The Heart of the Matter

Homily for Sunday, February 28, 2010

For the past few weeks I have been suggesting to you that we take an earnest look this Lent at what our underlying religious attitude is, and see if the Lord might be tweaking us into greater spiritual maturity.  I have done that by reminding us that many of us may be a secret heretic who thinks that we earn our way to heaven by being good and steering clear of being bad.  I further have suggested that we take a look to see what kind of image of God we have.  Particularly, do we in our heart of hearts think that God is a demanding parent who takes note of our every misdeed and gets upset with us because of these misdeeds, much like a demanding parent who has little patience with the child’s imperfections?

    I further suggested that God already loves us before we do anything, and totally accepts us, even in our sins.

    This week I want to look with you at why we do penance.  Why do we fast during Lent, pray more, give alms, attend daily Mass, read more Scripture, and give up a legitimate pleasure for Lent?  

    A little background first.  St. Paul tells us that we are citizens of heaven.  Paul’s presumption is that for those who have come to know Christ, and have recognized how desperately they are in need of Him, who is our Savior, heaven already looms large in one’s life.  Specifically Paul says: “For many, as I have often told you and now tell you even in tears, conduct themselves as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction. Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their shame. Their minds are occupied with earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we also await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”  

    What does it mean to be an enemy of the cross?  It means that a person has no grasp of what Jesus did for us on the cross.  So such a person, in Paul’s time, will keep the Kosher food laws (“their God is their stomach”) and will make sure all the males are circumcised (“their glory is in their shame”).  

    Now, we do not keep our kitchens Kosher and we see no particular value in circumcision.  We have other ways of being enemies of the cross.  We think, in our heart of hearts, that being good is good enough.  We think that God owes us heaven if we have at least been sincere.  We think that if we keep the rules, obey the commandments, do our Lenten practices, go to confession occasionally, and on balance are a good person, then we’re fine before God.  That, my friends, is being an enemy of the cross of Christ.  It’s salvation by self.  It’s self-justification.  It’s a way of saying that Jesus never had to die on the cross.  I really don’t need His death on the cross because I’ve kept the rules as best I can.

    Now it’s time for the breakthrough:  keeping the rules is staying at the level of a child, with the rules being our babysitter.  If we want to go through life simply keeping the rules then we will remain immature and never mature into adult Christianity.  

    So, when I argue for a different way of thinking, I am not suggesting that we relax and give up any effort on our part in being a Christian and a good Catholic.  In fact, I am arguing for an even greater effort.  The greater effort is to enter into a meaningful, intense relationship with God, like we’ve never had before.  Like Abraham in the Genesis reading who encounters a living God who freely bestows upon Abraham promises that are valid even to this day.  Like Peter, John and James who experience Jesus in His glory in such a way that they will wind up being able to survive the scandal of the cross. 

Therefore, our Lenten practices, and all of our doing good and avoiding evil, come from a different place.  Instead of putting God in our debt, we do these things as water flowing from a fountain.  The one who loves God loves in practice as well.

     To encounter the living God is to go beyond obeying rules and to move into such an identity with Christ crucified and risen, that we imitate Jesus in everything we do.  We also become liberated from thinking “we are doing what we are supposed to do, or not doing what we're not supposed to do” and we move into the realm of being citizens of heaven.  As citizens of heaven we are no longer in fear of upsetting a demanding parent.  We will have a mature fear of the Lord, meaning that I can say that the Lord is my light and my salvation; before whom should I fear?  No, I know that the Lord is my life’s refuge; therefore of whom should I be afraid? 

Homily for the 1st Sunday of Lent, 2/24/2010

Every now and then, when I was growing up, my father would tell my brothers and me, “Don’t ever forget that you are descended from the kings and queens of Ireland.”  When I got older I learned that there were kings and queens in Ireland many, many, many centuries ago.  That’s quite a family history to pass from one generation to the next, even through centuries of the most dire poverty in my ancestral home in Ireland which was one of the poorest sections of the country.

