2024 Dec 15 SUN: THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT Zep 3: 14-18a/ Is 12: 2-3. 4. 5-6 (6)/ Phil 4: 4-7/ Lk 3: 10-18

Very quickly, I want to let you know that we have a number of people who are coming forward and seeking to enter the Catholic Christian way of life, and therefore we are planning to reform our team for what we properly call the Order of Christian initiation of adults, the OCIA.

You'll remember it used to be called the RCIA for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, but now we're told that Order is the proper word rather than Rite.

So we'll be making plans to come together after the first of the year, so you have time to consider whether you might want to participate in the process of bringing people into the Catholic Christian faith.

Obviously, today the theme is joy, and we hear this very clearly from St. Paul. We also hear it from the prophet Zephaniah.

He wrote a very brief book of about three chapters. It is surprising that he ends up talking about joy, because Zephaniah is also the source of a hymn which we don't sing very much anymore.

In Latin it's called the Dies Irae, English is Day of Wrath, and it emphasizes God's anger. So it's surprising that this same prophet should talk to us about our cause for joy for the coming of a Savior.

And in the Gospel we find cause for joy as well. We may think of John the Baptist as a severe sort of person, but it says at the end of today's Gospel passage that he preached good news to the people.

Well obviously we need to consider joy. Some of you may know that I have made a study on my own of what has been called emotional intelligence.

The idea behind that is that we seek to understand our own feeling states. To recognize that, for instance, anger can be channeled into steady work to undo injustice, for instance.

When we understand and are at peace with our own feelings, we can look at other people and develop what we might call fellow feeling or empathy with the people in our life, understanding ourselves as feeling people who are necessarily pushed around by the circumstances of life.

And we remember at all times if we can be pushed around we are limited creatures of God and we always remember our relationship with God, our Creator. In recent times we've been given a sort of vocabulary for understanding feelings.

There have been a couple of animated films that have come out in recent years. The first one, Inside Out, came out in 2015.

And then there was a sequel just this last summer: Inside Out 2. And the feelings in one person are characters in the film.

And in both, there is the character called Joy, and Joy is understood to be kind of a coordinator among all the feelings. We can think about this and realize that, for any one of us, to have joy is to have a sense of the whole of life, the entirety of life.

And we might ask ourselves where is joy when we are feeling sad? -- For instance, when we lose someone close to us.

One thing that sadness can do for us is demonstrate to us how important that person was, what a gift he or she was to us. And ultimately it informs a sense of joy, which joy is about the whole picture of life, the whole variety of life.

So as we come together on this day of Advent called Rejoice Sunday, Gaudete Sunday, we seek to understand that we can be joyful as we look ahead to our God, specifically Jesus, the Son of God, bringing all things to completion and perfection. We've said in recent weeks that we know of people who just think of that occurrence as "the end of the world."

We all have limited imaginations and the notion of the end of the world particularly limits our imaginations because, when all is brought to perfection, that is really the beginning. We step onto the threshold of eternal life itself and an unending joy.

So we give thanks that this season of Advent is preparing us to step onto the threshold of eternity, to find our complete vocation in praise of God who created us to praise him without end.

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I left out a lot from Saturday evening.  I left out John the Baptist almost entirely, and he is described as bringing "good news" to people.  The fact that he tells people, essentially, to do what is expected of you, is a response against elaborate sacrifices for supposedly getting God's attention.

2024 Dec 8 SUN: SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT Bar 5: 1-9/ Ps 126: 1-2. 2-3. 4-5. 6 (3)/ Phil 1: 4-6. 8-11/ Lk 3: 1-6

I imagine that many of us, when we're trying to read the Bible, find a particular frustration in that we would like for the Bible to be sort of like journalism or a history book that mentions dates. We want to know when certain events happened. And the Bible is not good about that. These [issues] are not a priority. 

We do, however, have today the Gospel of Luke. It is using a lot of different data points to fix a particular event in history. And essentially to say that this event is for the sake of rewriting all of human history. Luke does this in the beginning of chapter two. We always hear at the Christmas Mass during the night about the first census of the Roman Empire and the fact that Jesus was born during that time. Luke then turns to a much more recent event, and he has a lot more data points. So we hear about who the emperor was and who the empire's governor was and various kings and high priests. So he fixes a particular time when John the Baptist began his proclamation of good news. And people have studied this, and it would seem then that John the Baptist began his work in the year that we call AD 27 or Common Era CE 27. And scholars have further determined that Jesus must have been crucified in AD 30, thus allowing for what we have traditionally understood to be a three-year public ministry by Jesus. 

