The Sign

Last night, our parish hosted its final Advent Holy Hour and Reflection. The first two were presided over by the deacons assigned to the parish. Last night was my turn. We decided to reflect upon the readings of the upcoming Sunday. (And, so, my reflection is on [primarily] the Gospel of the Fourth Sunday of Advent, A.)

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Reflection for the Advent Holy Hour
17 December 2013

          In my Sacraments course in high school, I was taught that “signs and symbols point to reality.” And while reality is right in front of our faces, we need to somehow validate it, to make sure what we’re experiencing in life is, for lack of a better word, “real”.

          In our First Reading and Gospel for the upcoming Fourth Sunday of Advent, we are presented with the sign announcing the coming of the Messiah. Isaiah points out to us that “the virgin will conceive and bear a son.” Matthew illustrates for us the fulfillment of the prophecy through his description of Joseph’s visit by the angel in his dream.

          Now, two thousand years later, we still seek a sign to validate the presence of Christ in our midst. Our reality somehow doesn’t seem complete unless we have that proof that our Lord is the “Emmanuel”, that God is with us.

          My friends, it seems funny that we go out of our way to seek the signs of the Lord’s dwelling among us when, in reality, we have the two greatest testimonies of His presence in front of us this evening: His Word and His Sacrament. Through His presence in the Word, our Lord continues to speak to us about how we are to trust that He is always with us, and what we need to be doing throughout the Advent that is our life journey in preparing to meet Him when He comes again in His glory.

          And, yet, the powerful sign of the Most Blessed Sacrament is also that reality which places before us the everlasting presence of Jesus Christ in our midst. This Sign of our salvation once again points us to the reality that our God continues to abide amongst His creation. This Eucharistic Presence reminds us that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Who and What we see before us in the monstrance is the same Emmanuel, prophesied by Isaiah and cared for by Mary and Joseph. He is the Sign that fulfilled the Law and the Prophets of the Old Testament.

          Our Lord, in Word and Sacrament, continues to be that Sign in which we come to recognize the loving presence of God in our midst. And in a week, we will celebrate that First Coming among us – where all the prophecies and signs all lead to a tiny manger in Bethlehem; where the Incarnate Sign of the love of the Father was made present to the world.

          And while we sit in the ineffable presence of God this evening, we must remember that He who we adore this evening was born, like you and me, into a world seeking a sign of the presence, of the reality of God. However, Jesus never sought the sign because He WAS AND IS the Sign. Now He teaches us not to seek any sign, for the Sign has already been given.

          We must move from seeking the sign to following the Sign.

          We must now follow the example of the shepherds who followed the glad tidings of the angels. We must now follow the example of the Magi who followed the star. We must now follow the example of Mary and Joseph who, after their own unique experiences with the Divine, followed the plan that God had laid out for them. We must now follow the example of the Sign, Himself, Jesus Christ, who teaches us that the wood of the crib must become the wood of the Cross, and both are necessary for our salvation.

          We no longer seek, for the Sign has been given. We adore for He is here, now, pointing the way to the Father. He who is the Fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets makes whole the reality of our lives.

          If “signs and symbols point to reality,” then the Sign sent by the Father through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ truly points to the reality we ought to have: Fullness of joy, light and peace in a world where the wood of our cribs becomes the wood of our crosses, so that, entering into Christ’s Paschal Mystery, we may experience the fulfillment of reality in the Kingdom of Heaven.

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Enjoy the journey . . .

Make Your Hearts Firm

Homily for the Third Sunday of Advent
Gaudete Sunday
15 December 2013

        There’s a story about the papacy of Blessed Pope John XXIII that goes as follows:

          A man comes to the Vatican claiming to be Jesus. Nobody knows what to think of this, and calls are being made throughout all the curial offices in Rome, trying to figure out what to do. Eventually, a call gets through to Blessed John, with the message, “Your Holiness, there’s a man here claiming to be Jesus. What should we do?” And in only the way Pope John could say it, he responded, “Look busy!”

          My brothers and sisters: We’re more-or-less half-way through our Advent journey. If Jesus was to come before us today, would He find us simply looking busy, or would He find us waiting patiently for His return?

          In our Second Reading today, James reminds us that we need to wait patiently for the return of the Lord. We seem to lack that anticipation that He could return on any day, at any hour. We seem always to be afraid of that time when the Lord will appear, mostly because we’re not going to be found patiently waiting for Him, but looking and keeping busy so that we can be found seemingly “worthy” of His arrival.

          This Advent season is to, in the words of Saint James, “make [our] hearts firm.” We must be honest with ourselves in asking whether or not we have truly taken the time to sit and truly prepare our hearts for the Lord’s coming. Have we allowed the busyness of the “holiday season” to sweep us away from spending time with the Lord? Have we let go of our firm heart by not seeking to become closer with Jesus Christ?

