Knowing

Hello, my name is Norman, and I am a nerd.  I always have been, and with sixty years of nerdhood behind me, it’s a pretty safe bet that I always will be.

I read voraciously; number games spin around in my head; I revel in crossword puzzles and jigsaws, Sudoku and Ken-Ken, cryptograms and acrostics.  I was never very athletic, but I know about all the strategies and statistics.  And like most nerds, I would have been voted “most socially inept” in high school if we had had such a superlative.

Today, I’m still more wallflower than butterfly, but at least I understand the rationale behind my nerdy social ineptitude.  Like most nerds, I know a lot about a lot of things.  Yet knowing about things is not the same as knowing things.  As long as I remain in the world of things, this distinction is not that important.  But when I enter the world of people, it becomes critical.

I can learn a lot about another person by simply applying my highly developed nerd study skills.  That’s okay, but if I don’t go beyond that, I’m simply an extra in The Big Bang Theory.  The only way to move beyond “knowing about” a person to “knowing” a person is to be with that person, to share experiences and feelings, likes and dislikes with that person, to laugh and mourn with that person, to celebrate and commiserate with that person.  It is only in relationship that we can truly know a person.

By definition, this relationship thing is awkward for most nerds like me, for it takes us far beyond our “knowing about” comfort zone.  But if we’re lucky, we get past this at least once in our lives, and, if we’re really lucky, as I have been, one of those times can lead to a lifetime relationship with a spouse whom we come to know as well as we know ourselves, with whom we become as one, and without whom we are incomplete.

Since our very creation, the Bible tells us, God has desired this same intimate relationship with each one of us.  He wants us to know Him that we might feel one with him, desperately incomplete without Him.  And yet, in our pride, in our desire to simply know ourselves, we shy away from God, refusing his invitation to relationship, to knowing.  Perhaps this is natural, for there was and is an unimaginably vast difference between the infinite, almighty God and our mere mortal and temporal world.  It makes sense that we are more comfortable in a world we can see and hear, touch and taste.  Yet, God will not abandon us.

God becomes one of us.  He becomes Emmanuel – “with us” – taking on our creatureliness and our frailty, taking on our pains and our sufferings, our life and our death, that we might come to know Him better, that we might be one with Him forever.   We will soon enter into great celebration of this amazing gift of incarnation, as we do each year at Christmas time. 

And yet, and yet, how often I can still resist the relationship.  Surely, I know a lot about Jesus – and it's good that I know a lot about Jesus – but it’s not good enough. 

How well do I share my successes and my failures with Jesus in prayer?  How well do I celebrate with Jesus in the sacraments, opening myself up to his presence, his mercy and his love?  How well do I join with Jesus in service to others, as he has served me?  How well do I see my spousal relationship with Mary – a relationship I know I would be completely lost without – how well do I see this relationship not simply as my good fortune, but as a blessing from God, a sign of the relationship God desires to have with me?  How well do I know Jesus, Emmanuel who has always been with me, and who promises to be with me until the end of the age?

These are the Advent questions we ponder as we prepare to rejoice in the relationship that God has desired to have with us from the very beginning, that God made possible through the incarnation of his only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and that God strengthens and encourages us to live through the Holy Spirit who abides in us.

Expectations

Expectations can be deadly.

Among people of Jesus' day, many different expectations existed about the Messiah and what he would bring.  Some expected a prophet like Moses, leading the people from slavery and bringing God's final laws to them.  Some expected a great military leader like David, someone to conquer the Romans, and bring Israel back to its former glory.  John the Baptist expected the Messiah to bring final judgment, laying ax to the root of the tree, burning the chaff in unquenchable fire.

No one expected Jesus.  They expected laws; they got beatitudes.  They expected conquest, they got humility.  They expected vengeance and human justice; they got love and divine mercy.  They expected vindication; they got reconciliation.  They expected pain; they got healing.

Some of those around Jesus let their pride – their certainty as to what they needed – keep them from changing their expectations.  They were blind to Jesus' messiahship, deaf to Jesus' teachings, and stumbled over Jesus' divinity.

But have things changed that much in two thousand years?  As Christmas nears, what do we expect?

Do I expect to find true joy in the presents under the tree or will I look to the presence of God in my heart?

Do I expect to vindicate myself with gossip and sarcasm, or will my prayers heal and reconcile me with others?

Do we expect to protect ourselves and defeat our enemies with bombs and bullets or will we build peace with the compassion of Jesus and with God's divine justice?

Do we expect to eliminate evil by destroying life with the executioner's chair or will we conquer evil with good, seeing the image and goodness of God within ourselves and within every other person?

As was true two thousand years ago, expectations can determine how we accept Jesus.  We can be blind, we can be deaf, or we can be lame – if we wish.  Or, we can ask God to open our eyes that we may see Jesus as our divine savior and Lord, to open our ears that we may hear Jesus' words of truth and salvation, and open our hearts that we might have the courage and strength to walk with Jesus, to love with Jesus, building up the kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven.

An Easy Yoke

This morning, we hear what is perhaps the most personal of Jesus’ metaphors recorded in Scripture – my yoke is easy, my burden is light. (Mt 11:30)

In his day, as it is today in much of the less-developed, agricultural societies, a yoke, whether a single yoke that a person may use to carry a heavy load, or a double yoke that may have joined a team of oxen to plow a field, would have been made of wood, the work of a carpenter.  And if the carpenter was particularly skilled and had custom-fit that yoke precisely to the person or team which was to use it, it would ride easy on their shoulders, it would make their burden light.  Presumably, St. Joseph and Jesus would have made many an easy yoke in the carpentry shop of Nazareth.  It could not have been more natural –and perhaps more personally pleasing to him – for Jesus to use this as a metaphor for the peace he would bring to those who accepted him and his love.

Yet this pleasing prospect – certainly good, even great, news – seems contradicted by a more well-known metaphor.  Throughout his ministry, Jesus insists that we must shoulder not an easy yoke, but a heavy cross, following him to Calvary.   Does the heavy cross also make our burdens light?  How can we reconcile these seemingly contradictory images?

A year ago today, we could not have imagined how urgent this question would be for us in Newtown.  This weekend, we will face this conundrum head on. 

On Saturday, we will gather to remember and mourn for the great loss we suffered, a hole carved out of our hearts that will never be filled.  We remember the pain and grief we endured that still throbs within us to this very day.  

On Sunday, we light the pink candle in our Advent wreath and don the pink vestments for Mass, recalling St. Paul’s admonition to rejoice always, for Christ’s coming into the world shows us that Jesus’ yoke is not made of wood, but made of the unconditional, eternal, infinite love of God.  God so loved the world, he gave his only Son. 

When we accept in our hearts that we are loved despite our sins, despite our failings, and despite our weakness, we are filled with profound joy.  It is a joy which cannot be engendered by a beribboned Lexus, a joy more lasting than the most perfectly-cut diamond, and a joy which the festive tree and its trimmings can only begin to hint at.  In turn, this joy leads to a profound peace, a peace which cannot be won by any army or secured by any treaty. 

