The Need to Encounter Christ

Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
21 July 2013

          “Okay, Father,” many of you might be thinking, “it’s the story with Mary and Martha once again. You’re going to tell us, ‘Don’t work too hard and spend time in prayer, listening to the Lord,’ right?”

        Yes, I could tell you that.

But I’m not going to.

What I am going to do is share with you something that Saint Benedict wrote down in his Rule: Let all guests be received as Christ.

My brothers and sisters, our First Reading and Gospel today explicitly present to us an over-arching theme of “hospitality”. However, we need to go deeper and understand that it’s what lies underneath the idea of “hospitality” is where we need to be . . . and that’s experiencing an encounter with the Living God.

While Abraham and Martha are doing those important tasks of hospitality, Mary cuts to the chase to show us what it’s all about. While taking care of our guests is a necessary, we need to provide them with an encounter that becomes supernatural – affirming that God is present throughout the course of our lives.

Yet Abraham, Martha, and Mary provide us with wonderful examples in what it is to be hospitable people of God. And even TO God! For once we have experienced that deeply unique and deeply personal encounter with God, we then want to share that with people. We want people to experience Christ in a similar fashion to us. And that is the mark of discipleship, of evangelization: To encounter Christ, so as to become Him and take His Presence out into the world, so that the world may come to know Christ.

However, this only happens when we encounter Him. How? Yes, through prayer, through the Scriptures, through the Sacraments. But there’s a more simple answer: through our interactions, through our encounters with each other.

Think about your experience of the Mass up to this point. Were you greeted by friendly people? Did you have to climb over people just to get a seat in the pew? Did someone cut you off in the parking lot to get the better spot? Or let’s flip it: Did you greet others with a friendly smile? Did you move out of the way so that others could sit down in the pew? Did you allow the other person to take that better spot, even if it caused you an extra step or two of inconvenience? Even these little gestures can mean so much in allowing people to experience an encounter with Christ.

To have that encounter with Christ, personally and interpersonally, allows us to encounter and share that peace of Christ which the world cannot give – that same peace we will share in a few minutes with each other, before encountering our Lord in the most intimate way possible: the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist.

The more times we encounter the Lord – or, I should say, the more times we allow the Lord to encounter us! –, the more times we have the opportunity to know not only Who Christ is, but what He is asking of us in our lives. We must learn to become Mary before we can act like Martha. We must spend time in listening to the Lord before we can fully appreciate the mission and ministry He calls us to.

We must sit at the feet of the Lord ourselves before we can call others to do the same.

If we want all of our guests to be received as Christ, then we have to know Who Christ is. If we want to treat others like Jesus, then we need to evaluate how we ourselves treat our encounters with Jesus.

Yes – so do good things and be thoughtful like Martha and Abraham, and spend more time with the Lord like Mary. But in all our thoughts, words and actions, let us encounter the Lord, get to know Who He is, and then introduce Him to the world. Just because we spend time with someone doesn’t necessarily mean that we encounter them.

Let us heed the words of our parish patron, Saint Teresa of Avila: “Keeping Christ present is what we of ourselves can do.”

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Enjoy the journey . . .

Another Quote

Had I remembered this quote from Servant of God Dorothy Day before I wrote my homily, I would have used it. But I want to share it, nonetheless:

. . . It was human love that helped me to understand divine love. Human love at its best, unselfish, glowing, illuminating our days, gives us a glimpse of the love of God for man. Love is the best thing we can know in this life, but it must be sustained by an effort of the will. It must lie still and quiet, dull and smoldering, for periods. It grows through suffering and patience and compassion. We must suffer for those we love, we must endure their trials and their suffering, we must even take upon ourselves the penalties due their sins. Thus we learn to understand the love of God for His creatures. Thus we understand the Crucifixion.

Enjoy the journey . . .  

Love of God Equals Love of Neighbor

Homily for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
14 July 2013

        Servant of God Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and social reformer of the Twentieth Century, once said, “I only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” This, my brothers and sisters, is a perfect summation of the Gospel we have just heard.

        Dorothy Day, who died in 1980, knew well and understood even better that one cannot separate the love of God and the love of neighbor. When the scholar of the law proposed to Jesus the question, “Who is my neighbor?”, he was testing Jesus in a way to see how Jesus might answer. Even to this day, whether we realize it or not, we’re asking Jesus the same question daily, because, in some way, we want Jesus to change His answer.

