4 - 2020 - Unpaid Bill

Did you see THAT?

A homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 26, 2020

Acts 2:14, 22-33, 1 Pt 1:17-21, Lk 24:13-35

The story of the Road to Emmaus is profound and iconic. For anyone who believes in the living God, who wants to see the face of Jesus, who wonders if Jesus is always beside them — he is — the notion of hearts ablaze with love and desire for the Lord is immediately relatable.

We know that Jesus is present in the breaking of the bread. That when two or more are gathered in his name, he is there. In Luke’s account, two men are discussing the events surrounding the crucifixion and Resurrection — thus, two gathered in Jesus’ name — and he joined them and became known to them as he broke the bread. As he said he would.

And then Jesus left them, but not really, because he has never, will never leave any of us.

Beautiful. Rich with make-you-think meaning and symbolism. And kinda neat and tidy, wrapped up and tied with a bow.

So much, in fact, it’s almost a fool’s errand to preach about this Gospel, because it takes little explanation and even less pondering to find the rich meaning in it.

So what else can we take away beyond the familiar?

Well, the Road to Emmaus is a rare Gospel in that its strong call to action is spiritual, personal and individual: Each of us is called to renew our relationship with Jesus and to seek him in every place he can be found. In this Gospel, there’s no call for us to serve the least among us, as Luke will provide in the next chapter. There’s no urging for us to become fishers of men, to go and spread the Good News.

No, on this road we’re asked to keep our eyes open for a divine traveling companion.

But beware of highway hypnosis.

As we deepen our bond with Almighty God into a mature relationship, it becomes easier and easier, it becomes more commonplace to know where to find Jesus, and to do it.

For starters, we find Christ in everyone we meet, six feet apart or otherwise.

After a while, though, doing things that have become easy and commonplace slips into the realm of rote and robotic. We might as well be doing them in our sleep.

Which doesn’t sound like our hearts were burning. It doesn’t sound like something Jesus would want.

It’s human nature, though, to stay in our comfort zones, to settle for Pizza Hut and McDonald’s because they’re consistent even if they’re not great (far from it). It’s human nature to rely on habit or even instinct when the goal is familiar.

But what if it weren’t?

Think for a second about how Luke describes what happened after Jesus broke the bread:

“With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him.”

When was the last time you had a truly eye-opening experience?

More importantly, when was the last time you allowed yourself to have an eye-opening experience? To be surprised or even a little startled?

We play some version of peekaboo with babies, then ease them into jack-in-the-boxes, piñatas, and graduate to haunted houses and hay rides and Great Adventure’s Fright Fest. We try out the newest daredevil roller coaster to get our hearts pounding on the next unexpected switchback.

And then — thud! — we grow out of it.

Maybe we don’t need Kingda Ka anymore, but we still need the capacity to be awed.

By all means, seek the Lord where he may be found, and call to him while he is still near.

But seek the Lord where you don’t expect to find him.

In a sunrise, a sunset, a thunderstorm, a gentle breeze. In the “burr-dee, burr-dee, burr-dee” call of a cardinal to his mate. In the fragrance of a hyacinth. In the cold and wet of dewy grass on bare feet. In a blinding sunbeam that sets your face aglow.

That can set your heart ablaze.

On the Road to Emmaus, when a figurative or literal grasshopper jumps at you from out of nowhere, and you feel that adrenaline rush, thank your Creator for your life, thank your Messiah for saving it and thank the Spirit for the wisdom and grace to recognize our Triune God in everything.

Welcome the surprise. Come back to life, heart ablaze, because of it. Because of Christ within it.

Faith is not blind

A homily for the Second Sunday of Easter, April 19, 2020

Acts 2:42-47, 1 Pt 1:3-9, Jn 20:19-31

The Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed — their names derive from the Latin “credo,” “I believe.” Even the most recent (and much-maligned) translation of the Roman Missal swapped in “I believe …” for the former “We believe …”, to assert that each of us individually embraces the truths contained in these statements of faith.

God the Father, the Creator.

Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten son, the Messiah who saved all of humanity from sin and death.

The Holy Spirit, who sustains humanity on our path home to God’s kingdom with abundant grace for all who ask for it.

These truths also form the core of the baptismal liturgy, spoken as the encapsulated promises that parents make on behalf of their children during this Sacrament of Initiation — promises that all the faithful renew during the Easter Vigil. The conclusion to this litany wraps it all up neatly and reverently: “This is our faith. This is the faith of the Church, and we are proud to profess it, through Christ Our Lord. Amen.”