    It was my father’s way of doing what Moses did in our first reading, from Deuteronomy.  Moses gives the words to tell the family history to the Jews about Abraham, the wandering Aramean, whose descendants became the 12 tribes of Israel, who suffered as slaves in Egypt, became free by going through the Red Sea and were given the Holy Land as their own. That Promised Land memory is still at the core of being Jewish even to this day.

    So too do we recall our history every time we gather for the Eucharist.  We come together and confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord because of His passion, death and resurrection.  We say it again and again at every Mass: The Creed gives us words to tell our family history, the Eucharist recalls our family meal as central to who we are, the Memorial Acclamation gives our lips the words to confess that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.

    St. Paul tells us, however, that our faith cannot just be lip service.  Paul says, “For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.”

    In recent weeks I have been driving home the need for believing in our hearts who Jesus is.  And I labeled as a heresy the secret belief many of us have, that we earn our acceptance from God by being good, sinning less, and being a better person.  There is a temptation for all of us who are secret heretics, to think that we really don’t need to believe in our hearts that Jesus is Lord. 

Do you remember the huge flap in the press 10 years ago when the Vatican put out a document called, Dominus Iesus, which in English is: Jesus is Lord?   

Imagine the effrontery of the Catholic Church to state unequivocally that “the theory of the limited, incomplete, or imperfect character of the revelation of Jesus Christ, . . . is contrary to the Church's faith. [The theory that what is revealed in Christianity can be found to be to that found in other religions, is contrary to the Church's faith.]  Such a position would claim to be based on the notion that the truth about God cannot be grasped and manifested in its . . . completeness by any historical religion, neither by Christianity nor by Jesus Christ.”

    In other words, the truth simply put is that Jesus is Lord.  

    As we heard in today’s Gospel, Jesus was tempted in the desert.  So are we tempted in, oh, so many ways.  But the most serious temptation of our time is to think that that belief in the heart, about who Jesus is, is just one way among many ways to wend our way through life.  No!  “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.”

    We don’t have to jump to wondering how non-believers will fare in the Judgment.  That’s for God to figure out.  But our belief that is anchored in our hearts is that Jesus is the one who justifies us, forgives us, makes us be in right relationship with the Father and with each other.  In other words, we need to be reminded again and again who we are.  And who are we?  We are sons and daughters of God, brothers of our Lord Jesus Christ.  

By our baptism we are not just descended from the kings and queens of some ancestral homeland.  We are brothers and sisters of Jesus who is Lord, who is God, who redeemed us, justified us, and who makes us right before God and man.

    Let us today recommit ourselves to Jesus as Lord.  Let us ask Him to help us be faithful to Him, to hunger for Him, to desire Him, to center our lives on Him, to love as He loves, to do as He would do, and to pass on this dignity of who we are to the next generation.

Ash Wednesday Homily

Prayer, fasting and almsgiving.  This is what the Gospel invites us to embrace as penitential practices, so I want to share some thoughts on the meaning of penitential practices.

 

The wisdom of the Church over the ages is that this season of Lent can be a powerful step in our spiritual growth if we use the time tested penitential practices of prayer, fasting, almsgiving, reading Scripture, attending daily Mass, depriving ourselves of some legitimate pleasure, etc.

 

First, a word of caution: whatever we “do for Lent” does not increase God’s love of us, nor do these Lenten practices make us more acceptable to God.  We do not earn, gain, or lose our salvation by whether or not we “make a good Lent” by sacrifice, increased prayer, fasting, etc. What a good Lent can do for us, by using these kinds of penitential practices, is to make us more open to God.    

 

God already loves us and “sends his rain down upon the just and the unjust.”  The problem is not God; the problem is our own obstinacy.  We build walls against God’s goodness, barriers to letting His grace flow freely into our minds and spirits.

