Pastoral Reflections

This Homily Originally Aired on October 27, 2019Sirach 35:12-14, 16-18 | 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18 | Luke 18:9-14   Almighty, everliving God, increase our faith, hope and charity.  Make us love what you command so that we may merit what you promise.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   Any of us that have lived a long time know that relationships are one of the most important things we are engaged in in this life, and they’re difficult.  They weren’t made to be simple.  They were made to take us to a place of joy and ecstasy and then to the darkest place of confrontation with our shadow.  It’s no different, in terms of our human relationships, in a sense, from our relationship with God.  It is supposed to be as intimate and as real as our relationship with each other.  That was God’s plan, to reveal himself as an intimate, personal God.  Unfortunately, I spent most of my life not turning to God, asking him to reveal himself to me, but I went to my church, the Catholic Church, which was very effective in helping me know about him, told me who he was.  And then when I watched what the priest did in the parish, I figured, “Well, that’s what God does.”  That was risky, but I kind of gave it over to the priest that preached and the church that taught and didn’t think that much about spending time getting to know this personal God who claims to be my Father and my brother and my wisdom.  But that’s where I’ve spent my last ten years, now that I’m entering into my eighth decade.  The 70s were rich for me, because I was retired for those ten years, and I was able to wonder and ponder and listen and think and ask questions.  And the God I see now is so different than the God of even ten years ago.  The teaching is the same.  I haven’t found him to say something that just totally disregarded everything I learned, but the understanding has changed.  There’s been wisdom given, which is his promise.   So when you think about us being poor — blessed are the poor.  That’s part of the scriptures today.  It’s not anything about poverty.  It’s about admitting that we don’t know that we need something more than just our own mind and energy and strength to accomplish the things that we’re here to accomplish.  We’re needy, and the need might sound like, well, we never know what to do, so we ask God to tell us what to do.  At least that seems to be the way the church approaches it.  We don’t know enough about a moral situation, as far as the right answer.  So we go to the church, and the church will tell us, “Well, this is what you have to do,” without even fully knowing what all the circumstances are, because none of us can know all the circumstances and all the parts of a complicated, moral decision.  It’s difficult.  And so rather than look for the simple answers, what I’ve learned to do and what I think God’s plan has always been is, “Turn to me in your unknowing,” if that’s a word, “And let me give you the insight.  Let me give you the wisdom you need.”  And then you have this thing that the church teaches but doesn’t seem to lean on very much, and that is we have this God-given dignity and right to make our own choices, our own decisions when it comes to moral issues.  Most people have problems with their relationship with their religion or with God over moral issues, what we can do, what we can’t do, not so much over who God claims to be, because what he’s claiming is so mysterious that it can’t be understood logically anyway.  He’s always been here.  He’s the awesome, most complete, most powerful force in the world, and yet he said, “I’d like to stay with you and marry you and get to know you.”  It’s what?  You can’t do both of those things.  And then he says something that the church never, I think, quite said to me, and that was, “I’m not here to tell you what to do.  I’m here to show you what is, and I trust you to make the right decision.  I know you can make the right decision.  I’m here to help you do that, and it’s more than just wisdom that I’m giving you.  I’m giving you a power.” If you want to imagine: what is the power that God gives us?  What is the thing that we need most?  Well, let’s just underscore the word need first, because we know that sin entered the world, and sin is tricky.  Sin is really a disposition.  It’s not so much an action, but the best way to describe sins is certain actions are sinful, and other actions aren’t.  It’s more difficult to talk about intention or belief or faith, but instead of looking at sin as a list of no’s, let’s look at a disposition that might best be described as autonomy.  The first book of Genesis talks about sin in probably the healthiest, most effective way.  It’s not talking about just disobedience.  Yes, Adam and Eve disobeyed and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  They broke the rule, but what were they doing?  They were caught in an illusion, a lie from some strange figure that was there saying, “That’s not really what God wants you to do.  He wants you to know everything.  He wants you to be strong.  He wants you to be tough.  So go ahead and ask God for the gift of this tree, which is the knowledge of good and evil, so that you’ll know what’s right and what’s wrong.”  Black and white, binary thinking, it’s what we all want.  It’s what the church gets caught in.  All religions get caught in that. This is good; this is bad.  That was the danger in their disobedience.  The act of disobedience was maybe typical of children, people unknowing.  You’re told not to do something.  Sometimes it makes you want to do it, but the thing was it’s about what they chose, because it sounded so good.  “I can be all that God wants me to be on my own, and he’ll be so pleased.”  I don’t know a person who doesn’t have a struggle with that idea.  It shows up all the time when something bad happens.  You say, “Well, no, I did some bad things in the past.  I’m being punished.”  Or something happens that’s good, and you say, “Well, it’s because I was praying all these days, and I did all this extra work, and I’m in a charitable institution.”  No, it’s not that kind of cause and effect kind of thing.  It’s not that simple.  Yeah, those things are partly true, partly false.  That’s the danger of that black and white, right and wrong autonomy.So what we hear in the first reading then is a statement from God, and it’s so clear what he’s saying.  “I’m God, and you’re human.  Your humanity —” the word human and humus, which means earth, and humility are all connected.  “You are not enough.  You’re not enough.  I don’t expect you to be enough.  I don’t expect you to figure out everything on your own.  I don’t.  So I’m here to promise you that, if you long for me in your life to be a source of wisdom, I will be there 100 percent, and when you pray for something, if you believe that I will answer it, I will answer this prayer, and I’ll answer every prayer you ever ask, except that I know you.”  And he knows that, if he gave us the power to achieve anything we wanted by praying to God and asking him for it, and he would answer every prayer, we would be egomaniacs.  And that’s the great danger, too much self, too much spirit, not enough earth, not enough groundedness, not enough human.  So his promise is beautiful in the first reading, because it says, “I will always do this, always answer your prayer, and your prayer, when it leaves a hungry, longing heart, not someone who’s full of themselves, asking for more strength — that doesn’t work, because I’ll only give you what is good for you.”  But when the prayer doesn’t seem to be answered, it’s move — I love the image.  It’s like a force that’s going around and floating in the air until it’s going to come to its proper goal, and what is the goal?  Whatever you prayed for, the answer will be what’s best for you.  It’s that simple, what’s best for you.  What more would you want? Paul underscores, in the second reading, his dependence on God.  He had a pretty rotten past when you think about it.  He was a Pharisee and going around holding capes of men that were slaughtering Christians, believers in Christ, because they were the enemy, and he got through all of that because of what?  Because of God’s mercy, because of his desire to open his heart to who he really was and what he was really doing, and he accepted it.  He saw, “I’m so wrong.”  When we see the faults that we’ve made and we own then and then we ask for help, it’s going to be there in a way that’s spectacular.  So what a trauma that must have caused him as he was converted to Christianity.  He got through because of forgiveness, because of God’s mercy, because he was there to listen to his prayer, and he must have prayed, “Please, forgive me.”  And he was.  Another thing about Paul that’s so fascinating, he always had this one sting of the flesh that he couldn’t get rid of, and God took care of that.  How?  Not by removing it.  By saying, “My grace is enough for you.  You’ve got to learn to deal with that.”  So then we go to the prayer in the gospel reading, two prayers.  I love these prayers.  I love the prayers, I should say, the guys.  One sits there, and the words of the scripture are so interesting.  He prays to himself.  Now, when I first used to read that, I thought, “Well, he’s whispering.”  No, he’s praying to himself.  He is the source of everything.  He is the righteous one.  He has made an effort, a sterling effort to do every rigid law, rule, fill it and make it go, because he wants to be better.  Why does he want to be better?  Well, maybe he thought, “God wants me to be better.”  I don’t think so.  He wants us not to sin and to turn to him, but we don’t have to be better to receive him.  We just have to want him and need him.  But here’s the interesting thing about the man, the Pharisee, sitting t

This Homily Originally Aired on October 20, 2013Exodus 17:8-13 | 2 Timothy 3:14-4:2 | Luke 18:1-8   Almighty, everliving God, grant that we may always conform our will to yours and serve your majesty in sincerity of heart.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.    