(Quick aside: As a youngster I thought the Nicene Creed was the “nicer creed” because it didn’t say “hell” while the Apostles’ Creed did.)

So our creed, in whichever form we choose to proclaim, is a complete summary of who we are as Catholic Christians, a fits-in-your-pocket list of things we believe. Much like the oft-quoted/paraphrased “If you pray nothing else but ‘thank you,’ that’s enough,” from Meister Eckhart, our creed keeps beliefs simple, compact. Easy to break open.

And that’s a wonderful thing.

In today’s Gospel from the evangelist John, Jesus tells Didymus, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” Those include us, of course; we have not seen Jesus in the flesh.

And yet … we have, if we are in sync with the 25^th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 25:33-40), seeing Christ in all humanity, especially the least of us.

Because true faith requires action, which will return — must return — when the coronavirus crisis ends. The second Letter of St. James (Jm 2:14-26) declares faith without works to be dead. Harsh, but true.

So let’s be un-harsh.

Faith with works is alive, very much so.

Now, what do we know about living things?

First, they must be fed. To feed faith, we have the Eucharist, the Word, the reflections and ponderings and insights of Church — us, all of us — guided by the Spirit. Check.

They need shelter. Our souls and our hearts are perfect places for faith to reside. Check.

Living things should be exercised regularly. That’s where doing good works comes in. We need only eyes to see and ears to hear to know what needs to be done. Even now, physically distancing from each other, we can use any number of technologies to be social, to support each other. To do little tasks for one another, six feet apart and heavily sanitized, that recognize Christ in all of us. Check.

They should be loved and embraced. Hmmm.

“Credo” is an action verb. When we were baptized, when we repented and reconciled for the first time, when we received First Holy Communion, even when we were confirmed, we were not supposed to put faith on auto-pilot. We weren’t supposed to say “Sounds good to me; I’ll buy in,” and aim ourselves in a straight line at a constant speed on a smooth path to Heaven. No adjustments ever needed.

No, we were not supposed to.

“Credo” is an action verb that guides our lives full of twists and turns. Lives with a whole lot of activity.

Activity requires choices, which is why we must choose to love and embrace our faith. To think about, to deeply ponder what we believe, and then wrap our arms around it.

Daily.

Hourly.

Maturely.

Children believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny out of simple faith. They believe in something that brings them joy, and when they learn the truth, depending on how old and how mature they are, either they move on and they’re fine, or they have to have their naive belief pried from them, and they’re heartbroken.

As adults, we’re blessed with greater wisdom, greater experience, and far more options. We’re blessed with a grown-up, two-way relationship with God.

We’re blessed with the joy of Easter truth — that Jesus died for us, for all of humanity, to fulfill God’s promise of salvation. That Jesus rose from the dead of his own accord, to destroy death and show the way to the rooms he is preparing for us in his Father’s house. That Jesus is with us always, and that his Spirit is with us anytime we call.

There are many ways we as Christians can be the sheep of Jesus on judgment day, can be the ones who fed and clothed and visited him, even without immediately recognizing him. That’s faith with works, faith in action.

But consider this: The first thing we can do to put faith into action is to believe. To choose to believe. To choose to grab hold of the faith the way a parent holds a child’s hand in a crosswalk, the way a lifeguard clings to a drowning person and swims to shore, the way a person in peril finds that last ounce of strength when they’re dangling off the edge of a cliff.

To choose to weave Truth, God’s Truth, all of it, into the very fabric of who we are.

No, we haven’t seen the 33-year-old Nazarene carpenter and touched his wounds, as Thomas was finally able to, but we do see wounded 3-year-olds and 63-year-olds and 93-year-olds, and our active, energized faith is our blessing to them.

And to us.

Covenant. Testament.

A homily for Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord, April 12, 2020

Acts 10:34a, 37-43, Col 3:1-4, Jn 20:1-9

There’s a viral video making the rounds, a rather simple one of a gentleman mowing the lawn. At first glance, it’s nothing out of the ordinary: a retiree going back and forth over the grass, making nice straight passes of trimmed fescue and rye. Another Pleasant Valley Sunday, to borrow a phrase.

But this is a Good News video, because the man, a former paratrooper, is doing yard work for a neighboring family while their dad is deployed overseas with the military. The lawn-cutter promised he’d take care of the family’s property while the trooper was away, because that’s what comrades do.

In this little video, one person is keeping a promise.

Promises made, promises kept.

Which is the story of Easter.