This joy and peace becomes a great light within us – the light of Christ’s love which the darkness cannot overcome.  It is a yoke that makes the heaviest cross bearable.

This weekend, we will gather to not only remember our loss, our pain and our grief, but also to recall the thousands of people who mourned with us that weekend and in the months to come; the millions of prayers offered in our support; the countless gifts of consolation showered on us from around the world.   Each person, each prayer, each consolation reminds us to this day of God’s great and powerful love, the love which we chose to be our shield, our light, and our yoke.

It is Jesus’ yoke, and he guarantees us today that no matter how heavy the cross, his yoke is easy, his burden is light.

We believe.  We choose love.

The Peaceable Kingdom

When I listen to our reading this morning from Isaiah (Is 11:6-9), soft flutes and violins are playing a lilting pastoral melody in the background.  The lion with the goat, the leopard with the kid, the world at peace…it is such a comforting vision.

But, we turn to the Gospel passage (Mt 3:1-12) and are bombarded with clashing cymbals, booming bass drums, and discordant horns blaring.  John the Baptist is yelling at us to repent, calling the Pharisees a brood of vipers, chaff burned in everlasting fire.  What happened to the flutes and violins?

Yet, there is a connection.  To get to the peace of Isaiah’s vision, to hear the flutes and violins, we have to listen to John, and repent, reforming our lives to account for the coming of Jesus.  This is why we have seasons like Advent and Lent.  In the “ordinary” times of the year, I often become lost in the chaff of daily tasks and troubles and miss the big picture completely.  Advent and Lent are times to put aside our preoccupations with our mundane, daily concerns and think about the bigger picture.

John calls us to repent, to change our minds, to re-form our lives, to break down the walls which keep us from the one who brings real peace to the world, to re-form ourselves into members of the Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom.

Jesus’ coming impels us, as John reminds the Pharisees, to live lives of faith which bear good fruit.  For much of my life, my faith meant that I should keep the rules, follow the commandments, and keep to the straight and narrow. 

It was that narrow part that got me in trouble.  My religion was essentially a private religion.  It was just about me, as narrow as my own person.  It was a religion that was only visible on Sunday morning, when I went to church.  What happened in the world was not so important, how I affected the world was almost immaterial, as long as I kept the rules.

But the peaceable kingdom is one of relationships.  It is a kingdom where all have fully realized the unconditional love that God has bestowed on them, burning away the chaff of fears and wants and filling their lives with hope and abundance.  This not only transforms individual lives, but transforms our relationships with each other.  Desperate enemies become fast friends.  Today, the Psalmist tells us that the poor are rescued, the afflicted are helped, the lowly are treated with compassion, and, as a result, justice and peace shall flower (Ps 72:1-13).  St. Paul reinforces the communal nature of the peaceable kingdom, as he prays that we think in harmony with one another, that we welcome one another as Christ welcomed us. (Rom 15:5-7). 

This compassion and unity is the fruit that the Pharisees were missing, that I was missing, that I can still miss when my religion remains my own, private affair; that I can still miss when I am consumed by my desires to earn love and honor through my own hard work and self-righteousness.

This Advent, I pray for me as I pray for you, that Jesus shows us the chaff in our lives, the parts that keeps us from realizing that his love is a gift, undeserved, yet infinite and everlasting.  I pray that he gives us the courage to burn that chaff, that we may become the flutes and the violins accompanying His peaceable kingdom.

The Power of Advent

Throughout the Bible, food is seen as a sign of God’s providential love.  The miraculous feeding with a few fish and loaves is the only miracle – other than the resurrection of Jesus – that appears in all four gospels.  In fact, it appears six times, for both Matthew and Mark relate two versions of this story. 

In the parable of the sheep and the goats, the first of the works of mercy which the Son of Man considers a marker of those who were to be admitted to the kingdom was, “I was hungry and you gave me food.” (Mt 25:35)

As we see in today’s passage from Isaiah (Is 26:6-10), heaven itself was often imaged as a great and bountiful feast of food and wine.  Jesus uses this same imagery in several of his parables. 

In an economy of subsistence agriculture, desperate, life-threatening hunger is just one bad harvest away.  Virtually everyone in Jesus’ day – as is true in many places of the world today – would have known times of extreme hunger.  Thus, the presence of food was an occasion to give great thanks and praise to God.

For me, not so much.  Like the air that I breathe, food is just there.  I’ve always known that the next meal is only hours away; snacks are even closer!  In some sense, I take food for granted.  And this is my great loss.

For whenever I take something for granted, I begin to think that it is my right to have it.  I deserve it.  I’ve earned it by my hard work or my goodness.  Ultimately, this becomes true of everything that comes my way.  I deserve the good food, the big house, the fancy car, the warm clothes, and all the comforts of life.  And if I feel that I deserve everything I have, why should I be grateful?  Who would I need to thank?

When I am completely lost in this world of ingratitude, I find that I even take my life for granted.  I wake up in the morning and immediately start thinking of all the things I must do, the people I must see, and the places I must go.  I’ve taken for granted, of course, that the day would be there, and that I would wake up to live this day to see to my oh-most-important tasks.  I have taken my life for granted.

My ungrateful world, while seeming at most times to be a most warm and pleasurable place, is actually cold and ugly, for at its center is a stony heart, shut off from the love of God.

When someone threatens what I take for granted as my just desserts, I become indignant and angry.  I strike out at those who threaten me or take what is mine.  And yet I am never satisfied with what is mine, for I see others who have even more.  Why is this more not also my rightful due?  I become grasping and greedy as I crave to have the things that others have, the things that I don’t have, yet must have. 

Advent is a season to reawaken my heart to God’s great love, to break the chains of ingratitude which bind my heart in selfishness and greed.

Advent prepares us to celebrate the greatest gift we could possibly receive, a greater gift than life itself.  In a few short weeks, we will celebrate the gift of salvation, of God-become-man, God sharing our humanity that we may share God’s divinity.  We could not have done this by ourselves, and we did not do anything to deserve this wonder, for this gift was tendered “while we were still sinners.”  (Rom 5:8).  It is a gift of unimaginable, unlimited, unconditional love.

Opened up by gratitude, we become more aware of this great love God has for us.  A virtuous cycle ensues. 

Aware of God’s great love, we begin to see our very life as a gift from God, an occasion for thanks and praise.  We begin to see our possessions as precious not because they are our right, or because they make our life more pleasant or easy, but precious because they are gifts from our all-loving God, the source of all happiness, the source of all joy.

As we begin to see our lives and our possessions as precious gifts, gifts which God continues to provide each and every day – the day itself being God’s gift – we become generous in sharing these gifts with others, serving Christ who comes to us each day in the guise of one of his children in need.

In sharing God’s love today, we prepare ourselves to receive the culmination of God’s gift, the promised final coming of Jesus, bringing the fullness of God’s kingdom to earth.