 

Are we not all aware that we can get so caught up in daily concerns, problems, pleasures and the like that we give little attention to the Lover of our souls?  If you were a hungry person who failed to see the banquet before you on the table set right before your eyes, you could go on complaining about your hunger yet never pick a fork and begin to eat.  God’s grace is like that.  Right before our eyes we have all the means available to us to leap away from fear into fearlessness, away from self-preoccupation into a high degree of compassion for the sufferings of others, away from a sense of being lost along the way into a sense of solidarity with the whole human race. 

 

The biggest crisis facing humanity is meaninglessness.  Yet the Source of Meaning is knocking at our door bidding us open to Him.  Our lives, though, are so filled with clutter, noise and commotion that we don’t see the Feast of Life the Lord places right before our eyes.  We’d rather complain about something, anything, than open the Bible.  We’d rather keep walking the treadmill of same old, same old, than be lifted up by the Lord to a conversion of heart that can pack our lives with an ever increasing sense of meaning and purpose.

 

The penitential practices mentioned above are means to open the door to the One who is knocking, to draw closer to the One who loves us beyond all telling:  

 

Prayer: how can we know Him unless we spend more time with Him?

Fasting:  how can we hunger for Him unless we know hunger?

Almsgiving: how can we have a sense of solidarity with the have nots unless we give?

Sacrifice: how can we understand the sacrifice of Christ unless we know what it means to sacrifice ourselves of some legitimate pleasure?

Reading Scripture: how can we know the Word, who became flesh in Jesus, unless we read the Word? 

Daily Mass: how can we grow in knowing the banquet the Lord sets before us unless we come to the Banquet?

 

So, “make a good Lent!”

Homily for Sunday, February 14, 2010

“Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings.”  What kind of wisdom is that?  Isn’t life better when we have trusting relationships, when we have people we can have confidence in?  Aren’t children raised better when they grow up in a home of such trust that they know unconditional love?  So, what is Jeremiah’s wisdom all about?  

    Holding that question there for a moment, let’s look at what Jesus is telling us.  It seems to be even more non-sense: being rich is bad; and being poor is good.  Who of us really thinks that?  Being well-fed is bad and going hungry is good.  What would happen to Whole Foods if we really lived by this beatitude?  Being sad is good; and being happy is bad?  How can this be?  And being hated, excluded, insulted and denounced is good; but praised and well thought of is bad?!  Yikes!  How can all this be?

    These kinds of Scriptures usually get dismissed by most of us as unreachable goals.  And we may even think we don’t want them as goals!  

    Well, there’s a clue on how to understand this in one line in the Gospel: Jesus, the Gospel says, came to a level plain with “a great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon.” And here is the telling line: “And raising his eyes toward his disciples he said. . .”

    Do you remember my telling you last week that most of are really secret heretics, that we deep down think and behave as if we have to earn our being acceptable to ourselves and to God by being better, doing more good, doing less evil, changing this or that about ourselves, conquering flaws, and making fewer mistakes?

    And do you remember my saying that St. Paul teaches us that the love of the Lord makes us acceptable even now, even as we are.  We don’t earn God’s acceptance of us.  Rather, when we know now how loved we are by God is when we are brought to our knees in profound gratitude.  And then, it is God’s grace, and our awareness of what God now means to us, that we wind up desiring from deep within us to conform our lives to Christ’s life and teachings.  In other words, we no longer simply want to make of ourselves a better person by doing more good and avoiding as much evil as we can.  No, it’s no longer about the things we do.  It’s all about the who that we are.  When we become disciples, we become so taken with Jesus that He is the biggest thought in our minds and the one by whom we run all of our decisions.  That’s what it means to be a disciple.  It means to be in love with the Lord!  When Jesus taught these radical teachings in today’s Gospel, “He raised his eyes toward his disciples and said. . .”  Yes, there was a vast crowd, but it was to his disciples that He gave these truths that can only make sense if we are in a profound relationship with the Lord as His disciple.