We’re familiar with the theological underpinnings of Christ’s Resurrection, and its mind-blowing significance. How it — how He — changed the world for the better by accepting an unjust death as a sign of ultimate love for his friends and for everyone, and then rising from the dead, as no one had done before and no one has done since, to conquer the scourge of death that we believe came into the world when Adam and Eve sinned.

Jesus did it out of love, but he also did it out of obligation, to fulfill a promise the Creator made to humanity at the beginning of our relationship with God.

In fact, Jesus made this ultimate sacrifice to keep myriad promises, because God’s covenant with his people is chock-full of them.

Promises made, promises kept.

The beautiful — extensive — Liturgy of the Word at our Easter Vigil is the story, and the history, of God’s promises.

The promise to the earliest people that, at the proper time, their sins would be forgiven. And forgiven. And forgiven.

The promise to Abraham that his descendants would be as countless as the stars in the sky or the sands on the shore.

The promise to Moses that he would lead his people to, quite simply, the Promised Land.

The promise to the Chosen People that a savior, a Messiah, would be born of the house of David.

In the early days of God’s relationship with his people, the promises were covenantal; that is, they were as much of a contract as they were one person’s vows. The Israelites didn’t know I Am that well in the early days, so God wanted a few things in return before fulfilling the promises.

God knew of their stubbornness; he wanted them to know of his constancy and consistency.

And so, God had a straightforward list of please-dos to please me:

Obedience to those 10 little rules carved in stone, especially the one about strange gods.

Faith, belief and trust, usually manifested by obedience in a specific situation: Don’t look back as Sodom and Gomorrah burn. Follow the pillar of smoke. Wade into the sea. Keep kosher.

I’m keeping my promises, says God; can you say the same?

Then came Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, the fulfillment of all promises and the herald of a more mature relationship with our Triune God.

Jesus preached — preaches — the fuller use of a well-formed conscience and a directing of human curiosity to things of the spirit. Jesus calls God his father and, through The Lord’s Prayer, urges us all to do the same.

Though he was the fulfillment of Old Testament — Old Covenant — promises, Jesus made a few himself, to augment the continuing promises of his father.

Wherever two or more are gathered in my name, I am there.

I will send my Spirit, the paraclete, the advocate, to guide you.

I go before you to make a home for you in my father’s house.

I will return for you.

This is my body. This is my blood of the new and everlasting covenant.

This New Testament of Jesus, indeed, is based on the notion of a more mature relationship with God, and we are challenged by its nature, its complexity. Challenged, but not impossibly so.

And like his father, Jesus has an ask. Not challenging or complex, but simple, beautiful, and achievable: Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Pay my love forward.

Jesus Christ is risen today. Alleluia! We sing it anew. Our triumphant holy day — Alleluia!

Christ is risen. Truly He is risen. Christos anesti! Alethos anesti!

And He is with us always.

But we are his hands and arms in the world now. Our eyes and ears are his, seeing the least among us, hearing their pleas for assistance.

Our coronavirus crisis has laid bare — as if that were really necessary — the wretched, festering wounds of inequality in our world, our nation, our towns. People of color, anyone who is poor or marginalized, are getting sick and dying at a far greater rate than better-off people who have easy access to health care, who can stay six feet apart in their homes and neighborhoods, and who can work from home instead of having to mop floors, wipe down every imaginable surface and stack boxes without protective equipment.

That doesn’t seem in sync with Love Your Neighbor as Yourself.

Jesus stretched out his arms on the cross and, in doing so, embraced the world. He rose, in a perfected form yet with his wounds still visible — thank you, Didymus — to remind us how far He was willing to go as a sign of his love.

Now, as Christ’s living body, it’s our turn to embrace the world, and perhaps suffer a wound or two in doing so.

And know in our hearts: Promises made, promises kept.

Little things add up

A homily for a weekday in Holy Week

Two years ago, I had the honor and privilege of preaching at an interfaith Holy Week service, reflecting on what Jesus did, how he got there, and how our lives affected his. I offer it to you again.

Have you ever gotten a splinter?

A little shard of wood in your fingertip or palm?

Maybe in that spot between the first and second joints on your pointer?

The splinter might have been pretty long, or didn’t go in that far, and you could pull it out quickly, in one piece.

It might have buried itself deep, or the end snapped off, and you had to find some tweezers or stick the end of a pin in a match flame to dig it out.

Perhaps you didn’t get it out right away, and it got irritated, infected, red and sore and maybe really gross. You could get blood poisoning, and at this point you’d need a doctor.