This time of year, we often wish people a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.  We don’t seem to have a similarly apt adjective for Advent.  Here is my thought.

Have a most grateful Advent.

The writing on the wall

I have always been fascinated as to how the language in the Bible has influenced the English language.  I avidly read David Crystal’s Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language when it was published in 2010 to celebrate the 500^th anniversary of that translation.  The book describes how people often use expressions from the Bible not only to recall a particular Bible message or to set a spiritual tone, but also when they don’t even know the phrase came from the Bible, for the phrase has just become one more thread in the rich tapestry of English.

 

Abraham Lincoln was a tone-setter extraordinaire and his speeches were generally filled with biblical allusions.  I was reminded of this a week or so ago as we were remembering the Gettysburg Address.  Surely, he could have said, “Eighty-seven years ago…”  Instead, he said, “Four score and seven years ago…,” alluding to Psalm 90 where our life span is described as “three score years and ten” (Ps 90:10 KJV) When Lincoln used these allusions, he meant for his listeners to know – and virtually all of them would have “gotten” the allusion – that the purpose of the Civil War, and of the very founding of our country, was not simply political, but more importantly, spiritual.

 

On the other hand, this morning, we read from the fifth chapter of Daniel the origin of the term “the writing on the wall.”  Even among people who do not know its biblical origins, this expression has become a common idiom.  Of course, when we use this term today, we are usually not referring to graffiti, but rather to some figurative “writing,” and we’re generally not intending to cite Scripture, though, like in Daniel, we usually intend to warn our audience about a dire situation at hand.

 

Thinking like Lincoln, what are the spiritual writings on the wall that we should heed today?  As in the time of King Belshazzar, the writings can seem quite ominous.

 

·        In the United States, one family in seven lives in poverty, and the income disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest has reached an all-time high.

·        Approximately 20-25% of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion.

·        Suicide rates are increasing, to the point that in 2010, the latest year comprehensive statistics are available, more people in the United States committed suicide than those who died in automobile accidents.

·        In 2011, 41% of the live births in the United States were to unmarried women

·        Less than one-third of the Catholics in the United States attend Mass weekly and in a Gallup poll, the percent of Americans describing themselves as having “no religion” has doubled in the past twenty years.

 

These are not just ominous signs for our own country – similar signs can be seen in many countries around the world.  How are we to respond to such global and pervasive issues?  Do we even have the power to correct these issues?

 

Our answer lies in a new writing, but this one not simply figurative.  It is not written on a wall, but it is words that are meant to be written on our hearts.  It is not intended to inspire despair or fear, but it is filled with hope and joy.  This week, Pope Francis released Evangelii Gaudium – the Joy of the Gospel.  In this exhortation, the Pope states that all Christians have access to a power which can overcome the greatest dangers that face us today.  That power is grounded in the unconditional love of God.  When we encounter this love in the person of Jesus, our lives are transformed into ones of great joy, which in turn, transforms the entire world.

 

Here are some of the opening lines of this amazing exhortation:

 

“I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them; I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day. No one should think that this invitation is not meant for him or her…How good it feels to come back to him whenever we are lost! Let me say this once more: God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy. Christ, who told us to forgive one another “seventy times seven” (Mt 18:22) has given us his example: he has forgiven us seventy times seven. Time and time again he bears us on his shoulders. No one can strip us of the dignity bestowed upon us by this boundless and unfailing love. With a tenderness which never disappoints, but is always capable of restoring our joy, he makes it possible for us to lift up our heads and to start anew.” Evangelii Gaudium 3

 

At this very moment, people are gathering from far and wide and will soon sit down with friends and family to give thanks for the gifts they have received.

 

Thus, the Pope’s message is extremely timely, for gratitude is a door through which we encounter the unconditional love of God.  May this encounter transform us into lights of joy that we, and the world around us, might lift up our heads and start anew.

The Living Word

As we near the end of the liturgical year, our gospel readings seem a bit scary…fire and brimstone stuff – wars and insurrections, famines and plagues, temples being destroyed, and Christians being persecuted, spurned by their families and friends, and ultimately put to death.  Where’s the love?

Often I prefer to set these readings aside, to compartmentalize them as written in a far distant time to a much different set of people in a much different culture.  I read them as apt descriptions of what was going on in first century Palestine, but of much less relevance to me living in twenty-first century America.  But this “historical” look at Scripture is a spiritually dangerous path to tread, for Scripture is the living word of God, as relevant to our salvation today as it was to the apostles living and eating with Jesus.

Today, we hear the disciples marveling at the magnificence of the Jerusalem Temple, but Jesus admonishes them that, in time, there will not be one stone atop another.  (Lk 21:5-6)  Most scholars agree that Luke wrote this gospel about 85 or 90 AD, when the memory of the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 AD was still fresh in many people’s minds.  Thus, it was likely that these words of Jesus were remembered as an accurate prediction of this tragedy.  Temple destroyed, prophecy fulfilled, end of story.

But it’s not the end.  Jesus was saying much more.  Jesus warns his first disicples – and us – that whenever we place our faith in anything on earth, a material thing or a purely human institution, that faith must crumble, as all things on earth ultimately do.  It may take some time, but all earthly things must come to an end.  Their journey must end in death.

Jesus goes on to say how his followers will be called before the governors and kings, forced to witness to their faith, and some will die for his name.  (Lk 21:12-19)  Again, I recall the early martyrs of the church, many of whom, like Paul and Ignatius of Antioch, were called before Caesar himself to testify and to die.  That was then, but certainly not so in our more enlightened time.

Yet, it seems that more and more often, right here in America, we are being called up before governors and, if not kings, congressmen and Presidents, called up to testify to the faith that we share, the values we hold and the principles by which we live.  Respecting the rights of others to not believe what we believe, to not hold our same values or live by our same principles, even accepting that these beliefs and values and principles may put us in a distinct minority, we must, as the early martyrs did, persevere in asserting our right – and even more importantly, our duty – to hold firm to our faith, to live our values, and to be guided by our principles.

We persevere in our living witness even if we find it hard to come up with the words for our defense, for Jesus himself stands with us today and the Spirit will give us the words we need.

And Jesus ends by promising that by persevering we will secure our lives.  By persevering, we will live forever and ever, with Him and all the saints in the kingdom of God.

Thank God

In her book, Love Through Me, Natalie Ryan tells of working for a small non-profit and receiving a call from a man named Dennis seeking a $100 donation for his work with orphans in Africa.  She felt the man was sincere and verbally promised she would have her organization fund his request.  You’re probably thinking like I am: “Right, man from Africa wants money.  It’s got to be a scam.”  Natalie’s boss was probably thinking that, because try as she might – and she worked to get independent verification that Dennis’s work was legitimate – she could not convince her boss to send the $100.