          When we allow everything else to become a priority in our lives, when we fail to make the time available to simply sit and be with the Lord, then we fail to understand the whole meaning of Advent. Our society has made this time of year too commercial: We have to buy the gifts, wrap the gifts, decorate the house, bake the cookies, send the cards, et cetera. These are the “things” of the season which should be secondary in our lives.

          If these things are first in our lives right now, we have our priorities mixed up. It truly doesn’t matter if all the gifts are bought and wrapped, if every inch of the house is decorated to perfection, if we get all the cookies baked, if we remember to send all the cards . . . None of this will matter if we’re not considering all of what we’re doing through our relationship with Jesus Christ, our encounter with Jesus Christ, and through the anticipation of the glorious Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

          My brothers and sisters, this Gaudete Sunday invites us to rejoice, for the coming of the Lord is near! But if we’re too busy in our lives, we’re not going to recognize His coming among us. As the season of Advent turns our attention from the anticipation of the glorious Second Coming of Christ to the celebration of His Incarnation, we must pay special attention to the way we “make [our] hearts firm” in preparing to meet Him through Word and Sacrament. 

We cannot rejoice if we’re merely keeping busy.

          We must wait for the Lord with patience and joy.

          We can only rejoice with the Lord if we truly know the Lord.

          Archbishop Fulton Sheen once commented that every person should spend at least one hour in prayer a day, and if we’re too busy for an hour, we should spend two hours in prayer. And he is dead on in his observation. We’re not going to be joyous in encountering our Lord if we don’t know who He is; and we’re not going to know who He is if we’re not spending time with Him.

          Looking and keeping busy do not help us in becoming better disciples of Christ. If we want to truly be joyful in this season of Advent, and even more so in the season of Christmas, then we are going to spend time in making our hearts firm, waiting patiently for the Lord, and joyfully welcoming Him when He returns.

          The encounter we have with Jesus Christ in this Eucharist today should not only cause us joy in the here and now, but ultimately prepare us for the eternal joy we hope to one day share in. Through Word and Sacrament today, we continue to make our hearts firm in knowing that our Lord continues to dwell with us through His Church. Yet, also through Word and Sacrament, we continue to wait with joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

          My friends, don’t simply look busy or keep busy. Rather, wait with joy for the coming of Lord. Make your hearts firm through prayer, the Word and reception of the Sacraments, most especially Reconciliation and the Eucharist.

          Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!

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Enjoy the journey . . .

Twelve Can Be the Perfect Number

. . . that is, if you're counting the tribes of Israel or the number of Apostles or the Days of Christmas.

Twelve, however, is too many when we're talking about the number of Christmas Eve services a church is offering.

Yes, I said twelve Christmas Eve services. From the Thursday before Christmas through Christmas Eve proper, a church in the Pittsburgh area will be hosting twelve services for one's celebration of Christmas Eve.

And nothing on Christmas Day.

While I can appreciate the wanting to allow people the maximum experience of the celebration of the birth of Jesus, we have to draw the line in the sand (or snow, for the sake of the season) and come to know that what we're doing is not proper in the sense of the season. We're making the worship of Christ at Christmas to become commercial.

We're not asking people to sacrifice their time for God anymore. We're asking God to sacrifice Himself (once again) for the sake of our human pride and arrogance.

Truly, the consumer culture has become the "golden calf" of the Twenty-first Century. To host twelve Christmas Eve Services and nothing on Christmas Day is a complete backwards understanding of what this day is about. (When I was in Wexford, a neighboring non-demoninational church hosted a number of Christmas Eve services, and nothing on Christmas Day - and that REALLY confused me that year, because Christmas fell on a Sunday!) 

This whole time of preparation - Advent, in the Christian calendar - is to allow for us to enter into the Christmas celebration with joy and solemnity. We lose something when a Christian church fits its Christmas service schedule to be as convenient as possible. And while I believe that we need to be aware of the lives that people live outside of the church setting, there is something amiss when we simply make something convenient for the sake of convenience, and do not challenge those followers of Christ to sacrifice a little for the worship of God. (The discussion and reasons I hate having a 4:00 PM Christmas Eve Mass in the Catholic Church is another topic for another day.) Christianity, when made convenient, is not Christianity, but a watered-down version of the Gospel: Making things pretty and fluffy and easy for the sake of the people, not making the people great messengers of the Gospel.