This Homily Originally Aired on October 13, 20192 Kings 5:14-17 | 2 Timothy 2:8-13 | Luke 17:11-19   May your grace, oh Lord, we pray, at all times go before us and follow after us and make us always determined to carry out good works through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son.   I don't know if you realized this, but every time I pray in the liturgy, the prayer is always addressed to God, and then at the end of the prayer, we say, “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns forever and ever, amen.”  We pray to God through Jesus, the God/man.  The God/man is the promise that we have the same experience that Jesus had, not to the extent that he had it, but the same experience of knowing and believing that God is with us, God is in us.  He’s the source of all good within us, and I don't know if you’re like me, but in my early years, as I was a young man and as a young priest, middle-aged priest — I’m an old priest.  It’s only recently than I began to realize how important the relationship I have with God the Father — it is to me what every true spiritual life will lead us to, an intimate, loving relationship with God the Father, the big one, the boss.It seems easier to fall in love with Jesus or the Holy Spirit.  It’s more ethereal, and sometimes we lean tremendously on saints and the intercessory powers or angels.  So there may really be some kind of inner resistance to going to the main one, the God who made everything, and believe that he is deeply in love with us and intimately engaged in our life.  It’s hard for us to believe that.  At least it was for me and still is in a sense.  So I want to look at these readings today, because I think they say something really important that is not the usual way I would have approached this set of readings.  Normally this is the perfect time to give a talk on gratitude, how thankful we should be for everything we receive.  I think there’s something more challenging in these readings, more profound.  It has to do with both our willingness to turn to a power greater than ourselves when we’re in need — that’s sometimes something that’s hard for us — but also the struggle that we sometimes have with believing in the heart of this incredible Christianity that we all believe in, what it’s really promising.  And the promise is always connected to a gift.  Salvation is a gift won for us by God in Christ, a gift.  So when we fall into the trap of are we earning it, are we good enough to get it, if things go back, is that because we haven’t done enough to get the grace of God that we need, is it a conditional relationship with this God — humanity is filled with conditional relationships.  I think all of them are in a sense, but this one’s different.  So let’s look at the readings.The first reading is about Naaman.  He is not a believing Jew.  He is actually a commander of the troops in Syria, a very successful man, and he’s always attributed his work to some divine power, whatever God he believed in.  But he developed leprosy, and the servant of his wife knew of Elisha the prophet and said, “If you go to Elisha the prophet, the prophet from Israel, he can heal you.”  And so Naaman decides to send a letter, and the letter goes to the king of the Israelites, and he says, “I’m going to Elisha to ask him to heal me.”  And the king goes crazy, thinking, “Oh, no.  This is a set-up.  Now if I can’t heal him, he’s going to start a war with me.”  Times never change.  But Elisha hears about the king being really upset and said, “What are you upset about?  Come.  I’ll take care of him.”  So Naaman goes to Elisha the prophet, and he brings all these gifts and gold and garments that he’s going to pay for this great gift.  And he goes there, and he expects Elisha to come out and do some kind of magic ceremony and lay hands on him, and poof, it’ll be gone.  Elisha doesn’t even come out, doesn’t even greet him.  He sends a messenger that says, “Go wash in the river, the Jordan River, seven times.”  And Naaman’s furious.  It’s an insult.  “I’m this great guy.  I’ve come, and he won’t even come out and talk to me?”  And again a servant comes into the story and says, “Well, Naaman, if he asked you to do something really extreme, really tough, you’d have done it.  So why not go wash seven times in the Jordan?”  So Naaman does, and his skin becomes like the skin of a newborn baby, so beautiful and smooth.  And he comes back and said, “Oh my gosh, thank you, thank you.  Here, take all this silver.  Take all these garments.  Take all this.”  And Naaman [sic] said, “No.  No, I’m not taking it.  It’s not me.  I didn’t do this.  I didn’t even come out and see you.  No, this is God doing it.”  He didn’t say those words, but that’s what his gestures and that’s what his refusal of a gift, payment, was.  You don’t pay for God to do something for you.  Got it?  So right away we see a prophet working for God, doing extraordinary things and not expecting anything to come back to him.  He gives all the credit to God and implies that God is not asking for anything other than believe in him.  Believe in him.  Trust him.  He’s real.  That’s exactly what Naaman does.  There’s a thing about gods living in territories, and they didn’t move from one territory to another.  So he needed the soil from there to take back to where he was from, and he would stand on that soil and worship the God of Israel, the God who gives healing to those outside of the community and refuses to accept any kind of payment.  Now Paul, in the second reading, gives us an image, one of the really powerful images of Christ’s message, when he’s saying, “We have to put up with a lot of stuff when we’re doing this work, and it’s not always easy.  But,” he said, “For everybody, everybody, there’s a thing going on.  We have to die with God, die with Christ, persevere in our belief with him, and trust that he’s always faithful, always going to be faithful.”  Even though he gets upset and tries to deny us, he can’t, because he’s faithful, can’t deny himself.  So what does it mean to die and to persevere?  Dying is always misunderstood as kind of a suffering, painful death, but no, what it really means is day after day, week after week, year after year, God is working in our life so that we die to those lower forms of consciousness that keep us separated from one another, from God, and we change.  We change, and something falls away, some level of selfishness, and it’s dead.  It’s gone.  So we die with Christ, and then persevere is another word for suffering.  You endure suffering, and suffering means you accept.  So you’re going through this painful process of dying, and you have to stay with it and trust in it and endure it, because it has such a tremendously effective and powerful work of changing you, moving you ever closer to the God who created you to be something that you’re in a struggle to become, what he made you to be.  So we go to this wonderful story of Jesus and the lepers, and the same theme is here:  God healing, because he wants to, in the person of Jesus.  Jesus is the new temple.  He is the way God chooses now to dwell with his people, not in a building, not in an institution but in a person, and then in all of us.  And so when he sees these men — and he’s healed many lepers in his life, but usually when he would do it, he would say to them, “Be cleansed.  Be freed of your disease.”  He doesn’t say that to these men.  They cry out, as they would have cried out to most people, “Have mercy on me.  Help me.  Help me.”  They were beggars, and Jesus hears something that he knows is in the heart of everybody that is suffering.  “Please take me out of this.  Please help me to grow through this.  Help me to become what this is asking me to be,” whatever.  But he just says, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.  Go to the temple, where you believe God resides, even though I’m here to tell you that God resides in me and will soon reside in you.  But go there, and ask them to do what they do.”  Well, the job of the temple priests was to look at someone and to see that they were being healed of leprosy, and so they would go through a pretty — well, an interesting ceremony.  You had to go find two birds, and one was killed, and the blood of that one was put into some water, and that was sprinkled on the other bird that then flew away.  Really interesting to — that’s worth another homily, someone dying so that someone can be free.  So they were told to go and do what you were supposed to do to get the gift from God that the temple could give you, and it says, in a very interesting way, on the way to the temple, they were being healed.  So there was something happening to them as they walked, maybe a building up of, “Oh my gosh, this is going to be great.  I am going to be healed.  I’m going to pass this test, and I’m going to do this ceremony.  I’ll be back with my family.”  But one of them realized, “Wait a minute,” and he was a Samaritan.  And in one sense, he may not have been so excited about going to the temple, because Samaritans were considered to be half-breeds.  They were part Jew, part Samaritan, and they had a different temple.  They worshipped God, but it was a different temple location.  And as you know what I’ve already said, something about a god living in a particular territory was important.  So they didn’t worship the God of Israel but their own god, and so he’s thinking about this, thinking, “Wait a minute.  Do I go to the temple to thank the temple, to pay the temple, or did I just experience something through a man that was God, and I’m healed?”  Now, I want to amplify the story a little bit, fill it in to what I think it might be — it helps you understand what I see in it, and I that is I think the others would have gone to the temple and would have done the sacrifice and would have talked about their healing.  And they would have said, “There was this

This Homily Originally Aired on October 6, 2019Habakkuk 1:2-3; 2:2-4 | 2 Timothy 1:6-8, 13-14 | Luke 17:5-10   Almighty and everliving God, who in the abundance of your kindness surpass the merits and the desires of those who entreat you, pour out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   For as long as I can remember, I could never understand that story in Genesis of that tree in the middle of the garden, the tree of good and evil and the desire of human beings to want to know what’s right and what’s wrong and this creature, this strong, powerful creature saying to them, “I know you were told not to do this, but really God wants you to do this, because he does want you to know what’s good and what’s evil.”  And that’s a hard argument to work against.  Of course God wants us to know what’s right and what’s wrong.  But does he?  The problem is to know what’s right and wrong would lead a human being to judge most everything as right or wrong.  There’s the problem.  It’s taking this mysterious world that God has created for us, this mystical experience of our living on this earth with God dwelling inside of us and reducing it to something as simple and binary as either we’re doing what’s right or we’re doing what’s wrong.  Either what’s happening is right or wrong.  Either God is there, or he’s not.  It’s so dangerous, and we still fall into that trap.  Religion falls into it all the time.  It’s so interesting to listen to different denominations of Christianity and see how different they are as far as what is right and wrong, and the more they stress the thing that’s right over wrong, you know they drift further and further away from something that is so important to hang onto.  It’s the subject of this set of readings, a thing called faith.  What do you believe?  What do you believe in?So the first reading is interesting, because it’s complaining about things being wrong.  It’s complaining about the fact that the world is in such rotten shape.  There’s violence everywhere and pain and suffering and like, “Okay, God.  You’re the God that takes care of your people.  That’s the right thing to do, and now here we are wallowing in pain and suffering.  That’s the wrong thing for us.  We shouldn’t have that, so what’s going on?  What’s wrong?  This is wrong.  Where are you?  Fix it.”  And the Lord has such an interesting answer to Habakkuk, well, to the people in the book of Habakkuk.  It’s this: “Realize something.  Write it down.  Write the vision.  The vision is what you need to hang onto, not judgment of what’s right and wrong but the vision.  If you see the vision, then you’ll be okay.”  So what’s the vision?  It’s a thing, the vision, and what I believe it is is what do you understand this God to be about?  What do you understand your role here on this earth — what is the vision of this whole thing?  It’s interesting.  If you have a project, you have a plan, right?  Well, a vision is different than a plan.  A plan is you know what you have to do.  You know what you need to do it.  You need the time to do it.  You do it, and it’s finished.  It’s pretty simple, but a vision is connected with something more mystical.  In fact, we would say a vision is something that comes from something other than the logical brain.  