In trying to figure out who was going to help this poor man, she heard God say, “You.”  She quit her job and decided to answer God’s call, forming her own missionary charity, “Hearts in Action.”   In a throw-away line that struck me hard, she wrote that her first order of business was “raising the $100” that she had promised to Dennis, the man from Africa.

What struck me was the realization that I could never remember a time in my adult life when it was necessary for me to “raise $100.”  If I needed $100 cash and it wasn’t already in my pocket, it was certainly as close as the nearest ATM.  My second thought is that I had never directly thanked God for this particular blessing in my life.  Perhaps I just attributed it to my hard work, or my prudent financial management, or just good luck, but apparently I had never attributed it to God.

And not realizing that this was simply a small manifestation of God’s infinite, unconditional and eternal love for me, I was never felt particularly happy or satisfied with this blessing.  Of course, I could always find $100 if I needed it, but what if I needed $1000 or $10000?  Not so easy.  I’d just have to work a little harder, save a little more.  But even if I got that, I would always see that there was something more, something better, or something newer that would be the icing on my cake.

I constantly sought out the new and improved, but once I got it, it quickly became the old and the ordinary.  I thought that more was always better – more possessions, more pleasure, more power, more beauty, more friends, etc. – yet always found that more may be better for a while, but more is never enough. 

Mary Jo Leddy, in her book, Radical Gratitude, refers to this state as perpetual dissatisfaction.  It is ugly, but it is the lifeblood of our money-based economy.  Without our constant yearning for the newer car, the bigger house, the latest fashions; without our obsession for the new and improved; without our mantra of “more is always better,” we spend less, the economy falters, jobs are lost, and our material wealth and our self-worth shrinks.  We no longer live for God, but only for ourselves.

Jesus praises the grateful leper (Lk 17:11-19) for he has broken this cycle of dissatisfaction.  The man has recognized the source of his life, the source of all that he is, the source of all that he has, and it is enough.  His sight is no longer focused on what he lacks, but on what he has already been given, the unconditional, infinite, eternal love of God.   

When we come together to celebrate the Eucharist – the root word for Eucharist is the same word that Luke uses to describe the man’s thanks and praise to God – we recognize that God has given us our very lives as a gift, that God loves us with a love that knows no bounds, that He gave us his only Son to die for us that we might have eternal life with Him.  Our gratitude does not change God, it changes us.  When we live with this radical, at-our-very-core gratitude, we, like the leper, appreciate and honor what we have, not obsess over and crave for what we are missing.  We can see ourselves for who we are – loved children of God – rather that constantly trying to be who other people want us to be. 

Most importantly, we recognize that we cannot wait to be happy to be grateful – we must be grateful to be happy.

Thank God.

The doorstep of heaven

The Sadducees attempt to discredit Jesus by showing that his belief in an afterlife in heaven implies ludicrous results (Lk 20:27-38).  They assume that heaven must be pretty much like earth.  On earth, we have the laws of Moses to follow, so we must have those laws to follow in heaven, too.  If the laws don’t make sense in heaven, then heaven must not be real.  However, as we’ll see, Jesus points out that their argument is flawed because their premise is false. 

Like the Sadducees, I have spent most of my life laboring under a false premise.  No, I’ve always believed in heaven and hell.  But like the Sadducees, I had a false idea of what heaven was like.  I assumed that heaven was the end reward for following the rules and being a good boy.  If I tried to obey all the rules, go to church every Sunday, be nice to other people, avoid lying, cheating, stealing, swearing, etc. etc., I would earn credits for heaven.  On the other hand, of course, God would always be watching for those times when I wasn’t living up to the rules.  In the end, St. Peter would have this book, and on the one side would be all the nice I had done, and on the other the naughty.  My hope, of course, is that the nice would outweigh the naughty and into heaven I would go.   Does this sound familiar?  Essentially, I figured that the afterlife was essentially the ultimate Christmas – the final reckoning of who was naughty and who was nice.

However, I came to realize that this was a quite sterile and empty view of my salvation.  No matter how hard I tried, I knew that I would always be doing things that were not on the “nice” list.  Okay, so there we have this reconciliation thing, but what good is that if I continue to sin?  And if this is my faith, why would God have to send his only Son to humble himself, “take the form of a slave,” and die an excruciating death on the cross just so that I could take my shot in the naughty and nice contest?   My premise, like that of the Sadducees, must be false.

Slowly, I began to understand what Jesus tells the Sadducees.  Heaven is not about following rules; it is about our relationship with our infinite, eternal and all-loving God.  And when we have left this earth and accepted this relationship for all time, that’s all we will ever need.  We will have no physical or emotional needs, no physical limitations; we will simply be one with our Creator, the source of all happiness.

I knew that I could be with God after I had died – all I had to do was follow the rules and I’d be with God after death.  But if heaven is about our relationship with God, wasn’t I missing the fact that God has already called me into relationship with him from the moment I was conceived?  I was following rules, but not living in relationship.  For Christian faith is not a list of rules to follow; it is a relationship to live, a relationship with the One who is my creator, who created me out of love to be with him and for him for all eternity, who is the my only source of true happiness, who calls me to live in him every day of my life.

From the very beginning, God reveals this truth to us in Scripture.  He creates us in his image and likeness, giving us life by bestowing his very Spirit on us.  He interacts with us as a loving parent acts with its loved child, so radically different from the master-slave relationship that most every other culture believed was the relationship between the gods and humanity.  He calls Abraham to be his intimate friend, promising that his descendants will be his chosen people forever.  He “so loved the world, he gave us his only Son.”  His Son gives us his very body and blood as a sign of God’s everlasting love and real presence in our lives.

On my good days, when I get this relationship, it changes my life and changes my relationships with others.  I see my marriage not just as a human contract between Mary and me, but as a permanent and divine vocation, a model of the everlasting, unifying love of the Trinity.

I begin to see my fatherhood not as simply as a temporary responsibility to prepare and launch my children into adulthood, but as a permanent vocation, a model of the unconditional, life-giving love of Christ.

I begin to see life not as a struggle to be number one, but as an imperative to be one: one with my family; one with my neighbor; one with my enemy; one with the poor; one with the oppressed; one with the persecuted; one with Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, I understand that if I ignore this relationship with God while I live on earth, then I will not value this relationship when I have left earth.  I will have damned myself to an eternity without God – that’s what we call hell. 

But when I can let go of my pride, let go of my need to earn what cannot be earned – the unconditional love of God – when I can lose myself in a relationship with the all-loving God, then I am living on the doorstep of heaven.

Temples

When the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 A.D, they expected the Jewish religion to just fade away, but they failed to reckon with the faithfulness of God to his people.  Today, we celebrate the dedication of St. John Lateran, the mother church of our faith.  It is our only archbasilica!  Yet, if some disaster destroyed St. John Lateran, would anyone think the Catholic faith would crumble?

But it made sense for the Romans to think as they did, for it is almost impossible for us to comprehend how important and vital the temple was to the Jewish people of Jesus’ time.