What have we done to the massage of Christmas? We've taken it and allowed it to become about the warm fuzzies and trappings of this time of year. We have abandoned the fact that Christmas is the celebration of the Incarnation of our God, the fact that eternity entered into time, and that this little baby born in a manger was born to die for the sins of all humanity. We take the suffering aspect of Christ's life away this time of year. (Think about how people tend to skip over the fourth verse of "We Three Kings" [dealing with the gift of myrrh], or leaving out the following refrain from "What Child Is This": Nails, spear shall pierce Him through, / The cross be borne for me, for you. / Hail, hail the Word made flesh, / The Babe, the Son of Mary.) We have "domesticated Jesus" (using a quote from Father Robert Barron), and have made Jesus into a feel-good teddy bear, not the Son of God.

What have we done to the message of the Gospel when make the life of a Christian as easy as possible by giving them a church of convenience? We don't allow people to realize that Christianity - or any life of faith, for that matter - is NOT about convenience, but, ultimately, about sacrifice. The fact that we are weak through our humanity should not lead us to bow to those weaknesses because it becomes more of a convenience for people, but, rather, we should be finding ways in which to overcome the softness and conveniences that our day and age have to offer, and challenge ourselves to become more like Christ in our suffering.

Our God did not become one like us so that we can have a life of convenience. Jesus Christ came to Earth so that we can know of the depths of the love of God - even to the point of death. The Passion and Death of Jesus was not done for our convenience, but for our salvation. The Incarnation was not an event in history that happened for the convenience of all creation, but so that we can understand that we are called to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.

It's not out of convenience that we choose Christ. It's out of an encounter with Him that we choose to follow our Savior.

I'm not faulting this church in wanting to serve their people, or to want as many people to gather to celebrate the wondrous event of the Nativity of Christ. I think that twelve services over five days is a little much, and it does feed in to the culture of consumerism and convenience that our society is diving into.

Jesus came to call us to rise above the culture. We need to be able to do so, even if some people call it "inconvenient." The Cross - nor the Crib - is ever convenient in life . . . but they are necessary for our salvation.







Enjoy the journey . . .

Yes.

Homily for the Solemnity of the
 Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
9 December 2013

        Yes.

        This is what we celebrate today: A “yes” to the Lord’s will.

        But not just any “yes”, but a “yes” which would alter the course of humanity; a “yes” which would change the world.

        While we celebrate the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, we prepare our hearts not really for Christmas, but for the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, which we celebrate on March 25^th.

        In a sense, we’re celebrating a “pre-emptive ‘yes’”.

        Remember, our God knows everything about everything, past, present and future. He knew that Mary would say “yes”. But He also knew that Mary would have to freely make that decision on her own, for God will not force His will on anyone – including the Mother of His Son. That is the reason behind free will: We must freely choose the will of God in our lives.

        Yet we celebrate this “pre-emptive ‘yes’” today because, in seeing that she would freely choose the will of God for her, Mary was given that special grace for her vocation – a vocation which was overwhelming! –from the moment of her conception. The Father gave the Blessed Mother the ability to accept His will without compromising her ability to freely choose whether to accept the vocation presented to her.

        This “yes” of Mary is the antithesis and the remedy of the “no” uttered to God by Adam and Eve through their disobedience. Adam and Eve, too, were given free will, and they – like us – abused it. Through their pride and selfishness, they thought that they were “better than God”. We do the same thing when we enter into sin: We believe we know better than God, and we pursue those things which leave us more empty, more broken. We refuse that grace God gives to us to live out the fullness of our vocations.

        We need to become more like Mary.

        True, we were not immaculately conceived, but that doesn’t mean God refuses us the grace to say “yes” to His will. It means that WE refuse that grace when we say “no” to the way He calls us to live.

        We need to become more like Mary.

        True, an angel hasn’t appeared to us to reveal God’s will for our lives. Oh, if it were that simple! But God does reveal His will for us through the people He gives to us in our lives. We simply need to pray and reflect upon those relationships in our lives which open for us the understanding of how God is asking us to fulfill our vocation in life.

        We need to become more like Mary.

        True, like Mary, we are confused by the will of God in our lives. We often ask, “How can this be . . .?” It is through this confusion that we must abandon our will to the will of God. It is through this confusion that we struggle to make the “no” of Adam and Eve the “yes” of Mary. It is through this confusion that we learn to trust in God, and God alone.

        Our “yes” may not be like the “pre-emptive ‘yes’” of Mary, but it is a “yes”, nonetheless. When we, like Mary, abandon our will to that of God’s, then we have that same grace which allowed the Blessed Virgin to fully accept the vocation to which God is calling us. It is through the “yes” that we freely choose that we participate in the remedy of that “no” which our First Parents chose millennia ago.

        In choosing to celebrate the Eucharist this day, we have taken that first step in saying “yes” in freely choosing the will of God over our own will. In celebrating the Eucharist today, we choose to accept the beginnings of the joy which will last into eternity. In celebrating the Eucharist this day, we, like Mary, open ourselves to carry Christ into the world in our own flesh, that through the Word and Sacrament, we may become the messengers of the Good News.