And Luke is saying, pay attention. God is entering human history definitively through the Son of God, the Word made flesh. And thereby human salvation is assured, union with our God is assured. And that is the way in which history gets rewritten. This passage quotes Isaiah, who uses an image similar to the prophet Baruch in the first reading. And it must have seemed utterly fantastic what he was describing. I mean, we in our day have earth-moving equipment. But the idea of leveling mountains and filling up valleys, that's still a stretch for us to imagine. 

And these images are being used to say God wants to give us a straight path to Himself. And this is cause for joy. You know that in recent weeks I've been talking about the idea of the end of the world, which idea really does not appear in the sacred scriptures. The Bible does not focus on an end so much as the beginning of eternity. And we know that our hearts must be convicted of this joy that is open to every human being. And we know we are preparing ourselves well to welcome the fullness of the kingdom of God when in accord with St. Paul we seek to discern what is of value. There's another translation I like that says to discover what really matters. And that is the good news that you and I are hearing today. I need to make a transition now because Keith Detmer is going to speak to us about the Centennial Campaign, which is the responsibility of every one of us to participate in. So I will stop there and let Keith continue.

2024 Dec 1 SUN: FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT Jer 33: 14-16/ Ps 25: 4-5. 8-9. 10. 14 (1b)/ 1 Thes 3: 12 -- 4: 2/ Lk 21: 25-28. 34-36

I have been thinking about how the events of our life present a variety of contrasts. Things we may desire, things we may not desire so much.

Yesterday I have to say I was not happy to see the snow come, Although I know that many people like to see the snow. For me it's one more thing to get through and try to live with. 

On the other hand, my nephew scored three touchdowns yesterday.

So this is how we all experience life. It's a series of things.

And I think especially the good things just take us by surprise. And we understand that we do not have to be the ones who die of fright, as Jesus says in the Gospel today. In fact all the Scriptures today are very encouraging.

We have the promise from Jeremiah. This is really a promise and a prophecy related to Jesus. The last shoot shall come to establish justice. 

And likewise St. Paul tells the Thessalonian Christians that they can look forward to what God is bringing.

Again we think of what is coming as something to dread. We can look back two weeks.

You never actually find in the Scriptures the term "the end of the world." But we have that popular notion. And of course most of the time when we hear the word "end" we think that something is over. It is not proceeding further.

And in fact all these blessings that we find in the midst of our sufferings are hints. They are pointing to something far greater than ourselves.

And really the season of Advent is about the good things that are coming to be. As we witness and recognize the fullness of God's Kingdom.

We know that here and now we struggle. So that God's grace might be at work within us. So that we might not be working against ourselves. Allowing the very life of God to show its love and its general goodness in what we do.

So as we enter upon this season we remember that even as we prepare to celebrate the humble coming of our Savior, we look ahead to His glorious coming and realize, "No, we don't have to die of fright." We can be the ones who welcome everything that our God intends to work for us and give to us.

2024 Nov 24 SUN: CHRIST THE KING S (Thirty-fourth and Last Sunday in Ordinary Time) Dn 7: 13-14/ Ps 93: 1. 1-2. 5 (1a)/ Rv 1: 5-8/ Jn 18: 33b-37

This Gospel is a part of the passion according to John, which we read every year on Good Friday. And we need to take note of the overriding quality of that we find here. And that quality is the fact that Jesus is presented to us as someone who, though about to be condemned to death, is in fact in charge of the situation. Pilate is troubled, even though he goes ahead and condemns this man to death. He really doesn't know what is going on. And he is in fact just caught up in events which seem to be of his making because he makes that decision to have Jesus crucified. We heard at the end of this passage Jesus' words, "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." And we may remember that immediately after Jesus makes this statement, Pilate asks, "What is truth?" He is not asking as a sincere seeker. He is asking as a cynic. Because Pilate gave up his search for truth long before this moment. We must understand the kingship of Jesus. Really, Jesus is saying that titles such as king do not do him justice. Very likely Pilate in his conversations with the religious leaders heard them translating Messiah, the anointed one, to mean a king because they thought that was the only way that Pilate would understand what they considered to be the crime of Jesus. So we come to this celebration of Jesus as universal king. And we understand that he reigns over us because he is completely our servant. He has laid down his life for all human beings. And we understand that if we are to serve as Jesus served, we will be looking for ways to aid our brothers and sisters. This is a surprising kingship, and it causes us to feel great surprise within our own hearts every time we think about our crucified king who won for us resurrection.

