.

            When he left the U.S. back in 1963 on his journey to PNG for the first time, he was scared to death.  Would he be meeting cannibals?  How primitive were these people he was being sent to?  At one of the stops, perhaps in Guam, he celebrated Mass and was blown away by the Introit for that Mass:  “If you love me, Simon Peter, feed my lambs.”  When he read that Scripture, he knew it was a message meant for him, sent directly from the Lord to give him his purpose for living.  All fear left him and never returned.

            He embraced another Scripture that fleshed out for him his reason for fearless confidence.  It was our 2^nd reading that I built my life on, so much so, that I had a synopsis of these lines engraved on the bottom of my chalice when I was ordained:  “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  

Malachy had many tastes of heaven not only in doing his ministry in PNG, but also here after he returned home from having been stoned almost to death by a gang of bandits who were out to violate the nuns and nurses living at his mission compound.  Malachy saved the women, but lost his eye in the process.

            His tastes of heaven were both mystical and relational.  Who here has not been profoundly touched by Malachy, almost as if touched by the love and kindness of God Himself?  How many people do you know who had as much joy in living as he did, and a joy in responding to people in need, whether for an anointing, or a confession, or a funeral, or a hand reaching out for assistance.

            How fitting that he died on the true day of Ascension Thursday!  The Ascension is all about heaven.  Let me explain Malachy’s desire for heaven.

He often told me of his favorite poet, St. John of the Cross who described heaven in sublime poetry; and Malachy and would quote him often to me: “I die because I do not die!”  In other words, he loved God so much that he yearned for the day he’d see the Lord face to face.  How could a man who so thoroughly enjoyed life say, “I die because I do not die”?  You see, Malachy was a mystic.  His habit of getting up at 4 AM and communing with the Lord made his heart fixed on heaven, fixed on Christ, so much so, that this relationship with Christ transformed his interpretation of everything else.  You see, if we keep our focus on heaven we begin to taste it here on earth.  If our heart’s first desire is the Living God, then we begin to live in joy here in this life.  In other words, the hope for heaven makes us come alive in this life in such a way that even death cannot stop that life we find in Christ.  Did we not hear just Sunday, “Where Christ has gone, we hope to follow.” 

I’d like to close by reciting part of that poem that was like Malachy’s life put into lyrical form.  It’s a description of someone yearning, even suffering for want of seeing God face to face.  It’s a poem about heaven, which is what the Ascension is all about.

1. I no longer live within myself
and I cannot live without God,
for having neither him nor myself
what will life be?
It will be a thousand deaths,
longing for my true life
and dying because I do not die.

2. This life that I live
is no life at all,
and so I die continually
until I live with you;
hear me, my God:
I do not desire this life,
I am dying because I do not die.

3. When I am away from you
what life can I have
except to endure
the bitterest death known?
I pity myself,
for I go on and on living,
dying because I do not die.

5. When I try to find relief
seeing you in the Sacrament,
I find this greater sorrow:
I cannot enjoy you wholly.
All things are affliction
since I do not see you as I desire,
and I die because I do not die.

May Malachy’s passion for life, and even greater passion for heaven stir into flame the love in our hearts for all the people God gives us, and stir into even greater flame our yearning for seeing God face to face.