It comes from some supernatural force. I wondered myself as I read this reading, “What is my vision of my God, my church, my faith?  What do I believe?”  It was interesting what came to me, because I have this vision that we’re here, because that was what God wanted us to do.  It’s his plan.  It’s his idea, and he’s a loving God, so I know that somehow in all of this there is something good happening.  And then I think about the evolution of human beings, and I realize, “Okay, it seems that there is in this vision of who we are and who God is, there is this progression of understanding and growth and change.”  So we’re moving.  We’re changing.  We’re not the same.  The consciousness that we have now is radically different than what we had at the time of Adam and Eve, start with that, and 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago.  We’re different, so something is moving.  There is something happening.  Something is becoming, and in my vision of that, we’re becoming more and more who God intends us to be, more like him, and then how does that work?  What’s our part in it?  Well, it seems to me that, if we reduce religion to rights and wrongs, do this, or don’t do that, there’s not much going on in terms of a vision, but if we imagine that the promise of God is that he wants us to participate with him in a process that he has created, that ultimately will bring about something wonderful.  We’re participants in this work with God, not just the receivers of it, but we work with him.  So my vision is that we have a God who is good, who is drawing us to something even better than we have now.  It’s a long, slow process, and we’re not just simply sitting back and receiving it.  We’re invited, by this mysterious thing called incarnation, that God is going to dwell in us like he dwelt in Jesus, and then with him in us, we do this work together, and we build this thing, this kingdom.  It’s a movement from slavery to something better, to freedom, to wholeness.  So the vision is there’s something big going on that we participate in, and it’s mysterious.  It’s moving in the right direction, but it’s impossible to judge whatever is going on as helping or hurting.  That’s where we get in trouble.  “Oh, that’s good.  Oh, that’s bad.  That’s a step forward.  No, that’s ten steps back.”  Don’t judge. Don’t use your mind.  Use your imagination — imagination.  This is really big, big work.  Every single person is a part of it.  So we go back to the ordination that we started in last week’s second reading with Timothy being given this priesthood, this work that he does, and it’s called a flame, a fire, a passion inside of him.  And so he’s saying, “Believe in it.  Do it.  Bear your share of the hardships of the gospel.  It’s not going to be something like you come onto the scene.  Everybody’s not so good.  They get better, because every talk you give they get better, and then everything works out, and then everybody cheers, and we’ve created the kingdom.”  No, nothing that simple.  For those of us who are asked to work in this process that God has in mind for this world, we have to have something, and it’s the vision.  We have to have a sense of what’s really happening, but then more than — along with the vision, we have to believe in it, absolutely believe in it, have faith in it.  So that’s what the gospel is about.  We turn, and we see that the apostles are worried about maybe they don’t understand the full message, and maybe they’re doubting.  Maybe they’re wondering if this whole thing is going to work.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be with Jesus for three years and watch his amazing response — watch the amazing response from people who just thought he was so incredible and so wonderful, and they were so excited about who he was and what he could do.  Then on the other side was the institution, thieving and burning with anger and resentment that he was taking away something that they thought they owned, something they were in charge of.  He was taking away their power, inviting them to participate in a power that was beyond the institution, but it was a gift from the God who created them, God living inside of them.  It was terrifying to those people who were in charge, and so they struggled, like we all struggle, every one of us.  So what is his response to the question when they say, “All right, we can kind of get this, but increase our trust in it.  Increase our belief.”  What they’re really asking for is, “Help us to see the vision.  Help us to surrender to it.  Help us to stop judging it.”  So he said, “If you have faith, it’s not about whether you believe a lot or a little.”  The vision is sort of true or sort of not.  We do that a lot.  I do a lot of that.  “Yeah, it’s working, sort of, I think.”   No, you either believe it, or you don’t.  And if you believe it, you have incredible power. Why he would give an image of the power of faith that you could move mountains or rip a tree out of the ground and plant it in the ocean, impossible things — that’s what he’s trying to say.  If you believe, you can do the impossible.  What is the connection between belief and the impossible?  It’s because the mind is logical.  The mind makes logical decisions.  The vision is based not in logic but in a paradox, in a very mysterious thing.  A God who loves and whose love shows — its expression of love is taking care of us, freeing us from enemies and doing all that, and then he just lets enemies come and crush us, and he does all this stuff.  And you’re saying, “Wait a minute.  Wait a minute.  Maybe it’s because I don’t do enough.  Well, if I did more, if I was more perfect, if I did everything right, then he would take care of me.”  That’s logical.  Do good, and you get good.  No, you can be the most loving, caring, saintly person and suffer horrendous things.  So come on.  It doesn’t make logical sense.  What are we supposed to do?  I love the image.  It’s believe.  Just believe.  It’s your job.  It’s your work.  It’s not extra work.  It’s just part of the work.  It’s just you have to hold this vision in front of you every morning of your life and say, “All right, here I am.  I’m here to do whatever I can.  I want to make a difference in the world.  I’d like people to feel something from me that’s comforting.  If I have — I don’t want to lose compassion  or empathy because of the people who treat me the way they shouldn’t.  I want to continue to have empathy an

This Homily Originally Aired on September 29, 2019Amos 6:1a, 4-7 | 1 Tm 6:11-16 | Luke 16:19-31   Oh God, who manifests your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy, bestow, we pray, your grace abundantly upon us and make those hastening to attain your promise heirs to the treasures of heaven.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   One of the things that I have discovered late in life, and I teach it as often as I can, it’s the whole notion of human nature and how it evolves, how we come into the world and what we’re expected to do while we’re here.  One of the most interesting things about human nature, when it’s in its more raw form, let’s say, closer to where we came from in terms of the animal world, but it’s primary concern is self-preservation.  It often feels isolated and separated from others.  It doesn’t have a strong sense of connection, and its primary concern is, “How am I going to survive?”  When you go from that low form all the way up to the highest form, which I believe is the essence of all religions, but in particular, Christianity really does stress it, and that is we get to the place where our primary concern is for others.  And the reason we’re here, the primary reason we’re here, is to take care of them and help them and heal them and support them, an interesting transformation.  I know I’ve moved, as all of us have who have been faithful to the tradition of Christianity to the Catholic liturgies, if you’re Catholic and involved in that — there’s something positive about moving us in that direction, even if we’re not that conscious of that’s what we’re doing, but you see in people that are older a much more open, sympathetic, compassionate kind of disposition toward the world.  It’s beautiful to watch.  One of the things that I think is important about it is, if you look at that as the primary movement of why we’re here, that we go through this process, and I would say children come into the world pretty self-centered.  They want to eat, and when they’re not, they’re crying and screaming.  Let’s face it.  It’s survival, and then we see a change.  And what I want to stress then today is that this is the work of — I said it — all religions, but I’d like you to imagine it’s the work that I help you do, that I am involved in, that I want to share with you.  So I want to go to the second reading to start my reflections, because there’s something in it that is very important.  First of all, looking back into the full chapter, what we’re looking at is a kind of ordination for Timothy, and Paul is there witnessing it.  And he’s being called to serve, and so there’s a strong, kind of liturgical feel to this.  Especially the ending is like an exaltation at the end of a major ceremony, praise to God who is accomplishing this.  But it’s clear that what Paul is trying to say is that Timothy made a profession in front of others, and he was challenged to do something, to teach, to preach.  But the thing it says that he must be dedicated to is the commandment, not the Ten Commandments, not the rules of the church.  No, the commandment, and I thought to myself, “What is that?”  Well, the obvious thought first is love, but love has so many dimensions.  So the one I want to talk about is what we might call sympathy, compassion, empathy, a deep caring for another person.  That’s the commandment.  That’s what we’re here for, and when you look at the evolution of religion from Old Testament and New Testament, you really do see a radical change in that attitude, because when Christ walked the earth, it was a basic misunderstanding that anyone that was in pain or disease or struggling or a beggar near your house, they were being punished by God.  So you weren’t supposed to necessarily pay attention to them or doing anything for them, but what’s interesting about that kind of rule and law — and it may have worked for a long time, but if you develop, if you grow and you evolve in your consciousness, you develop a thing that is a kind of visceral response to someone in pain.  We could call it sympathy.  Did you ever notice, when somebody tells somebody about how they went through something really traumatic, lost someone very close to them or went through some really painful thing, the first instinct often that comes to a person is a feeling of, “Oh, I’m sorry.”  One person told me that a person said that about their sister’s disease, and they said, “Oh, you caused it?”  No, you don’t say you’re sorry because you caused the pain, but you feel sorrow in you because the person is in pain.  That’s sympathy.  It’s a beautiful quality, and it’s what we’re here to develop and understand more fully and participate in.  So let’s go to the first reading then, because it’s really connected to the gospel.  It’s one of those statements from the prophets that’s a condemnation of a people who are anything but sympathetic.  But what I stress in this is what he’s describing is people who are unconscious but who are liking being unconscious and stay unconscious and party all the time.  I love the image of instead of having a glass of wine, they have a bowl of wine, and so they keep themselves drugged, and they keep themselves partying.  And the prophet is saying, “This isn’t going to work.  This isn’t what human beings are made for, so this is not going to work.  So one day it will all be done away with,” meaning, if you’ll just grow up a little bit, you’ll realize that that’s not what you want to be.  It reminds me of every 18- and 19-year-old who loves to party.  You talk to them in their 70s, and they may say, “Well, it was fun for a while,” but it wasn’t anything they wanted to stay in.  So we see this image in that first reading then of there’s something unnatural — maybe not — something counter to the evolution that we’re supposed to be engaged in as we move along, that it’s not to be frozen in a particular time when it’s all about distraction — distraction. So then we go to the gospel, and if you notice in Luke’s gospel — we’ve been reading it, obviously, this whole season — he’s interesting in these last weeks, because he keeps bringing up things that are kind of shocking, like unless you hate your mother and father, you can’t be in the kingdom, and if you watch somebody cheat so they can take care of themselves, that’s pretty cool.  You should follow them, because they do something that shows that they’re conscious of taking care of themselves, things that — what?  It doesn’t make sense until you pursue it, but in every case, he’s trying to get us more engaged in the mystery that I call living a spiritual life.  It’s not a logical life.  It’s not a simple life that has black and white answers everywhere.  It’s mercurial.  It’s gray.  