    Only a true disciple can see the meaning of the blessedness of poverty.  Only a true disciple can know that material things are ultimately unimportant.  Only a true disciple can see that possessions become less and less important as the love of God looms large in one’s life.  In fact, possessions get in the way.  They become false gods; and they distract us from what is really important.

Only one who knows that there is a resurrection from the dead can live with an eye on the eternal prize.  That means that the disciple can see the transitory side of suffering and tears; and only the disciple can move out of self-pity for one’s own suffering into profound pity and compassion for the sufferings of others.

    Only a real disciple can see that flattery and praise and admiration can cloud our identity with the Gospel.  And when we care more about being well thought of, that’s when we become embarrassed about our faith, and the teachings of our faith.  

    So, the question I hear from these Scriptures today is this:  do you really want to be a do-gooder who tries to earn your salvation?  If this is the direction you want to take, you won’t succeed.  Or would rather be a true disciple of Christ and see things the way He does?  If this is your choice, be ready to be denounced.  And be ready to know it as a blessing!

Homily for Sunday, February 7, 2010

Now tell me: in your heart of hearts is this what is really going on in your spiritual life:

    Do you fundamentally think that if you were only a bit better, more faithful, more dedicated, less of a sinner, if you simply did more good, then you’d be in a better standing with God?  Do you think that God is not quite pleased with you yet, that there are some things you know you have to change, yet somehow those changes don’t seem to happen?  Do you think that if you prayed more, behaved better, and went to Mass more faithfully, then life would be better?  Do you think, in your heart of hearts, that a sign of your being right with God would look like being successful as a parent, more accomplished in your career, less stressed financially, and happier in your marriage and family life?

    And do you think that if you simply were a better person, then the graces of God would flow into your life in great abundance?  Do you also think that the more faithful and dutiful you are, the more God will be pleased with you?

    If the answer to some or all of these questions has been yes, then you’re wrong!

    The truth is that you cannot do anything to make God love you more than He already does!  And an even more radical truth is that any wrongdoing you do, whether it be sin or apathy, cannot stop God from loving you in any way whatever!  Sin alienates us from God, but sin does not alienate God from us.

    You see, there are those who are loved by God; and there are those who know they are loved by God.  When we know we are loved by God, that’s when our life changes.  When we see ourselves for who we really are, including our warts, sins and failings, and know that even still we are loved by God, then we fall on our knees, and say such things as, “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!”

    When I know the truth of what I really am, when I give up my false self, when I stop the pretending to be other than what I really am, when I stand before God focusing on His patience with me and how undeserving I am of His love, then I understand Simon Peter, falling at the knees of Jesus and saying, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”

    The genius of St. Paul was this: he was able to make very clear that our right relationship with God comes not from earning His love, not from doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong.  No, my right relationship with God comes from God, from His unconditional love of me, from his choosing me to know who I really am.  St. Paul said, “By the grace of God I am what I am.”  He was an apostle, used by Christ to do remarkable work, yet he persecuted the church before he met the Lord.  Paul taught that our justification (that is, our being in a right relationship with God) comes not from our works, not from our doing what is right, not from our achievements, but from knowing that I am totally undeserving of God’s love -- yet He loves me anyway! 

    So, the real religious question is not: what is it that I do? Or what have I accomplished?   The real religious question is not, how do I practice my faith?  Rather, the real religious question is: who am I?  Am I someone whose passion is success, whose life wants no suffering, who wants everything to go my way, and whose proof of right living is financial success? 

    Or, am I fully aware of my faults and weaknesses, and yet also fully aware that I am loved by God?  Am I so in touch with the love of God that, despite my unworthiness, I know I am a child of God and can hear the angels singing, Holy, Holy, Holy.  Am I so trusting in this love of God that I can say, “Here I am, send me!  Use me.  No matter how unworthy I am, please Lord, use me.”

    When we have been gripped by the love of God, when we have allowed God to show us how loved we are, we will feel exactly like Isaiah and Peter and find ourselves weeping at Mass with overwhelming gratitude that, despite the fact that I am what I am, I am loved and redeemed.