        My friends, our faith in Jesus Christ demands of us the constant action of love. That’s why we must come to understand that our actions and inactions have consequences. The way we put love into action or the way we fail to put love into action reflects our love towards God. If we say that we love God and fail to love our neighbor, then we are only proving that our love for God is self-serving. If we say that we love our neighbor, but have no use for God, then our love for neighbor becomes self-serving.

        Love is the universal language, something given to us by God that is “already in [our] mouths and in [our] hearts,” as Moses points out to us in our First Reading. We now HAVE to act on that love, to “carry it out”, as Moses instructed the Israelites. “. . . The love of God is revealed in responsibility for others”, Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI teaches us (Spe Salvi, 28). How do we carry out love, then? Through putting our faith in action.

Love comes to the Christian as an act of faith. It is part of that “Light of Faith”, that Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis reminds of in his first encyclical. Our current Holy Father, who continues to promote putting our faith into action, reminds us (Lumen Fidei, 54):

The boundless love of our Father also comes to us, in Jesus, through our brothers and sisters. Faith teaches us to see that every man and woman represents a blessing for me, that the light of God’s face shines on me through the faces of my brothers and sisters.

        It is recognizing the love that God has for us that we respond in kind through loving our neighbor. Even if we don’t like the person, what they stand for or how they act, we are called to see Christ in them – as difficult as that may be – and love them. And as we are called to recognize Christ in the other, so must another recognize Christ in us.

        “Everything a baptized person does every day should be directly or indirectly related to the Corporal or Spiritual Works of Mercy,” Dorothy Day reminds us. Our love for God cannot be a love for God alone. Our love for neighbor cannot be simply for our friends and family alone. How we treat the least and the greatest among us, how we treat the presence of Christ among us, is a response to our accepting God’s love in our lives, and is a reflection of our relationship to Christ as His disciple.

        As we recognize the continued binding of love of God to love of neighbor, let us make the statement of Dorothy Day our own: “I can only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”

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Enjoy the journey . . .

Independent Reflection

My favorite holiday has come and passed. Independence Day is my absolutely favorite holiday. There's something about it that makes me excited every year to celebrate it.

Maybe it's the fireworks.

Maybe it's the food.

Maybe it's being able to spend time with family and friends.

Maybe it's about the holiday traditions.

Maybe it's a little bit of all of these.



Yet, maybe it's a little bit more.



Even though the Continental Congress voted on American independence on July 2nd, and the Declaration of Independence wasn't signed until August 2nd, July 4th has become the American rallying day to celebrate the freedoms that we as citizens hold most dear. But as we remember from this most important document, our freedoms come from nature and nature's God.

And while a majority of people believe in some type of supernatural being / higher power, the freedoms that have been bestowed to us by that being / power are constantly put to the test. And that is not a bad things.

For us who believe in the Christian understanding of who God is, we believe that He has given us the gift of free will, including the freedom to believe in a God or not. Our understanding is that, if God wanted to, He could in an instant take that free will away and force us to love Him and do His will, since He is the Creator and we are merely His creation. 

But God doesn't work that way.

He wants us to exercise our freedoms. But He wants us to exercise those freedoms responsibly.

He wants us to be independent. But He also desires for us to know our dependence on Him.

Thinking about some of our mythical superheroes, the great lesson we continue to learn from Spider-Man is that, "With great power comes great responsibility." We, even as God's mere creation, have an almost supernatural power when it comes to exercise our freedoms. Yet we know that in exercising those freedoms, it's never anything to be taken lightly. This is why we have such great debates in our nation and in society about what is the "right way" to pursue and exercise our freedoms, our liberty.

And this is a good thing to have and to do, because the seriousness that we bring in discussing and fighting over the issues of our time - whether they be "right" or "wrong" is an exercise in the very freedom given to us by God Himself.

I'm not going to get into moral debates about this or that here. This is to simply express why I'm so very grateful for the celebration of Independence Day. ---- For it is in the recognition of our freedoms and liberties that we can acknowledge that we are created to choose many things.

But those choices come with responsibilities. And we need to accept the consequences for the choices that we make, whether good or bad. Those consequences are naturally embedded into the choices that we make.

I thank God that I have the opportunity to exercise these freedoms, these liberties. I thank God that I have the opportunity to choose Him and His way of life. 

And it's because of these freedoms, liberties and opportunities that I have the responsibility to speak up for all those who lack this freedom.


And though Independence Day is a good day to celebrate all of this, I really don't need a day to celebrate . . . as long as I appreciate the those freedoms and liberties that God gives to me everyday - and the responsibilities and consequences that come along with that.