It needs reflection to live in, and so partying is not what we’re here for, but we’re here for something else.  So this is, I think, what we’re here for in the gospel.  It’s beautiful.  I love this story.  So there’s a man, Lazarus, and he’s poor.  He’s diseased, and he lives on the corner of the street, perhaps, where this rich man lives.  And all I can say is — I don't know if you have the same experience, but in Dallas now, if you drive to a lot of intersections, especially in places of higher income, you’re going to find these beggars on the corner, which is sort of new to me.  I’m not used to beggars in Dallas, and I don't know what your feeling is when you see them.  All I know is I can’t look at them, and I know that’s not just because I don’t want them to think that I’m reaching for my wallet.  But I just have a hard time sitting there and feeling anything like I feel, which is I want to do something for them, and then I think, “Well, maybe they’re faking it.  Maybe they’re not.”  Then I think, “Well, maybe if everybody gave them five bucks, well, there’d be 20 of them at every stop.”  What do you do?  I hate it.  I just — I don't know.  I don’t feel comfortable passing them, and I don’t feel like I’m obligated to do it.  So that’s the problem, but I feel something.  And I underestimate the power of that feeling.  Yeah, I’m sorry for them, but as you evolve and you change, you also develop something else, an inner reaction to somebody who is in pain, and it’s not just sympathy, meaning you know and understand they’re in a some kind of difficult situation, and you would like to help them — sympathy.  But it evolves into empathy.  Empathy, a word that’s only been in the English language for maybe — well, since 1909, and it’s different than sympathy.  Sympathy is you can tell someone is in pain, and you wish they weren’t.  Empathy is you actually feel the pain they’re in.  You experience it.  That moment at the street corner, I feel something like what it must be like to have no home, no place, no food, and it’s an uncomfortable, terrible feeling.  And I sort of try to get rid of it, and I’m beginning to realize, that’s not what you do with empathy.  That’s wasting it, because it has a mystery, a connection that we need to get in touch with that is so powerful.  So let’s go back to the gospel.Lazarus is there, and he’s ignored.  And I would say the rich man has a lot of diversions, and he’s just not really interested.  He’s never been told that he should care for these people.  In fact, I would just think that there’s no real connection when they see people like this.  They just don’t feel anything, no sympathy, and then he dies.  Lazarus dies.  The rich man dies, and then the whole story changes, the parable.  It’s beautiful.  What I find fascinating is you’re told there’s a great chasm between where this man is now who suffered, and I’m sure he had compassion and empathy for his brothers and sisters who were fellow beggars.  I’m sure they commiserated and helped each other, but the rich man, he had no conne

This Homily Originally Aired on September 22, 2019Amos 8:4-7 | 1 Timothy 2:1-8 | Luke 16:1-13   Oh God, who founded all the commands of your sacred law upon love of you and of our neighbor, grant that, by keeping your precepts, we merit to attain eternal life.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   There’s something so beautiful, so simple, so human about this set of readings.  I want to begin my thoughts with this image.  The God who came into the world, the God who first revealed himself to Abraham and then to his people, through Moses and through the prophets, the whole process of that God revealing himself was this slow uncovering of a God who no one really expected.  Gods were always demanding, always in need of being worshipped, honored, praised, sacrifices offered to them over and over again.  The image of we, as human beings, were to serve the gods by giving them things that we wanted for ourselves or maybe for others, but it was always this idea that we would give something away to him, and he would be so pleased.  Sacrifice, even sacrificing your children was a common thing, but this God, this God of Abraham, this God, who gave us the fullness of who he is in this God/man Jesus, had another quality that was so beautiful and so attractive.  And that is he has a weakness for us, a longing to take care of us, a longing to please us, a longing to give us the things that ultimately we really need, not what we want necessarily but what we really need.  One of the things he’s taught us is that we should pray and not just to him, not just honoring him with our prayers, but we should pray for each other.  That’s the beautiful thing of that middle reading.  Everyone should be working to pray for one another, and I often think to myself, “We’re asking God to do what God does.  Please help my friends.  Please make this person more aware, more conscious.  Help him to turn away from that which destroys him.”  It’s like we’re talking to God about doing what God has already intended to do.  We’re not praying to him to draw attention to someone who he hasn’t paid attention to.  So why?  Why do we pray like that?  I think it’s somehow that God’s intention is to bring life to every human being.  That’s who he is, and he’s created a world where that takes place.  But the world he’s created is not a world where we are basically robots doing what he says, but we’re free agents who can decide to choose to be a part of this process that God is so engaged in, healing, caring for, taking care of people.  And we underestimate the power of our intention, the power of what we want, as if we think, “Well, God’s running everything.  We’re just here to receive it.”  No, he’s made this strange relationship with us where we’re here to work with him, join him, be a part of the work that he does, an essential part, not that he can’t do it without us, but that he’s planned it this way.  This is what he wants it to be.  So when you are engaged in the work of caring for your brothers and sisters by asking God to help them.  You could imagine them really asking God to help me be who I need to be for that person without having to say it that way.  “Please help him.  I’ll do anything you want me to do to be a part of that healing, to be a part of that freedom that I long for the person who seems entrapped in something that destroys him.”   So praying is a symbol of our being a part of who God is and what God is about, and he’s about compassion, empathy.  Religion at the time that Jesus walked this earth was anything but compassionate and empathetic.  They worked out a fine system so that, if anybody was in need, anybody had a health problem or a financial problem, you wrote them off, because they had obviously done something wrong, broken a law, and they were being punished by God.  So people who were struggling were to be considered outcasts.  Just don’t get near them.  What a strange, twisting of reality.  Religion is often capable of that.  It’s frightening that it can do that so effectively at times.  So into this rigid system of control comes this God who reveals a heart in the person of Jesus particularly that is mindboggling.  He cares.  He’s compassionate.  He suffers with people that are suffering.  The last thing he does is write them off.  The first thing he does is rushes to see what I can do to help them, and that intention to help them is so intense that it just overrides nature in a simple way of saying here’s a power that is stronger than nature at the heart of nature.  It can do anything — anything, heal things that can’t be healed by natural processes maybe.  So we see this God revealing himself as someone who cares so deeply, and so you look at this first and gospel reading, and it’s so timely to me, it seems.  It’s about God and mammon.  And mammon, I’m not sure how to describe mammon, but the best way I can do it for you is, when you are working, living desiring nothing but what you want and what you need and you care nothing about who you take it from or how much pain you cause, that’s mammon, total self-centeredness, no compassion, sociopathic life, frightening.  So the first reading talks about people who are in business, and they’re saying, oh, they can’t wait for the time to come when they’re setting their scales, and they’re getting ready to sell, and they come up with all these schemes where they can sell impure properties by filling them with stuff that has no value.  They’re wanting to fix their scales so, when somebody buys a pound of something, they’re really only getting three-quarters of a pound, and all this stuff, and they’re just so greedy and so anxious to suck life out of people through what they’ve considered to be really smart, making a ton of money off of other people, taking from those in need, something that just makes them feel so much more important, perhaps more comfortable.  It sounds so much like what we see so often in major, major corporations today, people making enormous amounts of money by sucking as much out of people as they can, as much as they’ll endure, as much as they’ll pay.  That’s all they need to know is, “If they’ll pay for it, we can charge it.  Then we can get more and more and more, and they’ll have less and less and less.  That’s good business.”  It’s frightening.  So we see then in the gospel, Jesus pointing out this very, very real, real problem.  “What are you going to do?  How are you going to deal with this part of your life?”  So he brings up, I think, just a really simple and wonderful story.  One of the things he was so good as is sort of talking about life that was outside of the norms, the narrow norms that religion had fixed for us to consider to be acceptable.  The one thing we knew, or you know, or we can know, we can find out that at the time Jesus walked the earth, the religion that he was a part of forbad anyone to charge money for someone else, for using money.  In other words, to have a loan was considered immoral.  To give a loan to someone was immoral.  To charge them with nothing that you’re doing for them, you just gave them the use of your money for a while, and to make them pay for that was considered to be absolutely unfair, unjust and wrong.  So I love when Jesus can play with reality that goes way beyond those narrow, narrow restrictions of the way things are supposed to be.  So he talks about a man who is in the business of running somebody’s loan department, so to speak, and he’s in charge of payments coming back, which would have, of course, been filled with interest.  And so he’s about to lose his job, so he’s thinking, “Oh man, I don’t want to go to work.  I don't know what to do.  I don’t want to beg.  I’m too proud.  I know what I’ll do.  I’ll make friends.  I’ll do things for people with my job.  I’ll give them something that they will so appreciate that, when I’m let go, they will take care of me.  I will establish a healthy relationship with these people, one based in generosity, caring for them, using my position to make their position better.”  What a strange idea for a business.  Some kinds of businesses, when they say, “We’re here only to serve these customers, and we need to make sure we don’t make too much money, because it’s not fair.  We just need to make a good living.   They need to make a good living.  So why would we want to be paid in extravagant amounts?  So this would be just kind of silly.  We’re all in this together.  Let’s take care of each other.  Let’s build these relationships.”So funny whenever you go to a place, and you feel like you’re being ripped off by either a price that’s outlandish or by something.  There’s something in you that just turns — I don't know.  It makes you kind of sick, and you say, “Yeah, yeah.  Greed is everywhere.”  You get an estimate from one company, and then you find another company will do it for half the price and the same product, and you go, “What is going on?”  And you feel close to that business that wanted to make you pay twice the profit that someone else can live off of and make a profit and give you such a better price?  Of course you’re drawn to the person who takes care of you.  What a bizarre kind of concept.  Businesses are there not to make money for the owners or the shareholders but for the fairness and the goodness that they can bring to people.  It’s a service.  It’s a service.  Serve, serve, serve.  That’s so much what Jesus wants us to understand about why we’re here.  We’re all here to serve each other, give something to each other, and the beauty of that is what happens to people in an environment where they’re constantly being fed, nurtured, cared for.  It’s amazing.  Your whole disposition kind of changes.  You feel good.  You feel comfortable.  You feel safe, and you want to do the same thing for o

This Homily Originally Aired on September 14, 2014Numbers 21:4b-9 | Philippians 2:6-11 | John 3:13-17   O God, who willed that your Only Begotten Sonshould undergo the Cross to save the human race,grant, we pray,that we, who have known his mystery on earth,may merit the grace of his redemption in heaven.Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,God, for ever and ever.    