It was the heart and soul of the faith.  It housed the holy of holies, the Ark of the Covenant, and was where Yahweh chose to dwell with his people.  It was the only place where a Jew could offer sacrifice to Yahweh and properly atone for his sins.  Tens of thousands of Jews descended on Jerusalem on each of the major feast days to worship and sacrifice at the temple.

Ezekiel, writing during the Babylonian exile with the first temple destroyed, envisions the new temple with streams flowing from it, making the salt water fresh, and giving life to all creatures.  The vision evokes for us Genesis 2, and the streams flowing from the Garden of Eden.  The temple, in Ezekiel’s vision restores the peace and original justice of the Garden itself.

With Herod’s extensive renovation of the temple, it had surpassed the magnificence of Solomon’s original.  Outside of Rome, it was perhaps the most impressive and imposing building in the Mediterranean world.  Thus, it was also a point of pride for the Jewish people, who were, at best, only bit players on the world stage.

The Jewish prophets often proclaimed the Messiah would restore and perfect the purity of the Temple.   Jesus’ prophetic cleansing of the Temple that we read about this morning, echoing Jeremiah’s denunciations of the desecration of the Temple in his day, would have addressed this particular mission.  But Jesus knows that the Jerusalem Temple, as all things on earth, could not last.  It was just stones on stones that, one day, would crumble.  Rather, the temple on which his followers will depend is the temple of his body, which even death itself cannot destroy, which he gives to us anew at each and every celebration of the Mass.

St. Paul extends this metaphor to make us aware that, by virtue of our baptisms, God dwells in each of us, and each of our own bodies is now a temple of the Holy Spirit.  Considering my own meager body, that’s a pretty staggering thought!

How can this poor body of mine possibly house the glory of God?  How can I hold this temple of the Holy Spirit – and the temples of all those around me – with the same reverence and awe as the Jewish people had for the temple in Jerusalem.  What can or should I do to make my body and my life holy enough to justify such an honor?  Well, that’s a really long, long talk.  It’s our call to holiness – be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.  Spiritual masters have written thousands of books, billions of words, on this pursuit of holiness. 

But this time of year, I think of one insight that many of these masters have in common.  One wise man said it like this, “God dwells in two places – in heaven and in a grateful heart.”

Do I see everything about me as gift, the fruits of God’s unconditional and infinite love? 

Or do I jealously cling to all those things I claim as “mine,” the well-earned fruits of my hard work, my pious acts, or even my goodness?

St. Ignatius understood that we all find ourselves in this trap.  He saw that gratitude was an important early step on the road to holiness.  The first stage of the daily examen was to thank God for all that He had done that day, perhaps even reaching back and thanking God for all those times he directed and prodded me, provided for and protected me.  You don’t move forward in the examen until you’ve truly expressed your thanks to God for his unconditional and infinite love and providence.

Each November, before Thanksgiving, or whenever I lapse and believe that I am grateful enough, I re-read Radical Gratitude, by Mary Jo Leddy.  It’s a small book, easy to read and re-read often.  It reminds of the transformational gratitude that should always gild the temple in my heart.  It also reminds me that being happy will not lead to gratitude.  Gratitude makes me happy.

From the temple of a grateful heart, warmed by the appreciation of God’s infinite, unconditional and eternal love and providence, streams of love, streams of compassion, streams of generosity, peace and mercy flow out to the world.  And like streams flowing from the temple in Ezekiel’s vision, like the streams flowing from Jesus’ side on the cross, these streams bring life to the world.

Thank God.

Zacchaeus

I suppose that I am like many people – when I know that I’ve done something wrong, I don’t want anyone else to know about it.  I’m afraid that people will think less of me if they know my mistakes.  I try to hide them.  Maybe nobody will notice. 

Of course, I become ensnared by my desire to hide my mistake, inevitably creating more mistakes along the way, forcing me into more hiding and more disguising.  I can tangle webs with the best of them.  It is a vicious cycle and, to make matters worse, someone ultimately finds out and I end up looking even worse than if my original mistake had been known.  And yet, I find it hard to apologize for my mistake, to repent for my sin.  Most times, my only true sorrow is that I failed to keep it hidden.

Yet in Wisdom today, we hear that we need not care if our sins are known, for God overlooks people’s sins that they might repent.  (Wis 11:23)  That sounds a bit illogical.  God certainly knows that I’ve sinned, for he sees and knows all things, but he overlooks my sins.  He doesn’t think any worse of me at all.  And he does this precisely so I might repent for my sins.  That makes no sense at all.  If God overlooks my sins, why should I repent for them?  I don’t get it.  Zacchaeus did. 

Zacchaeus was a tax collector who lived in the very wealthy city of Jericho.  We presume that he gained his great wealth by extorting large sums from his fellow Jews.  They would have considered a traitor to his people and his faith, the very incarnation of sin and evil.

Despite Zacchaeus great sins, Jesus surprises Zacchaeus with an amazing gift.  Jesus overlooks his sins and declares that he will honor Zacchaeus by spending that day at Zacchaeus’ house.  For perhaps the first time in his adult life, Zacchaeus experiences unconditional love.  He is filled with the great joy that recurs throughout Luke’s Gospel.  The infant in Elizabeth’s womb “leaps for joy” when the pregnant Mary arrives.  The angels have “tidings of great joy” when Jesus is born.  Zacchaeus’ joy reflects the joy of the shepherd who found his lost sheep, the woman who found her lost coin, the father who found his lost son, and, most aptly, the angels who rejoice greatly at the return of one sinner.

This joy transforms Zacchaeus.  He declares his intent to put right anything he has done wrong.  He goes far beyond the mere law in giving half of his wealth to the poor.  No piddling tithing for him!  He returns four times whatever he may have wrongly taken, twice as much as the law would have him do…all because Jesus overlooked his sins and showed him God’s great unconditional love.

Jesus knows, as the author of Wisdom knew, that unconditional love is the only sure antidote to sin and evil.   As we hear in today’s passage from Wisdom: “you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned.” (Wis 11:24)

We are loved not for what we do, but for who we are – creatures of a God who loves all that he has created; creatures of a God that overlooks our greatest sins, seeing beyond those sins to the person whom He loves.  And when we recognize this truth in our hearts, when we accept the truth that we can never be worthy of this love, yet we are still graced by it, this truth breaks the chains of our sins, setting us free from our enslaving sins and transforming us as it transformed Zacchaeus.  We repent and become the loving, joyful, generous people whom God created us to be.

Transformed by the unconditional love of God, we will hear Jesus say to us, as he said to Zacchaeus, “today, salvation has come to this house.” (Lk 19:9)

All Saints

Since the very earliest days of the Church, Christians have venerated those people who showed heroic devotion to the faith, to the truth, and to the life and the way that Jesus taught and embodied.  Perhaps our very first hagiography, or saint-story, is told in chapters six and seven of the Acts of the Apostles where we read about Stephen, one of the first deacons and first martyrs for the faith.