2024 Nov 17 SUN: THIRTY-THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Dn 12: 1-3/ Ps 16: 5. 8. 9-10. 11 (1)/ Heb 10: 11-14. 18/ Mk 13: 24-32

So this is the time of year when in our liturgical calendar we find ourselves thinking a lot about what theologically we would call the last things. More popularly people will refer to the end of the world, although that specific phrase is not found in the Scriptures. But obviously the idea of the end of the world works upon our imaginations. I was thinking about the fact that there are a number of popular songs that in fact have the end of the world in the title.

For instance you may be familiar with a 1987 song, "It's the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine." I found the lyrics; they go on for a couple of pages and I really couldn't do anything with that song. [Laughter] I would stress that it seems that a lot of the imagination surrounding the end of the world has to do with things happening outside. And it seems these days as if there are some people who want to see it happen, they want to see upheaval and a change of what we expect and they'd like to go and break things to help it along. I don't think that's a good idea. 

But in fact I believe that we can take some of these words of Jesus and other parts of the Scriptures and realize that internally each of us undergoes various upheavals that feel to us like it's the end or we have to start over or we don't really know the way. 

And when it comes to saying oh, it's upon us, well, yes, God is all-powerful, he is the master of his creation and he could intervene at any time and say, well, this is over. But we have to appreciate the fact that God who is the author of time has been operating on a scale of time which is vast. I once put together what you could call kind of a "convincer" so we could get a feel for how vast the expanse of time has been since the Big Bang, which by the way this man did not give it that name, but this astronomer about a hundred years ago found evidence, and he aided this theory, and it happens he was a Catholic priest. Well, what I have here is a little notebook and instead of having a lot of pages it has just one long page of stiff paper and I used both sides of the paper in order to visualize how vast the expanse of time has been. [Shows whole expanse of timeline; laughter] And I like to ask people what one millimeter stands for on this timeline in all the time since the Big Bang, and I do it multiple choice:  is it 300 years or 3,000 years or 3 million years and the answer is 3 million years and you only go a millimeter on this. So that's a good thing to think about, and you know the cosmos will take care of itself, but we have to in fact consider what is going on within us; what are the upheavals that we experience within; what are our insecurities; how do we find that there are things that just don't sustain us. And with regard to those concerns I did find another song about the end of the world which I think really gets to the heart of things. This song is from 1962.

Why does the sun go on shining?  Why does the sea rush to shore?  Don't they know it's the end of the world?  'Cause you don't love me anymore 

Why do the birds go on singing?  Why do the stars glow above?  Don't they know it's the end of the world?  It ended when I lost your love 

I wake up in the morning, and I wonder  Why everything's the same as it was  I can't understand, no, I can't understand  How life goes on the way it does 

Why does my heart go on beating?  Why do these eyes of mine cry?  Don't they know it's the end of the world?  It ended when you said, "Goodbye" 

Well, happily, we have been reading from the great promise that the Letter to the Hebrews gives to us, and we have come today to the last portion [in the Sunday Lectionary] of that amazing book. We've been talking about Jesus as the great high priest and we hear a summary today. Jesus is the great high priest: the one who is at one and the same time the priest offering sacrifice and the sacrifice being offered. He has offered the sacrifice for all of us, once for all, and this is something that we need to search out in our own hearts. Have we accepted that this gift has been given to us? Do we accept that it is personal? Do we accept that it is the opposite of the lyrics of the song that I just recited? We can think about endings all we want but we do in fact have the good news today that accepting this gift is for us the beginning.

2024 Nov 10 SUN: THIRTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 1 Kgs 17: 10-16/ Ps 146: 7. 8-9. 9-10 (1b)/ Heb 9: 24-28/ Mk 12: 38-44 or Mk 12: 41-44

Abundance and scarcity are on our minds as we consider the Scriptures today. We may have a variety of attitudes toward the gifts with which we have been entrusted.

We may think of our situation here and now and say, "There isn't enough for me and for everybody else. I have to hug everything I have to myself." On the other hand, there is the attitude of abundance which recognizes that God gives us gifts and does so unfailingly.

We also have the theme of widowhood in the first reading and the Gospel. We understand widowhood in our own day to be precarious, certainly from an emotional standpoint.

From an economic standpoint, we see that there are many things which make up what we call an economic safety net. But in the times of Elijah and Jesus, such a safety net did not exist.

So the widows we read about here are in an especially precarious position. We may think, "How can it be that a jar of flour will remain filled likewise for a jug of oil? How can that be?" 