This Homily Originally Aired on September 9, 2019Wisdom 9:13-18b | Philemon 9-10, 12-17 | Luke 14:25-33   Oh God, by whom we are redeemed and receive adoption, look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters that those who believe in Christ may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance.    Every Sunday we go back to stories, most especially the story in the gospel, and try to find in it wisdom, understanding, some kind of direction for how we should be living our life.  I don't know what it would be like if we didn’t have these eyewitness accounts of this God/man Jesus, and every time I go back to them, I’m always amazed at how I can find something in it I’ve never seen before.  One of the things I’d like to point out is that these were stories that were not written just like news events, like this is written down right after the talk he gave, and people said, “This is what he said.” No, they were stories written down after his death and resurrection, after he became who he fully wanted to reveal himself to be in the eyes of those who were with him, and it obviously added a tremendous amount of importance to his teaching.  So I think about what they would have remembered in his teaching.  It would have been essential stuff, really essential, really important, and here we have this speech, this talk he gave to a great crowd of people.  And he makes basically three fundamental teachings. He presents three fundamental teachings, and in that I see some things that are really crucial, really important for you and for me to work on, to reflect upon, to question ourselves about what we believe.  So much has influenced you and me in terms of our way of seeing the world, mostly our family of origin, mostly our culture, the religion we belong to, and then there’s this one source, this one pure, beautiful source, which is the in-dwelling presence of a God who wants to speak to you and to me.  That’s what it seems he’s interested in most, a relationship with us, union with God.  So the first thing this set of readings offers us is a reminder that there is something about this work we have with God that is not something we can sit down and say, “I’ve figured it out.  I know how it works.  I know what to do, or someone else can tell me always what to do.”  No, it’s a work that demands this mysterious, indescribable thing called the Holy Spirit, Spirit, truth, and so the opening reading is really powerful, because it’s saying, “We have a hard time figuring things out, who I am, what I’m supposed to be doing, what’s the problem in my relationship.”  We’re trying to figure all that out, or we’re trying to figure out just logical things. Look at the way the world has evolved in terms of understanding and things that we now take for granted. “Well, everybody knows that.” Well, maybe they didn’t know that 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago.  Of course they didn’t.  So we’ve grown a lot in our understanding of how the world works, but even that is hard for us to figure out, and we’re probably just scratching the surface.  So we’re just reminded that we have this wonderful, wonderful thing in our head, this brain, and it’s logical, and it understands, and it’s creative, and it’s interested in how things work, and it searches for answers.  It’s wonderful, but at the same time, it’s absolutely — I don’t want to say worthless, but it’s absolutely ineffective in enabling you and me to open ourselves to what it is that God is doing in your life and in mine.  Logic is a liability when it comes to the spiritual world. The heart is what it needs to work with, and the heart is a different thing than the brain.  It has a way of surrendering to things that we can’t fully grasp logically, but they feel right.  They seem right.  They sound right.  So we start with the image that we need if we’re going to have a relationship with God, if we’re going to be his disciple.  If we’re going to live the life that he’s calling us to, we have to be radically open to a source of wisdom.  That is the key to you and I doing something in the world, and the thing that I know we’re intended to do in this world is to participate in the process.  The process, what are we here for?  It’s always been the issue.  What are we here for?  Well, one of the ways to imagine that is we’re here to get to heaven.  That’s sort of true, but in the first chapter that we’ve just been listening to in Luke, he talks so much about the gratuitous grace of God that’s going to save us, and salvation is not something you earn by what you do.  So this may sound strange, but let’s just say that that’s not the most effective way of thinking about what we’re here to do, to achieve salvation.  It’s a gift, yet we know there’s something here that we’re responsible for accomplishing.  We’re not just here to wait until the promise comes, that we can do anything that we want. No, let’s just say he promises that he’s going to take care of us.  He’s going to get us to the place we need to be.  That’s wisdom.  I don't know how he’s going to do it.  We have a thing called purgatory after death.  We can still grow after death.   Maybe that’s part of it.  Maybe the part we’re playing is more integrated into a whole bunch of other people’s struggle, and maybe whatever part we work with, even though we may not come to a clear decision, is partly something that benefits everybody else so that our work is effective in ways that we don’t even understand, even if it doesn’t effectively work for us.  So just imagine that we’re in this mysterious thing called my life — my life.  If there’s anything that we can see clearly in the ministry of Jesus is the way this particular gospel begins in saying, “There is one single thing that’s most important.”  By far the most essential thing that Jesus came to establish within you and me is something that I haven’t paid enough attention to in my life, because I keep going back to the idea of winning salvation by living a good life, and then that puts me in the role of checking what I’m doing.  Be sure I’m loving.  Be sure I’m forgiving.  Do this. Do that and control my passions. Be nice.  Be good, and then I’ll be saved.  But what if what really matters to God is not our performance while we’re here but our ability to connect with him, to be intimate with God? If there’s anything you can say about the ministry of Jesus is it has one dominant theme.  By just looking at it, without even knowing anything about it, it’s about a God who becomes a man and lives in a man and has such powerful influence in the effectiveness of that man that it’s like, “Hello, this is what we’re here to do.  We’re here to be filled with divinity in order for divinity to use the unique thing that we are to be able to accomplish things in the world that he couldn’t accomplish without me as a unique instrument.”  Amazing.  So if there’s anything you want to spend time on, if you want to say, “What am I really here to do?  What’s the most important thing?”  Spend time with God.  Listen to him.  Worship him. Find a way of connecting with him. Religion promises connection with God, yet religion has a shadow, like everything does, where it seems to come into your life and maybe take over and control all of your decisions.  The church is there to do the best it can to give us direction and advice, but that advice and direction is ultimately up to us to choose.  If you do it because you’re told to do it, if you act in a way because you’re told to do it and you’re afraid of being punished, that’s really not what God would be longing for from a human being.  He wants us to surrender, to suffer, which means to accept. So after Jesus, in this lecture in this series of themes he’s talking about, he starts with the idea that, “The most important thing is union with God, union with me, union with your Father.”  It’s everything for him, and the gift is wisdom.  So you can deal with things differently, because you’re not using logic, but you’re open to mystery.  So then he says, “Unless you are willing to turn away from mother, father, brother, sister, all the relationships you’ve had, unless you can hate those people,” which is really an interesting word — it’s really to be separate from them.  Unless you’re willing to separate yourself from all those who have given you something that isn’t really wise, isn’t really true, unless you’re willing to say no to that, when you see the truth, you can’t be his disciple.  You can’t be a student of his.  You can’t grow.  So it means shedding whatever has been told to you, whatever you picked up from watching the people around you acting in a way that you think, “Oh, this is normal,” and it’s not.  It’s rather destructive rather than the way things should be.  That’s a major step.  Open yourself to wisdom and then question when wisdom comes in conflict with those who have taught you, and the obvious thing you need to do is be free of those who have taught you, even though there’s such an intimate relationship with them.  But you have to be free of everything they’ve given you that’s not truth.  So you have to hate them.  That’s a strong word, but it’s dramatic, and it’s pretty effective, because it was such a responsibility to honor your father and your mother and honor all these people.  So he’s saying, “Be careful.  You’re not honoring them when you believe what they teach you when it’s not true.” And then he goes on to say, “You have to carry your cross.” Well, the cross is such an interesting thing.  It’s really hard to fathom its essence, but I’m saying mostly to you that it’s the one thing that is most essential in life, that you accept whatever the plan of your life is.  That’s what Jesus did.  You don’t have to be found out at the end of your life to be somebody that is being attacked by everyone, and you lose all your reputation, and you die this horrible death.  No, tha

Sirach 3:17-18, 20, 28-29 | Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-24a | Luke 14:1, 7-14   God of might, giver of every good gift, put into our hearts the love of your name, so that, by deepening our sense of reverence, you may nurture in us what is good and, by your watchful care, keep safe what you have nurtured. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.    