Remembering and venerating the saints is an important part of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions and an important part of our spiritual growth.  The saints’ lives are edifying—they show us how different people in different places and different times, sinners just like us, followed Christ and found themselves with Christ in everlasting glory.

Some people have argued that a cult of saints is unnecessary, perhaps even sacrilegious.  For these people, the only model is Jesus himself.  WWJD is their watchword.  Simply consider “what would Jesus do”, act accordingly, and all will be right in the world.  Of course, Jesus is the perfect model, and WWJD can certainly be a useful discipline.  But if we ignore the saints, or pretend that they are irrelevant, are we then to suppose that nobody, in the two thousand years since Christ walked this earth, has ever followed His way?  Would it not be the ultimate hubris to believe that we will be the first successful disciples, simply because we’ve adopted WWJD as our way of life?

We are mere mortals.  We discourage easily.  The saints offer us hope that even when we fail, even when we sin, the Spirit is stronger than us.  The Holy Spirit has worked through uncounted millions of people just like us, helping to bring God’s kingdom to light.  These people are part of the Church to this very day, part of the “communion of saints” that we proclaim our belief in every Sunday.  And the Church has officially recognized some of these people as “big S” saints.  To ignore their stories, to ignore their friendship, is to walk Jesus’ way with legs shackled, arms tied to our side, and dark glasses clouding our sight.  I guess it’s possible, but I’d rather not.

There are thousands of saints that the Church recognizes by name.  Of course, the Church doesn’t “make” saints – only God can do that.  However, for the past thousand years or so, the Church has “canonized” certain people who were believed to have led holy and virtuous lives.  Before then, saints were declared by acclamation, generally by those people around whom the saint lived out his or her life here on earth.  Of course, these named saints are only a tiny fraction of those whom we presume are in heaven.

The fascinating thing about saints is that they come from all walks of life and from all parts of the world.  There are saints from privileged backgrounds like St. Thomas More, chancellor to King Henry VIII or England and St. Katherine Drexel.  There are saints from very humble backgrounds like St. Isidore the Farmer and many of Jesus’ first disciples, poor fishermen from the dusty backwater of Galilee.  There are saints from Africa like St. Charles Lwanga and our diocese’s own patron, St. Augustine of Hippo, saints from North America like St. Kateri Tekakwitha and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, and saints from Japan like St. Paul Miki.

The thousands of saints all have their unique stories and there is bound to be a saint who experiences may match quite closely with your own.  And this leads us to a second benefit we gain from our veneration of the saints.  The saints not only model Christian living for us, but also become prayer partners with us in our times of need.  Again, some have claimed that Catholics, in praying to saints, are blaspheming God.  But we don’t pray to the saints in the sense that they are replacements or surrogates for God, we pray with the saints just as we pray with our friends and our neighbors at Mass.  We pray with the saints just as St. Paul prayed with his disciples, just as he asked them to pray with and for him. 

Some saints are patrons of certain causes, perhaps due to some characteristic in their own lives, the manner in which they died, some trouble they may have endured, or some feat they may have accomplished.  That patron saint may be a particularly apt prayer partner when faced with particular situations or challenges.

For example, St. Anthony of Padua was once teaching about the Psalms at a monastery.  Now, Anthony had a hand-copied psalter that he used in his teaching.  Anthony lived in the early twelfth century, long before the printing press, so books like this were very scarce and almost impossible to replace.  One of the monks in the monastery recognized the value in this book and stole it and ran off.  There was much consternation but Anthony seemed rather sanguine about the affair.  He simply prayed for the monk.  Soon after, the monk came to his senses and returned to the monastery, restoring Anthony’s precious book to him and seeking his forgiveness.  Today, we call on St. Anthony to pray with us that we might find some lost object as dear to us as Anthony’s psalter was to him.

Study the saints, pray with the saints, for each of us by our baptisms are called to holiness, called to be saints in this life and in the next.  What better way to learn what we are called to do than to know the stories of those who have already done it.  What better friends can we have to help us on the way than those who have tread the path ahead of us? 

All holy men and women, pray for us.

The Narrow Gate

Today’s gospel passage (Lk 13:22-30) occurs soon after Jesus proclaims the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast in which Jesus implies that the kingdom will grow to enormous proportions from its very small beginnings.  This must have sounded odd to the disciple who asks Jesus if only a few people will be saved.   Presumably, he thought of the kingdom more narrowly, possibly restricted just to the Chosen People or, even more limited, just to those who ate and drank with Jesus himself.  To the questioner's anticipated delight, he was already a member of this very exclusive group!

In a way, this jibes with our own experience and expectations.  We lock the doors at night once we are safely inside.  We close the membership to our clubs once we are safely admitted.  We build gated communities to assure that only those who belong can enter.  It wouldn’t make sense to do otherwise.  Similarly, in our spiritual lives, we often create boundaries or limits on God's mercy, but only when we are certain that we fall within those limits.  What sense would it be to exclude ourselves from God’s mercy?  On the other hand, those others, those evil-doers…

It is just this logic – this sense that we are right to belong, that we are insiders, protected and isolated from the undeserving – that keeps us outside the very door we feel we have entered.  Jesus states that the true way into the kingdom is a hard one, though it is open to anyone.  The Greek word we translate as "strive" in "Strive to enter through the narrow gate" is the root word of our English word "agony."  Jesus implies that entering the kingdom is an agonizing struggle. 

In ancient walled cities, the narrow gate was only one person wide, so that only one person could pass at a time.  This makes it a very apt analogy for our entry to paradise, for our narrow gate is exactly one person wide – Jesus. But where is the struggle, the striving?  Being with Jesus can actually be pleasant.  I look forward to being with Jesus at the Eucharist.  I enjoy the singing, the praying, and being with others of like mind.  And we even get graces and the real presence of Jesus!  I enjoy the peace of quiet of my weekly hour of adoration before the sacrament.  There’s not struggle here. 

But Jesus wants more.  Luke reminds us at the very beginning of today’s reading that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, to the cross.  And if we are to struggle to enter paradise through Jesus, we must not only eat and drink and be in his presence, we must also carry the cross with him.

The particular cross each of us carries may vary, but a consistent feature of all of our crosses is constant and universal love: love of family, love of friends, love of neighbors, and most importantly, love of enemies.  For without loving our enemies, our love becomes simply what the pagans do.  Christian love is much more.  The cross we bear is that this Christian love is not always – in fact, is not usually – requited love.  It may even provoke division and animosity.  This should not matter, since, as fellow cross bearers with Christ, we are measured by how we love, not by how we are loved.

How can we show this love every day and to everyone?  That is where we struggle and strive.  Many times, it seems unfair to love others unconditionally.   Take our nation’s struggle with immigration reform and with undocumented immigrants.  How do we balance our right to private property with Jesus’ command to share with those who have less?  How do we balance Jesus’ command to welcome the stranger with our need to provide for ourselves?  How do we know when enough is enough?