        We must become like Mary: In our free will, we must say “yes”.

 

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Enjoy the journey . . .

The Voice

Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent
8 December 2013

        We’ve all most likely been to a play, movie or other event where we have heard a disembodied voice make an announcement. Sometimes it shocks us; sometimes it makes us laugh. No matter what the circumstance, the voice is “there” to draw our attention to something important, something which is supposed to focus, and possibly shift, the understanding of our reality.

        John the Baptist, however, was not a disembodied voice.

        Nor were the prophets, like Isaiah.

        And, most definitely, Jesus was not a disembodied voice.

        John the Baptist became the final and greatest voice preparing the way of the Lord. He is, as Isaiah foretold, that “voice of one crying out in the desert.” The prophets of the Old Testament leading up to, and now including, John the Baptist tried to help the people of Israel to focus their lives on their relationship with God. They worked on trying to shift the reality of the Israelites from exile and domination to one where God would walk among them, to lead them back to Himself.

        Both in our First Reading and Gospel, Isaiah and John the Baptist are pointing out the fact that the coming of the Messiah was drawing near. But they were also helping to focus the Israelites on the mission of the Christ, which was to, in a modern phrase, “put people in their place.” These great prophets were warning the people of their day that the One for whom they were waiting was coming to not only save, not only to redeem, but also to judge.

        And this, my brothers and sisters, is what Jesus did. He “put people in their place.” He tried to lead the people to not only know the compassion of God, but also the justice of God.

        Now Isaiah and John the Baptist speak to us.

        Each week we profess in our Creed that “[Christ] will come again in glory to judge the living and dead.” We forget that in this day and age. To use a phrase of Father Robert Barron from his Catholicism series, we have “domesticated Christ”: We have made Jesus into a loving teddy bear that showers love upon everybody. And because of this, we have lost the idea of how our sin truly tears at the fabric of our relationship with Christ and His Church.

        We, in our culture and society, have forgotten that we will be judged for those sins of commission and omission, “in what [we] have done and what [we] have failed to do,” as we state in the Confiteor. Yes, our God continues to shower mercy upon His people; yes, our God continues to love us. But we must acknowledge that all of our actions and inactions have consequences . . . and we – either individually or communally – are responsible for those consequences.

        Some here may think that what I am preaching is hard to hear – the old “fire and brimstone,” to use a phrase. But, my children, as your spiritual father, I must now be the voice by which God calls you back to Himself; through the grace of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, it is my responsibility to make sure you get to Heaven. If I fail to preach the teachings of Christ and His Church, I’m not doing my job, and I fail to help you obtain everlasting life.

        However, when we were baptized, we were all anointed as priest, prophet and king, so that we may be conformed more to the image of Christ as members of His Body. It now becomes the responsibility of all the faithful to be that voice which calls all people to a deeper relationship with God. That voice should resound greatly not only by the words that we use to invite and teach others about Jesus Christ, but also in the way that we live our lives in accordance of His great command to love one another as He has loved us. And so, it becomes the responsibility of each person baptized into the Paschal Mystery to lead others to Heaven; we are responsible, in some portion, for each other’s salvation.

        The Word of God is not a disembodied voice. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). And through the humility of the Incarnation, Jesus wished for us to know the mercy and justice of God, so that we may share in His divinity. But are we humble enough to recognize that we need the mercy of God to live this life so that we may be judged worthy to live with Him in the next?

        My brothers and sisters, each person in this church is a sinner – myself included. We all need the grace of God to make it through this life. Sin holds us back from experiencing the fullness of God’s love, and keeps us from leading others closer to Christ. I beg you to look at your life, as I do mine, and see where we have failed to be like John the Baptist as that “voice of one crying out in the desert.”

        I implore you to seek out the graces found in the Sacrament of Reconciliation as soon as possible.

        [At the 4:15 PM Mass: You can take advantage of the Sacrament immediately following Mass this evening.] On Tuesday evening, beginning at 7:00, we will be holding our Advent Parish Penance Service. A number of priests will be available to hear your confession and bring you into right relationship with God. On Wednesday, from 6:00 – 9:00 PM, the Diocese will be holding “The Light is Still On for You!”, another opportunity for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Father Bob and I will be in our confessionals that evening, ready to welcome anyone who comes through those doors to experience the graciousness of our God. And if you know of someone who has not been to confession for a time, invite them to come with you, so that they may have the opportunity to know grace of the Sacrament.

        We, like John the Baptist, like Isaiah, like Jesus, are called to be that voice in the world which calls humanity back to God. But we cannot do it if we refuse the grace of God in our lives. We must remember that we will be judged in how we have used this life to draw ourselves closer to God through our charity – or lack thereof – towards others. Pray God that we will have the courage to accept His grace to be the people He has created and called us to be.

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Enjoy the journey . . .