Isaiah 66:18-21 | Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13 | Luke 13:22-30   Oh God, who calls the minds of the faithful to unite in a single purpose, grant your people to love what you command and to desire what you promise that amid the uncertainties of the world our hearts may be fixed on that place where true gladness is found.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   The first reading describes the intention of God the Father as he began working with these people.  You hear this theme throughout all of scripture, but it’s he wants to call people together.  He wants to get people to come to him and to understand and to grow and to become who he’s always intended them to be.  It’s so interesting to imagine who those first responders were to that invitation to come and dwell with him and listen to him.  I don't know if you’ve ever wondered about what I’m about to say, but I’ve been thinking a lot about what were the people like when God was calling his people for the first time into a people that he said, “I’ve got this plan for you, and I want to take you out of a place of slavery and bring you to a better place.”  What was their morality like?  How sensitive were they to the things that we have grown into to make us more and more like God our Father, compassion, understanding, love.  My sense is that they were very, very far from where we are today, and then we hear in the book of Hebrews, we hear that not only is God calling us into a place of goodness and wonder, but he’s saying, “As I bring you to this place, I have to ask you to go through something.  It’s called discipline.”  Discipline, what discipline would sound to me like is some energy and effort on our part that goes against the way we normally think or the way we normally look at things.  So it’s clear that, if you’re going to journey with God, if you’re going to come with him on this journey to freedom, you’re going to have to change, and discipline comes from the same word as disciple, learner.  And so you’re going to have to learn things about the way you have been, and you have to go through a process of changing that, and that is never easy.  And so when there’s pain in that experience, what the author to the book of Hebrews is trying to say is, “No, go through that, because that’s God’s gift to you, to take you through something painful, and if you endure the pain, you’re going to find this promised place, this promised land, this salvation.”  Always there is this, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, this longing for a place we aren’t yet in that we can one day reach. So when we look at the ministry of Jesus, and he’s the one who’s come to fulfill everything in the Old Testament — he’s the one that’s there to say, “Okay, this is the final chapter of the whole lesson that started with Adam and Eve and their struggle to know what’s right and what’s wrong. And what he’s trying to do, Jesus, he goes from town to town and village to village, and he teaches, and he preaches, and he’s trying to say something that is radically, radically different. And so when asked, “How’s it going? What’s the success rate?”  I think that’s an interesting question.  I thought of that question about are there a few people saved or a whole bunch of people being saved.  He doesn’t give an answer of how many.  He talks about how you become one of those who are in his kingdom, in the place he wants us to be, on the journey to someplace even greater than we could ever even imagine.  In fact I had this image, when I was preparing this homily, that as Jesus leaves a town, you wonder what he’s thinking, and you say — if I were walking with him, I’d say, “Well, how do you think it went there?  Do you think they got it?”  Because when I give a talk, sometimes that’s what people say who know my work and wonder about people who are there that don’t know it.  They say, “You think they understood?”  Well, it’s interesting.  His image of understanding is really fascinating, and he gives us an insight, a really beautiful insight as to what he was really doing.  He wasn’t trying to correct behavior.  He wasn’t saying, “Do more of what you’re supposed to do.  Be disciplined so that you will not choose what you want to do but do always what the law demands you do.”  That was the problem with religion at the time that Jesus walked this earth.  It was almost like people were robots to the law, and they didn’t know God.  In fact it was even considered to be blasphemous to think that you could have an intimate relationship with God.  That’s interesting if you think of the ego of the world saying, “No, don’t get people connected to God.  That’s going to be dangerous.  No. Just make God a kind of formidable, frightening figure that condemns the minute you cross with him your disobedience. Once he knows your disobedience, he’s angry, and he’s ready to kill you and destroy you.”  That’s the kind of God that a church that was running the world then, the Judeo-Christian — well, was running the Jewish world — the temple, it was all about discipline, following the rules and laws and doing what rituals demanded of you in order to receive some kind of mercy from God.  It was all in what you did, what you did, what you did. And Jesus calls that the wide gate, the one everybody was taking.  Everybody’s walking that way.  Do what you’re told.  God will bless you in this world and in the next, and Jesus comes to contradict that, not the promise but the way, the doorway, the thing you need to enter into.So I want you to imagine when he talks about — and this is very hard to grasp the first time you read this passage, but what he’s talking about, one might say, well, the narrow — the wide gate is the easy gate, and it’s painless, and then the narrow gate is really hard.  No, I don’t think that’s it.  One is obvious, and one is hidden.  The narrow gate is hidden, and when he says it’s hard for a rich man to find that narrow gate, it would simply mean a man who is rich at the time that Jesus was preaching was the man who followed the rules and laws to the letter of the law, because that’s why they were rich.  So there’s an acceptance of this misconception of what God wants from us. “Do what I say.  Do it perfectly, and I will bless you.”  And then there’s something hidden that Jesus came to reveal, because human beings are not made simply to be robots to external rules and laws. It gives us freedom from the anxiety perhaps or wondering what life is like and whether it’s right or not, and you know if you’re doing the right things, that’s it.  I think for me, growing up as a younger person, I would think, “Well, as long as I’m doing what I’m supposed to, I’m doing fine.  If I go to confession, go to mass every Sunday, don’t ever have any kind of sexual contact with anyone before marriage, all that, well, then I’m in.”  Okay? And that just took a whole lot of discipline.  Another word for that is repression.Then Jesus comes along and said, “No, there’s another way.” I would describe it this way: The wide is doing what you’re told.  The narrow gate is becoming who God intends you to be.  It’s that simple.  And how do you do that?  Well, the frightening thing is you can’t become who you’re intended to be, you can’t develop the unique thing that you are, the unique person that you are and the role that you’re going to have in this world and in your family of origin and in the circle of your friends.  When you become authentically who you are, you’ve got a gift for each of them, but if you’re all following the same robotic life and just doing what you’re told, nobody’s changing really.  So what you find in that narrow gate is not just a way to salvation promised to law-abiding citizens.  No, it’s a very intense, wonderful journey of being transformed.  Notice I say transformed, because I don’t think you can sit in a room and say, “Okay, I’m going to become myself.  I’m going to work on this.”  Well, you don’t know what that self is.  At least I didn’t.  Who I see myself as now at almost 80 is nothing like I’d see myself when I was 30. A few things are the same but very few. The goals I have now are not the goals I had then, and those goals back then were not bad.  I wanted to be a good priest, do everything right and not make mistakes and please everybody.  That’s not a bad thing, but this inner journey is something really different. And to go inside to see what’s there, to become conscious of what you’re really doing, what you’re really feeling, what you’re really longing for, that’s not something you can do on your own. It has to be done with someone. So that’s the very heart of the message of Jesus.  He came into the world to replace the temple, the laws, the rules with the personal presence of God inside of you.  What does that look like?  It looks just like Jesus.  He was you, human completely and filled with divinity, and one of the phrases that they use about him is that he grew in age and wisdom.  He wasn’t just, poof, coming into the world as a little boy with all the knowledge of God.  No, he had to remain 100 percent human.  That was the core of his message.  If you take that away from him and make him too divine, you ruin it.  The thing you want to think about, when you think of Jesus as God, is he was so close to him, and that presence of God made him more and more and more like God until he was completely like God at the very end when he was absolutely filled with nothing, nothing but mercy and forgiveness and compassion.  So much resistance in Jesus’ life to his end, his failure, his being ridiculed and humiliated, and he despised it.  That was a phrase from the scripture last week.  He despised the shame of the cross, but he surrendered to it.  Why?  Because the final thing that God was doing inside of him, that he’s doing, thank God slowly, for all of

Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10 | Hebrews 12:1-4 | Luke 12:49-53   Oh God, who through the grace of adoption chose us to be children of light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.    The theme of today’s liturgy is my favorite focus these days.  I’m so aware, as I think everyone in the world is aware, of how important it is to be in touch with the truth, and never before in the history of the human race have we had more information, information, information, some of it true, some of it lies.  It comes through the same channels, through things that we’ve always trusted, newspapers, television, Internet.  “I saw it in the news.”  That’s like, “That’s real.”  And we know that it’s not necessarily wrong to think that it should all be truthful, but it is probably a little naïve.  But all it does to me is remind all of us that, in this particular age we’re living, we have to be discerning.  We have to check facts.  We have to look more deeply into situations rather than to pick up a sound bite that somebody might throw out there, which brings me back to the whole focus of Christianity: the truth.  The truth.The first experiences that human beings had of God was a kind of personal invitation on his part to be a part of him, and that is what we have with Abraham.  We have the story of Adam and Eve where God is connected to the human race, and then we have the story of God saying, “I need the human race to cooperate with me in achieving the goal that I’ve given to human beings.”  That goal is to move more and more completely into union with the reality of the world, the truth.  That’s what God wants us to feel, see, know, and so he had this personal relationship with people like Abraham and Moses.  And then it broadened out, and it was more like he could call on many people to be his voice in the world.  They were called prophets, and Jeremiah is one of my favorites, because he’s so human. He was only 19 when he was called to be a prophet, and he was told that he would be able to make a new world, a wonderful thing, and he could build things up, make them whole.  He was drawn to that, like so many of us are, and yet there were also the words given to him, which he may not have paid much attention to.  But it said, “And you also have to tear down a lot of things.”There’s the problem.  It’s always been the problem with the truth.  It’s not like you’re hearing something for the first time. No, you’ve heard it before, but it’s been in a different category, or it was seen to be bad or was seen to be good when the opposite was really true.  So the hardest thing about the work of a prophet is he’s got to go in and speak to the truth to people who think they already have the truth, and the two don’t match.  So who are you going to believe?  This crazy, wild man?  Prophets were screamers and yellers, and they had to be in order to be even noticed, I guess. They weren’t that sophisticated, I don’t think, in terms of their teaching.  They were just quick to say, “If you don’t stop doing it, you’re going to die.”  And that’s a strong statement obviously.It does work, but who wants to die?  If you hang on to your old ideas, your old, false notions, your lies and life seems okay, then what’s the motivation for going to something so radically different that you have to really change — really change?  Change is hard.  Nobody really likes to change until they absolutely see its value, and usually before you see its value, the gift of the truth, you have to look at the emptiness of what you thought was true.  And that has to die first, and then the new thing can come in.  That’s the way it works.  That’s why it’s so hard to go through this process of being awakened and shown new things, because you first have to doubt where you are. You have to wonder, “Is what I’ve always believed really true?”  And then the way you do it, and we know the way you do it, is you look carefully at how that lie has served you.  And if everything is calm in your favor and everything is great, you’re going to not leave that lie, but the beauty of human beings is that we have some inner truth, inner knowledge of what really works.  What a gift that is.  I would call it our natural instinct, our innocent instinct in us that knows what’s really true, what works.  It’s called consciousness, and it needs to be developed.  It evolves, and it’s growing more and more and more in the human race, and so I’m more and more optimistic that people will see through the lies. And yet it’s still difficult.So in the first reading, we have Jeremiah, who’s doing his work, and of course the people in power are the ones who are most likely to be hanging on to something that’s not true, because mostly the thing that we worry about in any kind of organization or leader or anyone that has power over people, parents, a spouse, is the danger of using that position of power to make a person live in the way you want them to live for your benefit.  And that means telling them lies.  So that’s what Jeremiah was trying to do, and of course he reached all this resistance.  And I love the fact that he’s sitting there in this cistern sinking in the mud.  Nothing could be more clear that his life was not successful, and what’s not in this passage is the part that he gets — he’s really mad at God.  “You duped me.  You fooled me.  You told me this was going to be a wonderful life to help people, and look what’s happening to me.”  And so there’s something about the person who speaks the truth.  He has to believe, absolutely believe that it’s worth their life. It’s worth everything. I know I, when I came out of the seminary after Vatican II, I was so excited about all the changes and all the new things, and I just couldn’t want to tell people, because oh, these are so wonderful, these new ideas, this new openness to God’s presence inside of us, the way he’s inviting us to develop our own conscience and see the beauty of all religions and feel oneness with all people and all these wonderful images.  I came out of that seminary with all the enthusiasm of Jeremiah, and I was in a cistern many times when people looked at me and said, “What are you talking about?  No, that’s not Catholic.  That’s not the way we do it.  We don’t like the new liturgy.  We don’t like the language of our native language.  We like it in Latin.  We don’t like singing.  We like to sit there in meditation.  We don’t like the change in the way the room is arranged.  We like the way it used to be.”  There’s always that tension.  Then 50 years later, I don’t hear anybody saying, “I miss the Latin.”  There are still some who do, but we’ve changed.  We see something new, and we see the value in it, and we see the beauty of it, but it’s been difficult.  Transformation, it’s always difficult.  So prophets, the work of being the truth-giver is not an easy job, never has been, never will be. So we have then in the second reading, we have this beautiful image of Jesus who had this same prophetic work.  He had to be there to speak the truth, and Paul is so aware, because he was in the lie, and he saw the truth.  It wasn’t easy for him to see it.  It was like this flash of light, and he saw something so radically different that it took him a couple of years to digest the transformation that happened to him. We often don’t think about that. We think sometimes you say the truth, somebody goes, “Oh, wow.  That’s great. Now I can change it.”  No, he had to go through a major, psychological, emotional, spiritual renewal when he saw that the thing he was condemning and destroying was the light and the truth, and so he’s very much aware of the gift that he received and the cost that that gift was.  So he’s so thankful and talks about, “We’re all here to do this work, and it’s hard.  And if you start complaining and whining, you haven’t gone and shed your blood yet for it.” It’s interesting that all the disciples, except for Judas, who took his own life, but all but one were martyred for their faith.  They went through what Jesus went through.  They died for it to speak the truth.  It continues to happen in the world today.  People speak the truth, are murdered or excluded, condemned, ruined, whatever.  So we have then in the gospel the most powerful image of why it is that prophets don’t give up, why Jesus didn’t give up, why he endured the shame of the cross.  The shame was looking like he was a fool and he was a fake and his truth didn’t hold in the world.  It wouldn’t accept him, and it’s true.  The resistance was so much that they had to destroy him, but then he proved that you can’t stop the truth.  It will not die.  It comes back stronger always.  That’s so hopeful to me in the world today that all this resistance we have to people that are standing up, trying to point out the insanity of so many things in the world going on today, trying to say war is useless, or this idea of competition, this idea of nationalism, whatever — I don’t want to get into politics at all, but there’s just certain things that people are claiming that I think most people see, “No, we tried that, and it didn’t work.  It’s a lie.”  So what we have in this gospel passage is the most beautiful image of what it is the truth actually does.  “I’ve come to speak the truth.”  John, the disciple who understood Jesus more than anybody, simply said, “Jesus is the truth incarnate.  He’s the truth.”  His essence is the truth, a loving, forgiving, understanding man/God filled with mercy and justice, both.  Why do we see if it’s mercy or justice?  No, they’re both.  Mercy and justice, they have to be together, and he came to proclaim all of that. What he says about it, “It’s like a fire.  I want to s

Wisdom 18:6-9 | Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19 | Luke 12:32-48   Almighty, everliving God who taught by the Holy Spirit we dare to call our Father, bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters that we may merit to enter into the inheritance, which you promised.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   I don't know if you’ve ever asked yourself a question like this, but it struck me today as I was preparing to preach this homily. That was: why is it that we go back to these ancient stories and try to listen as attentively as we can to experiences these people had thousands of thousands of years ago?  Shouldn’t we just be concerned about what’s happening today, the world we live in?  Why go back with the struggle of a group of people trying to find freedom from an enslaved culture?  Well, it’s pretty obvious, I think.  The answer comes — at least it came to me, and I was like, “Oh, yeah.  Sure.”  These are all stories of symbols, symbolism, loaded with symbolism.  We’re not reading about people in the past.  We’re reading about human nature.  We’re reading about divine nature.  We’re reading about the way the world functions, and without that kind of knowledge — I don't know — it would seem to me we could get lost in the kind of immediacy of a life that is today more complex than it’s ever been. There’s enough today to keep people occupied, much less what’s really going on, what’s really happening, the big picture.  Well, the big picture for human beings has never really changed, and there’s three things that I’m going to talk about that I find in these readings that are an integral part of you and I being able to figure out what’s going on, what’s happening.  Something’s happening here.   One is faith. One is inheritance, and the other is sacrifice.Nothing is clearer in the stories of scripture, and nothing is clearer, in a way, in terms of the way human beings survive that what they believe in is what is real to them.  Their faith, their understanding of life creates the world they live in for the most part, and so one of the things we find in this relationship with this divine creature that is so clearly revealed in the Old and New Testament for us, we see that one of the essential things that he requires is that we believe in him, absolute belief and trust.  I love the way it’s described in the first reading.  This thing called faith is actually the participation in the promise that we’re hoping in.  That means that, if you are hoping in a world that is getting better, if you are hoping in a world that someday will fulfill all of your needs, that there’s something that everyone’s working toward that is like a land of milk and honey, if you believe that, then you’re in it already.  It’s so interesting that the first group of people in the story of salvation that we have in the Old Testament is a group of people who believe that there is something better than the world they’re in, which enslaves them and keeps them from becoming who God intends them to be, and so they believe when someone comes along and said, “I’m going to take you out of this into a place that’s wonderful.”  And participating in that anticipation is somehow tasting and experiencing what’s coming. It’s the first time I’ve had any true insight into why it is that Moses didn’t make it into the Promised Land.  