For Jesus, of course, there is no balance.  Enough is never enough.  There is just more love – eternal, unconditional love, the same love that God shows us in the giving his only Son. 

So we keep struggling, we keep praying, we keep proclaiming God's love as best we can.  For if we stop struggling, if we stop loving, one of two things must be true.  Either we have ignored Jesus completely or we are certain of that which we cannot be certain – that we have done enough.  In either case, Jesus tells us, we will have placed ourselves outside the door, outside the kingdom, despite God's constant invitation for us to enter.

Struggle and strive, give thanks for our occasional successes, ask forgiveness for our more frequent failures, and pray for the strength to love others as God loves us.  Only by doing so can we hope to be counted among those from the east and the west and those from the north and the south, that take their place at the feast in the kingdom of God.

The Clarion Call

In our social interactions, we generally seek reciprocity.  When we exchange gifts with another, we tend to exchange gifts of similar value.  It becomes a simple matter for us to judge the status of our relationship with another person by the value – either financial or emotional – of the gifts we exchange.  

God had given an incredibly valuable gift to you and to me.  More amazingly, God offers this same gift to every single person now living, to every single person who has ever lived, and to every person who is yet to live.  It is the gift of salvation, the gift of forgiveness, the gift of oneness with the source of all good, the source of all peace, the source of all joy, and our source of all holiness.

However, God’s gift is so far beyond what we can possibly imagine, we cannot easily discern its value.  It is not delivered to us in the mail, gaily wrapped with a card announcing the giver’s good wishes.  We cannot look up its price on the internet.  Yet God constantly seeks to make us aware of the gift and its value.  He has planted in each of us a seed of faith, to be nurtured and grown that we may know the magnitude of his love for us.

In the beginning, we know almost nothing of the gift, never mind its value.  We live as if we can have nothing other than what we can provide for ourselves.  We live in the self-centered world of ego, with no response at all to God’s gift.  We may not even be aware that God has gifted us all.

Graced by God in baptism and the sacraments, we begin to gain some understanding.  We sense, consciously or subconsciously, that is not our ego that supports us and sustains us, but rather something much greater.  In response, we offer our obedience, much as servants obey their master.

But as we mature in our understanding of this gift, our response becomes much deeper and richer than mere obedience.  We come to understand that God not only loves us with an unimaginable love, not only cares for us with an unimaginable providence, and not only forgives with an unimaginable mercy, he desires us to love and care for and forgive others as He has done for us.

In essence, God has entrusted us with even more than his great and mighty gift of salvation.  As church, we realize that we are like the stewards who not only obey the master, but also love and care for all of that is His.  Our self-centered lives of ego become other-centered lives of love.  Without this love, our obedience becomes a horribly insufficient reply to God’s great gift.

Jesus tells us this when he cites the greatest command – love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind…and love your neighbor as yourself (Mt 22:37-39).  As our exemplar, Jesus gives us a new command – “love one another as I have loved you” (Jn15:12).  Paul echoes this command by telling us that even with the faith to move mountains, without love, he is nothing.  Love is the obedience of the heart (1 Cor 13:2).  Love makes us slaves not of ego and sin and death, but of righteousness and life.

Since the very moment of his selection as Pope, Francis has consistently proclaimed this mission of love.  As church, he reminds us that we are the ones who have been entrusted with “still more” (Lk 12:48).  We are the stewards whom God has entrusted with the knowledge, the understanding, and the experience of His infinite, providential, and merciful gift of love.  Pope Francis urges us to respond in kind – care for the poor, bind up the wounds, and have mercy on all.

It is a clarion call.  It is a call to love.

Praying always

In the 1960s, someone at IBM coined the word "multi-tasking” to describe what their newest computers could do.  Pretty soon, it became a buzzword for efficiency.  Everyone was encouraged to multitask so they would be more effective and efficient.  The problem is that psychologists have confirmed in test after test that none of us can truly multi-task with any proficiency at all.  When we try to do two things at once, it takes longer and we make more mistakes than if we just did one thing, finished it, and did the second thing. 

Early on, I realized that I was not really very good at this multi-tasking thing.  I could do lots of things and I could them very quickly, but if I wanted to do it right, or get anything done at all, I had to focus on just one thing at a time.  So when Jesus tells me to pray always, I get confused.  If I prayed always, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else!  I can’t do two things at once!

My problem is that I often think of prayer as something to do.  When I get up in the morning, I “do” morning prayer.  It’s on my list of things to do.  But prayer is not something that would be on a list of to-dos. 

St. Jerome said that for the saints, even their sleeping is prayer.  St. Augustine wrote that when we practice faith, hope, and charity with continual desire, we pray always.  In essence, what the saints teach me is that prayer is not just something I do; it is something I am. 

When I am fully aware of the God who is with me until the end of name, who wishes to dwell within me at all times, in whose name is my help and my strength, my life becomes prayer.  I am praying always, since the other things that I am doing are being done for the glory of God, led by the Spirit to fulfill God’s will.

To use Jesus’ metaphor, praying always is as simple as leaving the light on – “Let you light shine before others, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Mt 5:16)

So the key to praying always is simply to have a constant awareness of God in my life.  Thus, what keeps me from praying always is not a lack of time to do other things, or not an inability to multi-task, but simply forgetting that which I should always know – that God is always present to me and simply wants me to be present to him. 

The readings today give me some clues as to how I can remind myself of God’s presence, and thus transform my life into constant prayer.

Paul points out to Timothy, as he points out to us, the critical role of Scripture.  In the second-most famous 3:16 in the Bible, we hear “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tm 3:16).  Note to self – read and reflect on scripture daily.

Moses wants to pray for the people as they defend themselves against Amalek.  But he can’t do it alone.  Aaron and Hur find him a seat and help hold his hands up in prayer.  (Ex 17:8-13)  Just like Moses, I need the help of others, too.  There are people out there who have successfully transformed their lives into constant prayer, who now enjoy the most intimate presence of God.  Note to self – study the lives and the writings of the saints.  Become friends with the saints.

Well, that’s a good start, but it’s only a start.  I need more.  To make the constant spiritual presence of God uppermost in my mind, what could be more natural than spending time in the physical presence of God?  Note to self – participate in the Mass and practice adoration regularly.

But even with all this, I still find myself forgetting God, acting selfishly, working for my own glory instead of God’s.  What’s a body to do?  Like all mistakes in life, we can best avoid them by finding out why we made them in the first place.  At IBM, we’d call this root cause analysis – or the “five why’s” in six-sigma lingo.  St. Ignatius calls it the examen.  Note to self – nightly examination of conscience.

Final note – praying always is, by definition, never done.  It can only be lived.  Pray always and when the Son of Man comes, he will certainly find faith in you.

The Pure Motive

This book, “Between Heaven and Mirth,” James Martin emphasizes the role of joy and humor in our faith.  He demonstrates that there is even humor in the Bible, though the writers, understandably, tended to be very serious about their writing.