Enjoy the journey . . .
 

The Homily that Will Never Be

Below are thoughts for another homily that I was working on for this weekend --- it helped form the one that I'm giving for this weekend (see the previous entry), but didn't seem "right" for what I wanted to ultimately convey to the people of God.

Again, these are thoughts, and while written to be incorporated into a homily, and while sort of taking the form of a homily, are not really "a homily" in the traditional understanding.

I hope that there's a nugget somewhere in this mess that you can take away.

Enjoy . . .

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My brothers and sisters, I don't think that there is a priest or deacon who preaches a homily who is not nervous on some level. We're human, after all. We want to be loved, accepted. We want to be able to say, "That was a good message," when we're done preaching.

But sometimes we have to preach that difficult message, the one no one wants to hear. And no matter what the message, it takes a supernatural courage for us to preach to you the message of the Scriptures. We do so, for it is that message, that lesson which will help you leave this place and live the Gospel out in the world.

Yes, we mat become frustrated when see people reading the bulletin or Pittsburgh Catholic, or playing with their phones. Not just because we have worked and prayed hard and long on what we are to say, but, also, because it shows a lack on the listeners' part to allow the Word of God to sink into their own hearts.

For the last number of weeks, we have listened to what Jesus has to say about being one of His disciples: We must abandon everything, deny ourselves, take up our crosses daily, and follow Him. Why? To send us out into the like He did with the seventy-two in today's Gospel, so we, like the seventy-two, may experience the ultimate joy of following Christ.

The prophecy of Isaiah in our First Reading is the desire we should all have in our hearts: to be nourished by the graces of God so that we may all know the joy of His calling. But we can only do that if we daily choose to follow Christ in our thoughts, words, and actions. We can only attain the Beatific Vision if we do what Saint Paul did, and boast in nothing but the Cross of Christ.

Christian discipleship is hard. It takes a good amount of trust in God to follow Him. Yet it is important that we pray for the grace and the courage to live out the Gospel message, whether others accept it or not. This is why Jesus tells us to pray for more laborers for the harvest. And this just doesn't mean priests, deacons, and religious, but, rather, faithful and faith-filled men and women courageous to live and preach the Gospel.

The Lord certainly has thrown us out as lambs among the wolves. For anyone to live and preach the Gospel in our society today is to open one's self to taunt, rejection, scorn, and hatred. To stand up for the truths given to us by Christ and handed on by the Church is to enter a crowd of spite and ridicule. However, the Lord is not setting us up for failure; rather, He is setting us up to trust in Him in spite of the fact that people will hate us.

As I said at the beginning, it takes courage for any priest or deacon to preach the Word of God. It also takes courage for any and every baptized member of the Body of Christ to proclaim the Gospel by their lives. We must constantly rely upon the graces we received at Baptism and Confirmation, the graces we receive through the vocational sacraments of Marriage and Holy Orders, and the continued graces we receive through Confession and the Eucharist to be effective ministers of the Gospel message. Jesus knew that this would be a difficult task. (Look at how many people rejected Him in His ministry!) That's why He gave us the Church: So that through the wisdom and guidance of the Holy Spirit, we may be able to support each other for the mission and ministry God has called us to.

The journey of faith always leads to Jerusalem. This is our ultimate destination, for a life lived for Christ always leads to the Cross. But through the Cross alone do we attain the joys presented to us in our Scriptures today.

My brothers and sisters, being disciples of Christ is never easy. In fact, it calls for a radical change in the way we live our lives. Yet when we place our trust in God, praying for the courage to preach the Gospel by the way that we live our lives, and boast of nothing but the Cross of Christ, then we will be ready to be sent out, like the seventy-two, as lambs among the wolves. We will be strengthened by the graces of God, given to us for the mission and ministry at hand.

For it is in making the journey to Jerusalem with Jesus that we come to ultimately attain the promises of eternal life.

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Enjoy the journey . . .

Happiness, Joy, Mission, Ministry

Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
7 July 2013

          Those of you who are around my age or have children around my age may remember the cartoon show “Ren and Stimpy”. Ren was a Chihuahua who was persistently angry. Stimpy was his dim-witted friend, more-or-less the eternal optimist. In one episode, Stimpy becomes sad that Ren is always angry, and creates a helmet for him to wear, with Stimpy holding the controller, ready to give Ren a dose of happiness when Stimpy thought he needed it.

