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We are given very powerful readings today,
So today we’re given three challenges:
First Paul says, be transformed.
But Jesus is patient with Peter,
It’s challenging to be transformed,
Lakes benefit from water constantly coming in and going out,
And that’s our second challenge,
Our soul thirst for Jesus, the living water.
Today we are challenged to ask ourselves,
Peter was constantly in need of transformation and renewal.
We see this kind of renewal and transformation in the Church
And discernment is the third challenge we hear
Peter was able to discern the will of God about the Gentiles
So often we think we know what God wants
There is a lot of rebuking and persecuting going on today,
Today we are challenged to examine our lives,
We are blessed to have St. Peter as our parish patron.
It’s a sad fact of history
While they were there at Dachau,
These 2500 priests considered all of this,
But that was not the complete question they asked.
We must do better.
He says, “your righteousness must surpass that
The law is not simply to be observed,
It is not enough to merely avoid murdering someone, he says,
If you have conflict, resolve it.
It is not enough to avoid committing adultery.
It is not enough to avoid false oaths.
This is what Jesus is telling his disciples.
When we look at the world today,
When we look at our nation,
Even when we look inside our Church,
The 2500 priests at Dachau who saw the need to do better
Whenever we humble ourselves enough to serve others,
When we serve others,
So as the priests in Dachau
I’ve brought in this image of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet,
But the priests at Dachau intended something more.
And so they began to think the time had come
The priests in Cellblock 26 saw the need
That is what those 2500 priests concluded,
That decision is what allows me to stand before you,
But when we look at the current conflicts in our world,
So I ask you to find some individual or some group that you can serve;
Christ the Servant went to uncomfortable places
Today Jesus asks us to surpass the righteousness
It is not easy;
Today I urge you to find a way to serve others,
With Lent approaching,
The world desperately needs to see Christ, the Prince of Peace.
The feast of the Epiphany commemorates the arrival of the magi,
The magi in the Gospel of Matthew found Jesus in their own way.
These three magi, or wise men, read and studied the signs,
For some of us, our journey might be similar:
Such was the case with the other wise man, Artaban.
It seems that Artaban had studied the stars with his friends
One night, Artaban looked up and said,
Sometimes we think we may have “missed the boat,”
But Artiban was persistent.
However, he couldn’t cross the desert with only a horse,
So Artaban set off for Bethlehem, hoping to meet his friends there.
Artaban’s spirit was crushed.
Sometimes our spirits are crushed.
And then it gets worse.
For just then, soldiers arrived in the village,
From Bethlehem Artaban traveled on to Egypt,
And so Artaban traveled from place to place, visiting the oppressed.
He had come for the last time to Jerusalem, still looking for the King.
Nazareth? The King of the Jews!
But just then a troop of Roman soldiers came down the street,
Artaban knew what he had to do.
Suddenly there was a great earthquake,
Sometimes we feel the same way, that we have failed.
You see, then came a voice through the twilight, very small and still.
The sweet voice came again, faint and far away,
A calm radiance of wonder and joy lighted the face of Artaban
Not one of us travels the same road.
On this feast of the Epiphany,
What has your journey been like?
[Click here to read the full version of “The Story of the Other Wise Man” by Henry van Dyke]
Once upon a time there were two towers.
Today Jesus talks to the crowds about building a tower.
There is a cost to building a tower.
The spiritual writer Dietrich Bonhoeffer explores this idea
“Cheap grace is grace without discipleship,
“Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow,
“…what has cost God so much cannot be cheap for us.”
Jesus did not give up his life for us
He gave up his life so we could follow him 24/7:
Today we hear Jesus ask us if we have we factored that
Jesus is inviting us to do the same thing
Returning to the two unfinished towers we started with,
But there are also some significant differences between them.
Jesus talks about the man who doesn’t finish his tower
La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
Now the second tower in our story
Its chief architect was Antoni Gaudi,
But what’s different about La Sagrada Familia,
It will have three grand facades,
When Gaudi died in 1926,
Maybe some of you here have seen it in person,
The construction of this church is a metaphor
Gaudi calculated correctly.
And so that begs the question, where are we in our spiritual lives?
When we honor Jesus with our lives,
And so this week we’re invited to recalculate our spiritual life,
As we look at the spiritual life we are building,
On this Solemnity of Pentecost the red vestments and red altar cloths are reminiscent of the fire that descended on the disciples. We see this color more and more in our own lives as the weather heats up and the fire season begins.
As we know so well from the fires that typically begin to plague us in the summer, fire can be destructive and deadly.