For me, today’s gospel scene (Lk 11:42-46) has always been one of those moments of humor.  I see the crowds gathered around Jesus as he excoriates the Pharisees, in no uncertain terms, on how misguided they have been; how their actions are leading them to eternal perdition.  You can imagine the discomfort on the part of the Pharisees, and perhaps the amusement of the rest of the crowd at seeing this discomfort.  One of the scribes  – I imagine him with a self-satisfied smile on his face  – tries to point out that Jesus has perhaps stepped too far, and mistakenly included him and his fellow scribes in his prophetic denunciation.

Jesus turns and says, in effect, oh, yeah – you, too, wipe that smile off your face, woe to you who are equally shamed, equally damned, for your actions betray you.  Whenever I read this passage, I can hear the laughter of those who have watched the tables suddenly turn on the pompous scribe.

Yet, behind the humor is a very serious point.  Jesus points out that our actions betray us, though not always as we may intend.  Jesus knows that our actions are simply the result of our motivations.  If our motivations are not pure, then our actions or works, no matter how righteous they may appear – after all, the Pharisees were scrupulously obeying what they understood to be the law of God – must be equally impure.

For Jesus, there was only one pure motivation – love.  This love starts with gratitude at what God has done for us, a gratitude that grows into trust that God will continue to do good for us, a trust that grows into a desire to be constantly close to God, and then to grow in likeness to this God who is love, who is good, who is merciful.  One may call this virtuous cycle of gratitude, trust, love, and mercy “faith.”  We could debate which comes first, the gratitude, the trust, the desire for oneness with God, the mercy, the love, the faith, but they all grow out of and reinforce each other.  This is the pure motive which drives the works by which we will be judged.

And yet, I have often assumed that motives didn’t matter much at all.  The only thing that mattered was my obedience.  I followed the law, asked for forgiveness whenever I broke the law, and that was it.  Is this not the proof of the pudding?  Who cares about motivation if the end result is my obedience?

Jesus insists that this attitude is the road to woe and damnation.  Without pure motives, without faith, works can only amount to hypocrisy.  I may think I am one with God and I may even claim that God is number one in my life, yet without love, I am only being one with myself.   I have placed myself on a pedestal.  I have set myself up for a fall.  It is just a matter of time.

For when my motive is not grounded in love and mercy, in faith and in gratitude, I become judgmental.  I see others who are not following the law as scrupulously as me and judge them to be my inferiors, those who have not won God’s love as I have so clearly done.  Since they have not earned God’s love – as if God’s love needs to be earned – they are not worthy of my respect or my love.  I’m smug, therefore I judge.

This morning, Paul reminds us that as we judge, so we will be judged. (Rom 2:1)  Though Paul was never present when Jesus preached, and though he was writing many years before the Gospels were written, we can hear in his words the words of Jesus:  “Stop judging, that you may not be judged.  For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” (Mt 7:1-2)

Indeed, woe to me when I judge, for affliction and distress, the wrath and the fury are mine.  

But blessed am I when I love, for the peace and the joy, the glory and the honor are mine, now and forever.  Amen.

It is enough

At some point, every parent faces a certain challenge – teaching their children to say the “magic words.”  Please and thank you.  “Please” isn’t too hard.  After all, there is immediate positive reinforcement; you say please, you get what you want.  Thank you is another story.  Kids don’t see that thank you’s get them much of anything. 

My brother had a strategy for the dreaded thank you notes.  His birthday was at the end of June, almost exactly six months from Christmas.  He would say that he was waiting until Christmas and would thank everyone once for both gifts.  Of course, when Christmas rolled around, it was only six months until his birthday.  No sense with thank you notes then, he’d just wait and kill two – or was that three? – birds with one stone.

Grandparents make the challenge even more difficult.  My mother-in-law, Pat, would send things to the kids all year long!  We’d say, “send a thank you to Grandma or she’ll stop sending you these goodies.”  Of course the thanks were few and far between but did that stop Pat?  No, the presents kept coming!  What’s a parent to do?

Of course, Pat and other grandparents aren’t the only ones whose generosity is unstopped by lack of thanks.  They are on God’s side.  In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus offers a gift beyond our wildest imaginings.  As lepers in the ancient world, the ten supplicants weren’t simply sick; they were cast out from any contact with society.  So Jesus doesn’t simply cure their disease, he reunites them with the community, makes them one with humanity.  And yet only one comes back to thank Jesus for this great gift.  Jesus praises this man, but, as the kids might be quick to point out, despite their ingratitude, the other nine lepers are not “uncured.” 

What’s the deal?  Why should I have to thank God for his grace if, as its very name implies, God freely and unconditionally gives it to me?  Why does Jesus make a connection between gratitude and salvation if the other lepers are still cured despite their ingratitude?

Perhaps my model of God is wrong.  I imply to my children that in giving thanks, they will continue to receive gifts.  After all, that’s the way I look the world.  I expect thanks when I give a gift.  If I give a wedding gift and don’t receive the obligatory note of thanks, I feel slighted.  I may look at that couple in a different light.  Far be it for me to remember their anniversary.  

I presume that God acts like I do.  If I remember to thank God, then He will continue to remember me in my need.  Unfortunately, I have now reduced God to a vending machine – put in the right coins and hit the right buttons and I receive grace.  Most fortunately for all of us, God is much greater than a heavenly vending machine.

God loves us and graces us not for what we do, but for who we are.  He created us out of love, he created us in his very image and likeness, and he created us to be with him in love for all eternity.  We are for God.  Yet sometimes I live as if I don’t believe this at all.

Instead, I take life and all that God has given me for granted.  My goal then becomes to work hard to make life as good as it can be for my family and me.  And yet this hard work never completely satisfies.  We never seem to have enough.  There is always something that seems just beyond our reach, but if I work just a little bit harder, it can be ours.  Of course, if we get that, there is something else just beyond that, and the cycle continues.  We can never work hard enough, we can never satisfy ourselves, and on our worse days, we feel that we are simply not good enough.

In fact, this constant level of dissatisfaction drives our economy.  Without our constant yearning for the newer car, the bigger house, the latest fashions, etc., we spend less, the economy falters, jobs are lost, and our material wealth and our self-worth shrinks.  We live not for God, but for ourselves. 

Jesus praises the grateful leper for he has broken this cycle of dissatisfaction.  The man has recognized the source of his life, the source of all that he is, and it is enough.  When we come together here to celebrate the Eucharist – the root word for Eucharist is the same word that Luke uses to describe the man’s thanks and praise to God – we recognize that God has given us our very lives as a gift, that God loves us with a love that knows no bounds, that He gave us his only Son to die for us that we might have eternal life with Him.  This attitude of gratitude does not change God, it changes us.  For with gratitude as the center of our lives, our eyes open to see that whoever we are, whatever we have, it is enough, for it is the fruit of God’s infinite and everlasting love.

It is enough.  Thank God.