          It is from this episode that the song “Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy” came to mind while reflecting on today’s readings. The happiness that Stimpy is inflicting on Ren is an artificial happiness, a forced joy. (So much so that Ren can’t take it anymore, grabs a hammer, and destroys the helmet.) This happiness and joy, which Stimpy truly wanted to share with Ren, is essentially the antithesis of the happiness and joy which Isaiah and Jesus present to us today.

          Isaiah presents to us this great promise of authentic joy in our First Reading. Those who serve the Lord will be able to obtain this joy, and will be able to recognize the fulfillment of this prophecy when it is fulfilled, for we are the ones who, in faith, believe in the fulfillment of the Word.

          Yet we know that, ultimately, Jesus is the fulfillment of the Word because He IS the Word. And when, in the Gospel, he presents to us the promise of having our names “written in heaven”, we rejoice in knowing the life that awaits us. We know that this is the true joy and true happiness that we’re all seeking.

          But there’s a catch.

          For us to attain the joy and happiness that is promised to us, we must remember that, just as with the seventy-two in today’s Gospel, Jesus sends us our on a mission to proclaim that “the Kingdom of God is at hand”. Our Lord knows that the mission and ministry is difficult; He knows that He is sending us out as “lambs among wolves”. For the last number of weeks, we have been listening to Jesus tell us what it takes to be His disciple. Now He puts us to the test: Do we want the happiness of the world that is fleeting, or do we desire the joy of the fullness of the Kingdom? Deep down, of course, we desire the latter. Unfortunately, due to our human weaknesses, we easily grab for the former.

          Blessed Pope John Paul II, who Pope Francis will canonize later this year, points out to us:

          It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads into your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

          It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.

          Jesus sends us out on the mission, empowers us for ministry so that we may be able to bring the happiness and joy of having encountered the Lord to the world. Yes, that’s a tall order to fill. Yes, we may feel inadequate and unworthy to be sent on such a mission, to be called to enter into such a ministry. But that is why we have the graces of the Sacraments to fall back upon – especially the sacraments of the Eucharist and Reconciliation.

          And, to be honest, none of us will ever be found completely adequate for the task at hand. That is why we have each other – the members of the Christian community – for support. And none of us are worthy, but God chooses the lowly and, through working in and through us, raises us up to glory.

          Blessed Pope John XXIII, who Pope Francis will also canonize later this year, encourages us with these words:

 Consult not your fears, but your hopes and dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.

          My brothers and sisters, we are a joyful people. We are joyful because we have encountered Jesus Christ in our lives. And through this encounter, we bring the joy of our faith to others, announcing by our lives that “the Kingdom of God is at hand.” The gift of our faith is the source of our joy. Pope Francis reminds us of this in his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, which was promulgated and given to the Church this past Friday. Our Holy Father teaches us:

          Faith is born of an encounter with the living God who calls us and reveals his love, a love which precedes us and upon which we can lean for security and for building our lives. Transformed by this love, we gain fresh vision, new eyes to see; we realize that it contains a great promise of fulfillment, and that a vision of the future opens up before us.

          In the end, we long for the true joy and happiness borne out of a relationship with Jesus Christ. In that relationship do we see the promise of true joy given to us by Isaiah and of true fulfillment promised to us by Christ. The world, those wolves, will present to us a false happiness, a helmet to wear so that, like Stimpy to Ren, they can push a button to fill us with what they think is happiness, but is, in reality, a recognition of the true desire for that encounter with Christ in our lives.

          We gather this day, my friends, to experience the joy of our Lord in the midst of our broken lives. Yet we continue to recognize the promise of joy that is ours as we are sent out into the mission and ministry Christ calls us to. And, in faith and with the gift of faith, we draw others to know the authentic joy of encountering Christ – a gift of self that is given as we share with the world our God-given gifts of joy and faith.

          Let us heed the words of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati:

          You ask me whether I am in good spirits. How could I not be so? As long as Faith gives me strength I will always be joyful.

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Enjoy the journey . . .

Pilgrimage Along the Country Roads

Last week, some members of the youth ministry program and other members of the parish ventured to southern West Virginia for the annual mission trip. I made a brief visit Tuesday and Wednesday to celebrate Mass for our crew, and to visit the three work sites they were working at. Overall, it was a long, but good trip.

Heading down on Tuesday afternoon was wonderful! A sunny, blue sky with a smattering of clouds along the way made it a wonderful time to enjoy traveling and driving, which I love to do, but do not have the ample opportunities to do so. I arrived at the center where our group and a few other groups were staying. (It was actually the small city's middle school.) When I got there, the groups were in a meeting, but shortly heading my way for dinner. I was able to grab a bite of spaghetti and green beans with the group, catch up on what they were doing, and enjoy hearing their stories.