For a splinter. This long. Weighing so little that only a scientific scale can measure it.

A splinter.

Jesus of Nazareth got splinters. As a contractor, as a carpenter in the first century, he worked with simple tools, rudimentary tools. Hand saws, hand planes, mallets, wedges. Nothing stamped “Craftsman” on the side, even though stories about him say he indeed was a craftsman.

His supplies came from around him – trees he or someone cut down, rocks chiseled and split, mud and mortar hand-mixed. Carried on his back, hauled in a barrow, dragged at the end of a rope. No Home Depot cart; no Lumber Liquidators delivery truck. Just the strength of a hard-working man.

Jesus got splinters.

And God though he was, it’s painfully likely that he mis-hit a nail and smashed his thumb with a hammer once or twice. Rocks and bricks gave him blisters and calluses and absolutely scraped his knuckles.

Jesus worked with simple tools and rough materials: Aleppo pine, Hawthorn, Sycamore, Laurel, Willow, cut not at a sawmill nor sanded smooth. The carpenter had his work cut out for him.

Jesus worked with simple tools and rough materials: tax collectors and prostitutes and fishermen. Andrew, James and John. Simon Peter. None of them sanded smooth. The rabbi had his work cut out for him. He preached in parables to keep his message understandable, relatable. He preached a new covenant of divine peace and a baptism of water and the spirit.

Jesus still works with rough materials: us.

Men and women who sin, who turn their backs on our loving God and Creator, who refuse to see Christ in all of Creation, and especially not in their sisters and brothers. Sinners who see differences as the key to labeling and sorting and, once everyone has had some sort of triangle stapled onto them, the most efficient way of pushing people to the margins. Once these undesirables are at arm’s length, it’s easy for those who turn their back on God to build walls to keep them out.

Jesus still works with simple tools. No implement of his is simpler or more elegant than the Law of Love.

Love God, the source of love, and thereby live in love.

Love your neighbor as yourself, for the love of God.

Jesus wrote this law not in ink, but in blood, his blood. Shed for us, for our salvation, on a cross of wood at a filthy place named for rotted corpses. A cross of wood exactly like the wood he had cut and trimmed and smoothed from his boyhood. Exactly like the wood that undoubtedly gave him splinters.

Just for a moment, let’s compare splinters to sin.

If you track sins in bookkeeper-fashion, if you count each stolen candy bar or bigger-than-a-little-white lie – or far worse transgression – as a sin, as a mark against you in the Book of Life, then any one of us could have contributed mightily to the wood of the cross, one splinter at a time.

But if you view sin holistically, if you consider sin to be a life lived in the darkness, committed by a person rejecting the Light of Christ, then you can see how all those splinters combined – millions and billions of them squeezed together like modern plywood – all those splinters gave the Sanhedrin and the Romans plenty of wood to hang Jesus on.

The sins of everyone who ever lived or ever would live.

History is hazy on how much of the cross the Christ drag-carried to Golgotha. A typical prisoner of the Romans who had been condemned carried the crosspiece, something like the landscaping ties we use in our gardens today. Estimated weight: 75 to 125 pounds.

The Nazarean was no ordinary prisoner, though, and to make a horrible example of him, the Romans may have forced him to carry the upright and the crosspiece, some 300 pounds of wood. No wonder the Cyrenean was pressed into service to assist Jesus. Despite his years of work, and the rugged body that came with it, the scourged 33-year-old with blood flowing from razor-sharp thorns mashed into his head had to struggle up Mount Calvary.

In Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” the ghost of Jacob Marley tells Scrooge about his fetters: “I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” Marley speaks of the sins he and Scrooge committed by choosing to steal, to extort. For him, for them, the sins accumulated as chain links.

Jesus was nailed to the cross all of humanity created. We made it splinter by splinter, and yard by yard.

We’re still adding to it.

Jesus accepted the will of the Father; he felt the pain, the agonizing, physical pain that mirrored the emotional pain our loving God feels when we walk in darkness, when we break our family ties with God.

And on our behalf, as a true representative of all humanity, Jesus conquered the cross. He conquered sin. Every sin. Millions and billions.

His resurrection from the dead gave us the new birth that we all need, that we all should choose.

In coming down from the cross and rising from the dead, Jesus shattered all misconceptions about how people are to treat each other on this earth, and how we are to daily renew and strengthen our relationship with God. To embrace the Law of Love.

We do this by avoiding the big sins that masquerade as tiny splinters, and by plucking out the ones we cannot avoid. We pray for forgiveness and healing and the grace of God to stay away from repeat injury.