That’s one of the reasons pop singer Billy Joel used fire as a metaphor for chaos, crime, and war in his 1989 song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” He got the idea for the song from a conversation he’d had with a young man. Joel had just turned 40 years old, and the young man told him that the world was in an “unfixable mess.” When Joel tried to console him by saying, “I thought the same thing when I was your age,” the young man replied, “Yeah, but you grew up in the fifties, and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties.”
Joel was taken aback by this and replied, “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of Korea, the Hungarian freedom fighters, or the Suez Crisis?” Those events then became the origin of the song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Throughout the course of the song, Joel sings a litany of headlines from 1949 to 1989: North and South Korea, Joseph Stalin, the Thalidomide children, the Bay of Pigs invasion, Watergate, AIDS. And as Joel rattles off headline after headline, the chorus pounds out:
We didn’t start the fire
It’s been over thirty years since Billy Joel wrote those words, and unfortunately we can keep adding to his list of headlines: the pandemic, the epidemic of school shootings, the war in Ukraine. And on and on and on.
It sometimes seems that our world has always been engulfed in a raging wildfire, and we don’t know how to put it out.
How do we fight it?
One possible answer is to fight fire with fire.
We see the fire of the Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles today. “From the sky a noise like a strong driving wind,” “tongues as of fire.” It sounds like a wildfire from heaven.
The Holy Spirit descends like fire upon the disciples gathered together, but unlike a wildfire, it does not consume them. This is a different kind of fire.
Think of the burning bush on Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Law. God was present in a bush that burned but was not consumed, and from that fire God gave Moses the Law. It was that Law that connected the Israelites to their God. For generations, the way to be in relationship to God was to be faithful to the Law, to follow the instructions of the Torah.
For Jews, Pentecost celebrates the giving of the Torah, the giving of the Law to God’s people. The Law comes to Moses from a burning bush that is not consumed.
It is fitting then, that it is on Pentecost that the disciples receive the fire that burns but does not consume. The Law is now written on their hearts. That burning bush now dwells within them. They burn with God’s presence and are not consumed.
We, too, have received this fire. Through Baptism, Confirmation, and the continued reception of the Eucharist, the Holy Spirit has come to us “like a strong driving wind,” in “tongues as of fire.”
So on the one hand we have the raging fire of violence, destruction, and death outlined by Billy Joel’s song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and on the other we have the fire of the Holy Spirit descending on the apostles.
Is this how we fight the fire that Billy Joel writes about? Do we fight fire with fire?
Yes. And no.
When we hear the phrase “fight fire with fire,” we likely think of using an opponent’s strategy against him or her.
For instance, in politics, if an opponent starts slinging mud, then a candidate might fire with fire by slinging mud right back.
Or in business, if I’m competing for a promotion and someone tries to make me look bad to ruin my chances, then I might decide to fight fire with fire and try to make them look bad, too.
Or personally, if someone’s always picking on me or insulting me, then I could fight fire with fire and insult them right back.
But this isn’t the original meaning of fighting fire with fire.
The phrase “fighting fire with fire” comes from a strategy in battling wildfires. When a wildfire begins to get out of control, firefighters deliberately set what’s called a back fire in the path of the oncoming wildfire. This is not so that the two fires “battle it out.” Instead, as the back fire burns, it consumes fuel so that the primary fire has no tinder when it reaches the edge of the fire line.
The back fire burns up the grassland, the vegetation, and other flammable material so that when the main fire arrives, there is nothing left to burn. It can’t spread.
The Holy Spirit is like a back fire for our world. The Holy Spirit consumes the fuel for our fires. It’s like the refining fire in the book of the prophet Malachi that we hear during Advent. The Holy Spirit burns away our prejudice, our pride, our doubts, and our fears.
When we burn with the love of God in our hearts, there’s no room for fires of rage and hatred.
The key to stopping the wildfires in our culture is to allow the Holy Spirit to do its work of burning away the jealousy, hatred, prejudice, and fear that lie within us.
This is what the first Christians did. It’s what the saints have done throughout the ages. They set back fires of the Holy Spirit to starve the raging fires of sin.
The first disciples didn’t fight fire with fire by battling the Romans. They fought the fires of persecution with fires of baptism.
And that, too, is our call. Jesus’ words to the disciples are meant for us too: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
On this Solemnity of Pentecost, we remember our call to bring the Holy Spirit to the world, the fire within us that burns without consuming.
It’s a fire that says, “Turn the other cheek.”
It’s a fire that says, “Love your enemies.”
It’s the fire that gave St. Thomas More the determination to stand up to Henry VIII.