Each night, the participants have an activity each night. Tuesday night happened to be square dancing. Yes -- SQUARE DANCING. I and a few of the adult leaders from our group remembered having to learn square dancing as part of our physical education  course in grade school. I guess times have changed, because these kids had no clue what to do. (But, in all honesty, I wouldn't have remembered what to do, either.) True, our missionaries seemed a little clueless when it came to square dancing, but, in the end, I believe that they did have some fun just trying to figure out what the heck they were actually supposed to be doing. One of the teens, though, ended up in the group closest to the sound system (on which the music actually came from a record player!), and was able to master the dance a little more than his counterparts. However, he was also finding himself in the group which had the most experienced square dancers - so I'm sure that helped him out, too.

Following the adventures in square dancing in the way-too-hot-to-be-in gymnasium, I celebrated Mass for our crew, and for some of the other Catholics in the various other groups. I was good to spend some "holy time" with them. It was good, also, to celebrate in an air-conditioned room, since it was uber-humid outside.

After the Mass, we celebrated the birthday of one of the teens with a surprise ice cream cake and Twinkies party. It's always a good idea to give people sugar right before you tell them to go to bed. When the party was done, I went and found a hotel room for the night. (I've slept on the floor before, but I'm not that crazy!)

Wednesday marked my third anniversary of ordination to the priesthood. What did I do to celebrate? I visited the work sites where the groups went to. We had three groups, which meant traveling to three sites. Luckily, they were not too far from one another. (Two of the sites were along the same road, just about a little under two miles from each other.) I had the opportunity to meet the people who lived at the work sites (which were their homes). They are all beautiful people in their own right - having pain and frustration in their lives, but, in their own way, giving God the glory and honor.

The first work site was work being done to a woman's living room in her house. They ended up rebuilding the floor (basically from the bottom, up), cleaning and painting the walls, and even into the hallway.

The second site was replacing a family's roof and giving them a new bathroom. Talking with the gentleman who owned the house, he thought that the group was just going to do a little spot repair here and there, not take off the entire roof and replace it! He was surprised by that, but very grateful for the work being done. The bathroom floor was almost falling in on itself, but our workers there had stabilized the floor from the basement, and was just about to finish laying the subfloor for the room before setting the tiles, and putting the toilet back into place.

The third work site was to work on the underside of a house, and prep work for skirting the house. Apparently there was much activity with spiders the day before I was at the site. (Better them then me!) There was also a lot of ditch digging to support the skirting that was to be done. The woman who lived at the house was, in my own words, spunky. She didn't hold anything back from telling you what she thought. But it sounded like the team enjoyed talking to her and getting to know her.

I left for Pennsylvania following lunch, and enjoyed taking my time to get back. (Not just because there wasn't anything pressing for me to do, but, also, because I was so tired from all the driving!)

While driving down and back up through West Virginia, I couldn't help and think about my experience in Guatemala. The mountains there reminded of the Central American country, and seeing some of the housing along the road reminded me of the poverty I saw there last year. And while poverty is still poverty, there was a difference - Guatemala versus the United States. But it reminded me all the more that while it is important to do what we can for our brothers and sisters throughout the world, it is important to keep in mind the poor that are in our midst here, mere miles away. 

Also, while thinking of Guatemala, the thought came to me to recognize that while the people our youth was serving was grateful for the help, there was the inter-personal aspect which makes all mission trips successful. It's just not going to "do something good" for another person, but, ultimately, seeing and serving Christ in that other person, and allowing yourself to be Christ to those you serve. I think that our mission workers got an understanding into that insight. *Service really isn't service unless there's that personal interaction.*

All in all, while it sounds like the crew who went down had a terrific opportunity to engage in getting to know the people they were serving while helping improve the quality of life where they were - albeit just a little bit -, the great gift for me was sharing in this mission, even for a brief time. It reminded me not only why I was ordained, but it also reminded me all the people that I have served - both here in Pittsburgh and throughout the world. I continue to pray for all of them, and hope that the Lord is continuing to do great things in their lives.

For right now, my pilgrimage along the country roads of West Virginia was the reminder for me - especially on the third anniversary of my ordination - of why I entered into a life of service. I may not always get it right, and I'll down-right fail from time to time. But it's in coming to know those who I serve, and to appreciate the presence of Christ in them, as I try to allow Christ to work in and through me.



But NOT through square dancing.



Enjoy the journey . . .