We do this by never becoming splinters in the lives of our sisters and brothers whoever and wherever they may be, and by never being polluting splinters that diminish the glory of God’s creation.

We do this by remembering how the wood of the cross came to be, and by remembering how painful even the tiniest splinter can be.

To ourselves.

To God.

Who IS this guy?

A homily for Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, April 5, 2020

Matthew 21:1-11, Isaiah 50:4-7, Philip 2:6-11, Matthew 26:14 to 27:66

Let’s start cinematically and theatrically, comedy film first. Yes, it’s appropriate on this day when we hear of agony and sacrifice.

At the start of “Ghostbusters II,” Ray and Winston are on a mission, specter-bustin’ gear at the ready, and when they confer with their client, she tells them there are a whole bunch of them, and they’re rowdy. The two Ghostbusters blast through the kitchen door into a room full of shrieking birthday party kids, one of whom disappointedly groans, “I thought it was going to be He-Man!”

As Ray and Winston sing their theme song, they’re crestfallen when they get to the line, “And it don’t look good.”

Nope, it don’t.

In the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar,” a massive crowd accompanies Jesus into Jerusalem, singing “Hosanna, Hey Sanna, Sanna Sanna Ho,” praising him as all right by them, but then asking Jesus to die for them and, as the Gospel of the Passion tells us, eventually turning away from Jesus and throwing him to the Sanhedrin and the Roman executioners.

Jesus had been preaching true peace and true love for three years all over the Promised Land. He healed bodies; he healed minds; he healed souls. He acted nonviolently, patiently and selflessly, and his rare flashes of anger were always justified and just.

His fame — or, to the authorities’ point of view, infamy — almost always preceded him.

Simply put, the people of Israel knew him, or at least knew of him, knew something about him.

Well, they thought they did.

So why, and how, did they go from “Hail conquering hero” to “Crucify him! Crucify him!” in a handful of days?

They were expecting He-Man. (Please forgive my flippancy.)

When they got the true, essential Jesus, it didn’t look good. For him. For their selfish selves.

The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, proclaimed this Palm Sunday and again on Good Friday, is historical, theological, philosophical and psychological. We can — we should — ponder all year, every day of the year, what Christ’s sacrifice means to us two millennia later. And if that’s what you take away from the Passion, you’re on solid ground.

And if you stop reading/listening now, you are blessed. It’s all fine by me.

But let’s get back to cartoon heroes and superstars for a second, because there’s an interwoven message I believe we can carry forward.

When the people of Jerusalem encountered Jesus, they had certain expectations. If Jesus was the Messiah that God had promised them, what would Jesus do? Would he be the greatest military leader in Middle Eastern history? Would he rally the people to overthrow the Roman overlords? The numbers were in the Israelites’ favor, at least until Rome sent reinforcements: There were far more sons and daughters of Abraham than there were Roman soldiers, though the Romans were battle-hardened killing machines and might have prevailed. Which is why their legions were able to enforce the Pax Romana in all the lands they conquered. But if Jesus were a divinely sent Hammer of God, the wielder of the two-edged sword, those Romans’ reign could be over.

What would Jesus do? Would he call down fire and lightning and plagues and locusts from Heaven to drive out the Romans and their supposedly religious collaborators, the Hebrew hypocrites who called themselves the leaders of their people?

What would Jesus do???

Obviously, not what the people of Israel were expecting.

So they turned on him. Fake. Phony. Loser. Next!

Maybe what Jesus did — what Jesus does, what he would do — is not what we’re expecting, either, today, now, in our lives. In the lives of others. In the life of The Other.

But it should be, because of those three precious, sacred, productive years Jesus spent preaching and teaching and healing. Fortunately for us, a few people were taking notes during those lessons. We have our scriptural instruction manual. We have our Holy Spirit-guided consciences. We have each other.

As members of the Mystical Body of Christ, as Church for one another, and especially in these COVID-19 times, we carry a dual responsibility, a dual challenge.

We must be Christ to one another, to every person we encounter, albeit from six feet away or virtually.

And we must recognize Christ in every person we encounter, same rules apply.

So who are we expecting? And what can they expect from us?

It’s pretty simple, actually. And crystal-clear.

Who are we expecting? And what can they expect from us?

The everyday hero with unique talents our Creator formed in our mother’s womb. The everyday hero Jesus died and rose for. The everyday hero the Holy Spirit sustains with a flood of wisdom and grace.

Nothing more, and nothing less.