It’s the fire that gave St. Maximilian Kolbe the confidence to give his life in place of a stranger at Auschwitz.
It’s the fire that sustained Mother Teresa through years of discouragement and darkness.
It’s the same fire that St. Ignatius of Loyola was talking about when he told the Jesuits to “set the world aflame.”
This is the fire that makes a difference in the world.
It makes a difference in our personal lives, and it makes a difference in our culture.
It burns away our selfishness, our pettiness, our prejudices, and our fears, so that they can be replaced by self-giving love.
We see that fire most clearly in the burning heart of Jesus hanging on the cross, not a political leader come to overthrow the Romans with the fire of battle, but a servant leader come to transform hearts with the fire of sacrificial love.
It is His Holy Spirit we celebrate today, and it is his Spirit that sets our hearts on fire so that we can fight the fire of sin with the fire of the Holy Spirit.
If you have been listening to the Bible in a Year podcast and are still on schedule,
We have all heard these stories before,
The signs and wonders Jesus performed were powerful and effective,
Some might say we need those signs and wonders today,
Then, like the early disciples,
But let us not be jealous of those early Christians
On the contrary, as St. Augustine says,
Even those who lived with Jesus and saw him every day
Only after this could Thomas,
Now we might ask:
The disciples had left everything behind to follow him.
Their pain and disappointment was a gaping wound
It was only when the disciples saw the Lord’s wounds,
And when Thomas finally exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!”,
And who are those,
When, later on, the Lord had ascended from human sight
How blessed we are, indeed,
Like the disciples, we have our own deep wounds,
On this Divine Mercy Sunday,
Like the disciples, we gather here on the first day of the week.
When we come forward to receive Holy Communion,
St. Augustine tells us that such a faith is beautiful to behold,
Let us not long for the signs and wonders
Jesus “was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days,
Entering fully into Lent means leaving our comfort zone
It all begins with the Spirit.
Lent is the season for us to place ourselves
This Lenten season is the time to examine the voices we listen to—
But to get there, the Spirit first leads us into the desert.
And what is the desert?
This Lenten season is the time to let the Spirit lead us to a place apart.
During Lent we are led into a desert of fasting and focus,
Lent is characterized by the Spirit, by the desert, and finally, by temptation.
Lent is a time for us to return over and over to the Word of God
Today’s gospel is a powerful lesson for us.
About five or six years ago there was a poll
Happy Birthday Princess,
We get old and get used to each other.
Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit.
But once in awhile, like today,
Happy Birthday Princess. – John
Now there are many things to love about that letter.
But aside from that, there’s a real honesty to the letter,
It’s just beautiful, and it’s no wonder that it was voted
Now I bring this up today
Love seeks expression.
And what is the Word of God?
Out of love, the Father gives the Son as gift to the world.
Like all married couples,
No, when we get love letters from our beloved,
And that’s why it’s so important for us to read Scripture regularly.
And so that’s one reason the parish is promoting
If you’ve been listening to the podcast for the first three weeks,
It can be really helpful to listen to the Word of God in its entirety,
Reading our love letter from God
When you encounter a word or phrase like that, you stop reading
Eventually, you may feel inspired
For instance, if you were reading today’s gospel,
When mature lovers speak to each other,
Just like Johnny Cash writes,
We get old and get used to each other.
This is what happens to us the more regularly we pray with Scripture,
Reading the Bible this way is not about figuring it all out,
On this Word of God Sunday,
Today is the feast of the Holy Family,
A story of a family taking a long trip during the holiday season
I’m speaking of course of that 1990 movie Home Alone,
His wish gets granted when,
And just as Mary and Joseph don’t realize
It takes Mary and Joseph several days to find Jesus
In the end, Jesus is reunited with his family,
It’s good to look at these two stories together
Here in front of us we have the beautiful manger scene
And now picture an imaginary line running the length of the floor
The Church sets the Holy Family before us today as our model,
How could our families ever be that perfect?
But holiness doesn’t come from our being good enough,
And so what we learn about family from the Holy Family
The Holy Family was holy because Jesus was there,
Our families are holy to the extent that Jesus is present in them.
If you think back over the past few days,
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph lived lives of self-giving sacrifice.
Reconciliation is another sign of holiness in a family.
And then there’s joy.
Whenever there is sacrifice, reconciliation, and joy,
Now it is very possible that for some,
And so as we recall our vocation to be holy,
But we have a God who will never disappear,
There is no text for my homily this past weekend, just the audio. But here is the video for “If You Eat Each Day” by Bryan Sirchio, from which I quoted:
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