Well, you and I are very much accustomed to looking at life in economic terms. We think almost constantly about buying and selling and storing up lest there be a shortage. But we are invited to think in different terms.

And we can gain something from a consideration of today's second reading. We have been reading for several weeks from the letter to the Hebrews, which makes a powerful argument that the sacrifice of Jesus is the one great sacrifice, which frees all of us and allows us to recognize abundance rather than scarcity.

We hear about the sacrifices of old: people slaughtering and burning up livestock. It may seem to us that this is kind of a crude way of thinking we have to get God's attention or we have to demonstrate how sorry we are for our sins.

We may think that this is antiquated behavior, but in fact, you and I engage in similar behavior. Somehow we want to prove that we have a right to be here. We want to prove, for instance, our competence or our closeness to God.

And this leaves us in a place which I would call nervous and unsettled. And in this case, there is an alternative. Jesus has offered the sacrifice of Himself.

He is a great high priest, and He does something that no one else can do. He acts as priest offering the sacrifice, and He is the sacrifice itself. And as Hebrews says, He enters the unique heavenly sanctuary with His own blood.

And therefore, He has given us salvation and everything that flows from that gift, including a mentality of abundance. So we can use our imaginations and think of ourselves perhaps finding every sort of goods, every sort of services in our lives, but then we still don't have a direction.

Now that is scarcity, but abundance is knowing that we are God's beloved children, that we can count on abundance in anything that we find making its way into our hands.

We are people, not of scarcity, but abundance.

You may know that I and the various liturgical ministers get ready for Sunday Mass in a little room back in this corner.  It's called the prep room.  And it is a relatively small space for the number of people who gather there.  So I find myself getting vested for Mass and I try to catch a glimpse of myself in a full-length mirror, to make sure that the chasuble is on straight.  And yesterday before four o'clock Mass I was having a bit of trouble because there were so many people and someone remarked to me, "Ah, you can do it blind." 

Well, perhaps I can, but I just find this to be an instance in which I am very well aware of how much I depend on my sense of sight for this and for so many things.  And we can all reflect on how we rejoice in our gift of vision.  We can think at this time of year -- even if we've seen it year after year -- we still marvel as we watch the colors of the leaves changing at this time of year. 

Now Bartimaeus had a clear understanding of what he wanted to do with the gift of sight, which came to him as Jesus said, "Because of his faith."  He wanted to follow Jesus and the gift of sight permitted him to do this easily.  And he did it. 

We know that our eyes can be fixed on a variety of things, some of which are a good deal more important than other things.  We know we want our very soul to be filled up with what our God presents to us to be seen.  And of course that includes all of God's people, the dignity of every human being and our call to help one another to know that God is in our midst.  At the same time, we understand that there is something that goes beyond mere seeing.  We can find a hint of it in the Hebrews reading today, where we come to understand that our Savior, who is truly God and truly human, has tremendous mercy and compassion for all of us.  And that really is something which goes beyond seeing.  Actually, seeing can sometimes get in the way of understanding.  We tend to equate knowing with seeing an image of something.  But in fact, we're just seeing an image.  Understanding goes deeper.  And at times, we just have to look away from things in order to understand. 

Now you remember on Easter Sunday, we have that gospel of Peter and John inspecting Jesus' empty tomb.  They did not see him there. They looked around the tomb and saw various burial wrappings.  They were strewn about, and there was the one that had covered Jesus' head, rolled up in a place by itself.

They didn't see the risen Jesus right away, but they looked around the tomb. And finally, they understood so many things that they were afraid to ask him about -- things that they tried to ignore, in fact, because they didn't want to think about his death.  And they didn't know what to do with rising on the third day.  Finally, they understood. And this really went beyond seeing.

Likewise, in the psalm today, the people are exclaiming that the Lord has done great things for us.  We are filled with joy because they were set free from their captivity in Babylon.  You don't have to see something in order to understand.  We are going home.  So we recognize how much we depend upon the gift of sight.  And likewise, we see that we are led to something that goes even deeper, to understanding who our God is.  And really, we can equate understanding with faith.  Jesus says to Bartimaeus, "Your faith allows you to see."  We must understand our own understanding and see that understanding is a function of faith.  And it feeds faith as well.  We give thanks, as Peter and John did, for all the things that have been told to us that maybe we can't quite put into place.

The witness of the People of God, the Church throughout the centuries and today: we take it all in.  We understand.  We grow in faith.

The homilist was away last week.

Well the young people sitting up front here spent a night -- I don't know how comfortable it was because they were sleeping outside during the night.  It's what we call cardboard city.  It is an opportunity for them to have an experience of homelessness.  And I wonder whether at school you know people who are similar to what I am going to describe to you.

In high school I had two classmates who had this ongoing feud about which one of them was taller.  It happened that they were the two shortest guys in the class. And right there we find something about the futility, the nonsense of seeking distinction.  Or trying to prove that someone is somehow superior.

Well this is what we find in the Gospel.  James and John want distinction.  I suspect that if Jesus gave them their wish, and I don't know which of them was the older, they might have decided that these places were dissatisfying because the right side is considered preferable to the left.  So there may well have been some kind of dispute over that.

We see the folly of this.  We understand that we must begin our understanding of ourselves by knowing that our God loves each one of us to a degree we cannot conceive.  And it is from that awareness of God's complete love for us that we can carry out our life unconcerned about distinctions: that we will make our lives acts of thanksgiving.

Jesus asks them, "Can you drink the cup that I drink?" The Old Testament passage and the selection from Hebrews today remind us of that cup that Jesus drank.  He laid down his life.

He did something which only he could do.  As God, he was able to take the initiative.  As human, he was able to offer up human nature itself.

This is a summary of what I preached on Sunday, October 6, 2024, the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

So we had a Gospel about marriage accompanied by Genesis 2 and the creation of a woman.

This is always an occasion to talk about marriage, and I have to say the main point I was driving at that day was that before people can be spouses they have to be friends; they have to enjoy a deep friendship.

I used once again the exchange in Act 2 of the play "Our Town" in which George and Emily are coming close to saying to one another that they are to be married.

I did not record the homily as I got distracted that day. That was the day that we held the Mass in the Grass in the Troy Park at the Gazebo.

And it was a beautiful, perfect day to be out, and that was what distracted me from the duty to record the homily.

2024 Sep 29 SUN: TWENTY-SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Nm 11: 25-29/ Ps 19: 8. 10. 12-13. 14 (9a)/ Jas 5: 1-6/ Mk 9: 38-43. 45. 47-48

Very briefly I want to talk about some things in the second half of this Gospel and in the second reading. We know that Jesus is not calling us literally to maim ourselves. He is making a point that it is better to enter the kingdom of heaven one way or another rather than fail to do so. In the second reading -- this is our last selection from the letter of James -- James is already bemoaning the fate of those who cling to their riches. If they cling to them they cannot with open arms receive the gift of the kingdom of heaven. You and I may not consider ourselves especially wealthy but actually our economic standard of living is the envy of billions. We have to keep in mind that we are called to live lives of sharing with those in need. 

The main thing I want to get to here is the theme that is obviously set up by the passage from Numbers and by the Gospel today. And it has to do with the question who is in and who is out. And we hear that Jesus is talking about inclusion. And that's especially important to think about because very recently Pope Francis made some statements about non-Christian religions and a lot of people were bothered by it.

But the Pope was saying something that was entirely consistent with the Second Vatican Council: that all who are yearning for and seeking what is good and true and holy will find themselves united with the Son of God who offered himself for all people, past, present, and future. I call this the anthropological principle of the Christian faith. It's something we find in no other religion.

And it's entirely based upon the fact that the Son of God saw fit to unite himself with our human nature and with every one of us individually. I can remember at the end of my first semester of working on a degree in theology that I had an oral exam. And the professor asked me, "How do we know that people are united with Jesus?" And I found myself struggling to come up with an answer. But the professor provided the answer for me. And I look upon this still as a great moment of wisdom, by receiving great wisdom,  when he said, "By the very fact that the Son of God has taken on human flesh, all people are united with Jesus." 

And whenever I think about his telling me that, I find myself looking at my hands. I'm looking at my human flesh, and I think of the human flesh of all people. And I realize the gift has been given. 

You and I, especially as we witness a baptism today, have the joy of explicitly proclaiming faith in the Word-made flesh. And we can be confident that people who are earnestly seeking what is true and what is good, people who have never heard of Jesus, and even people who think they know Jesus and reject Him, all these people can be welcomed in. I am sure that it has occurred to many of us that God becoming human is the way that humans need to be loved. We all have our bad days, and sometimes those bad days can extend to weeks and months. We're just not sure of what this is all about, being human, but we have the good news that the Son of God has been absolutely the opposite of indifferent to our human state and to our struggles. And of course, He laid down His life and rose victorious. In all this we trust.