I thought, “Well, what a bummer.  He did all that work, and he never got there.” His work of faith was to help people get there, and his participation in it, with the kind of conviction that he had that no matter what was going on he knew it would happen — he participated in it before it happened.  Then there’s this other promise, a weird, strange promise. Everything God promises to you and me, everything we work for we may not achieve in this life, but somehow the working for it and the struggle we’ve had and the sacrifices we’ve had will create something for us in the next life — the next life.  The only thing about the next life that I was sort of brainwashed into thinking was it was a sort of a dice throw about whether or not you would be able to get in, and it all depended upon your ability to do what you were told to do, your obedience.  If you obeyed God, not so much necessarily worked for what he was asking you to do but always obeyed the rules and laws, you would then have a chance to get to the promised place after this life, but if you just sort of wallowed in your own self-interests or just became unconscious and didn’t think about it and broke the rules, you would be burning in hell.  So it was kind of like something you didn’t want to think about that much, because it was an option.  Instead of looking forward to something wonderful, you had to also have the fear of looking forward to something that would be terrifically, horribly painful and destructive.  It’s like most things in life.  If we don’t want to think about the negativity and the pain, we just don’t think about it.  We deny it. So that’s faith.  The other thing is this strange thing about sacrifice. What is sacrifice?  It seems that, if anyone is going to work toward the goal that God has promised us, they have to sacrifice, and what does that mean? When we look at the images of sacrifice that are made reference to in this set of readings, they’re pretty horrific. One is the fact that Abraham was given a son, and the son was the hope that God had given him that his posterity would continue, because there was no image of life after death back then.  So the whole notion of whether your life continued, whether it made any impact on the world was that you continued to live in your children and your children’s children and on and on.  It’s kind of a really simple and beautiful way of imagining the responsibility that we have to the generations that follow, that we do the work, and they often receive all the promises.  They receive the promise.  So there’s that notion of Abraham was asked to act as if that promise wasn’t going to take place, and so he was asked to sacrifice his son.  The sacrifice was to murder him.  The sacrifices in the Old Testament were to murder animals.  The sacrifice to save the world, in terms of the New Testament, was the death of Jesus.  So sacrifice is always connected in our heads with death and destruction, but if you look at the meaning of the word, it means an offering to God that God will find pleasing — offering to God that he will find pleasing.  Does he take pleasure in killing the firstborn of all the Egyptians, of asking Abraham to kill Isaac or wanting his Son to die on the cross?  Did he take pleasure in the pain of those situations?  No, but they’re all symbols of what people are invited to give into or give up in order to be a part of this plan of salvation, continuing on and on and growing in the evolution of consciousness of all human beings.  It’s a beautiful, beautiful plan, and when it comes time for it to unfold, the biggest problem we often have is our own control, our own desire to make it work, to feel like this is the way it should go.  And that means that we’re controlling it, and we’re judging it.  Those are the things that are so dangerous, to judge, to control, and so a sacrifice is to let go of judgment and control and to allow what’s happening to happen.  So you look at your life, and you’re saying, “Well, I know how the plan is going, and I should become this, and then I’ll do that, and then I’ll be even better at that, and that’ll influence those people,” and on and on and on.  Then we get it all set in our heads, and then the problem is God is looking at us, saying, “No, it’s not your plan.  It’s my plan, and you can’t fathom it.  You can’t understand it.  It’s always going to remain in the shadows, in the darkness.” That’s why you have to have this thing called faith.  Faith is belief in the things that you cannot see or feel or touch, but you know they’re real, and they’re operating, and they’re happening.  So we have an image in the gospel, and it’s a beautiful image of a symbol of what life is like and what it is.  Here’s the image: God is the one who creates this world for us. It’s his house.  We live in the house.  We have a job while we’re here, and the primary job of every human being that’s ever been created is to serve, to serve God.  But does God need service?  Is God lonely, and we pray to him, and he feels better?  Is he needing love from us in order to feel like a good enough God to continue his work?  No, he doesn’t need our love.  He doesn’t need our affirmation.  We do. So what is it?  What is it he wants?  He wants us to take care of his creation.  If we want to love God, love the people he created.  That was a vision that St. Catherine of Siena — she said to God, or Jesus — she was talking to him, and she said, “How can I love you? Tell me.  How do I love you?”  And he just said, “Love the people around you.  That’s all I ask.  That is so pleasing to me.  Take care of people around you.  That’s loving me.  That makes me smile and happy and makes me want to support you and give you things. It means you’re in the plan, and therefore you’re going to be used by me.  Sometimes you’re going to be super-successful.  Other times your whole life is going to fall apart, but that’s all part of the process of grooming you and forming you into the perfect instrument that God wants you to be.”  It’s really not rocket science, but it’s mysterious.  It’s mysterious.  We’re all working for the inheritance.  We all are believing that the inheritance is real, and the inheritance is given, not just to an isolated individual because of their performance.  But it’s the individuals together, working together for the good, and it creates an environment, a culture, a community of people, and in that community, life

Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23 | Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11 | Luke 12:13-21   Draw near to your servants, oh Lord, and answer their prayers in unceasing kindness that, for those who glory in you as their creator and guide, you may restore what you have created, keep safe what you have restored.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   Sometimes it’s really confusing to figure out who God really is.  So many voices, so many opinions, so many different ways that people present him to the world around them.  I often wonder about the patience of God when people get up and say things about him that are so far from the truth, and they’re not struck dumb, or God let’s them do it.  And you wonder, “Why?  Why don’t you just control all those who preach and teach, all heads of all religion, to make sure they’re always right on target?  Or why did you make the scriptures so confusing at times when we have a God in the Old Testament that seems so, at times, impatient and angry at human beings, and at other times, he’s sort of like milk toast, and you can talk him out of anything?”  Well, I think the reason is because all of those things that I just mentioned are ways in which we can ponder and wonder about the many facets of our God, but there is only one real source of knowing him.  In my growing up as a Catholic and now Catholic priest, I relied so heavily on the church.  I knew the church was the one who would tell me who God is, and yet with all my experience behind me now, entering my eightieth year, I know that everything the church teaches and everything the church directs us to do is not always the will of God.  Does that make me doubt the value of the church?  Absolutely not.  The value of the church is beyond anyone’s understanding, because it’s a gathering place of people who long to be fed every day by this life force that is personal — personal.  I don't know what I’d do without sacraments, without the liturgy, without gathering with people every Sunday and listening to the word and pondering it and singing and eating and drinking.  It’s the heart of it, but the theology, that’s tricky, most especially moral theology. That’s even trickier, because so often we’re told things that people believe because more — it’s more about their background and their own personal history than it is about the religion or who God really is.  So look at this first reading.  It’s fascinating.  Here’s God. He’s just called upon Abraham to become a partner with him, in a sense, an invitation for us to imagine that ultimately everyone is being asked to enter into that kind of partnership with God to work and save themselves and the world.  It’s clear that God — I love this human part of him.  He’s concerned about Sodom.  He doesn’t really know what’s going on, so he has to go down and check it out.  I love that. Like, “I don’t trust the reports. I need to make a personal visit.” So human, and so this God goes down and finds that this place is pretty corrupt, to say the least, and so here’s Abraham, who has just, in a sense, encountered God.  They haven’t worked together that long, and all of a sudden — we have Abraham, who is a little more compassionate than God, because he starts talking about, “Okay, if you go down and just send down fire and destruction on the city, you’re going to kill everybody.  What about the people there that might not be bad?”  And as if God didn’t think about that, he’s reminded. “Well, what about the good people? You want to kill innocent people along with the bad?”  “Well, yeah, kind of I do.”  “But if you found so many, would you save the whole city for just 50 or 45 or 30 or 20 or 10?”  Each time God says, “Well, probably not.  No, I’ll let it go for that.”  What is that? What do we learn from a story like that or Moses talking God out of destroying the Israelites that he’s kind of been frustrated with on this long journey, and when they turn back to their ways, when they’re left without a leader, and they fall back to their ways? God is furious, and maybe it’s because the moment is when he’s about to give them their greatest gift.  The greatest thing he’s ever given to human beings are the Ten Commandments, the manual for what it means to be human. We’re made for those things, a relationship with God, a healthy relationship with each other.  That’s who we are.  That’s our essence, and he told us that for the first time then.  It maybe just underscores this part of God that is so like us, so passionate about this relationship.  It’s like he’s a typical human being in a loving relationship that he sometimes just loses his patience and wants to just dump it all, but he keeps coming back and coming back and being more and more amazing in terms of his patience, his understanding, his compassion.So we have, in the second reading, Paul, who’s nailing it to — no pun intended on the last part of the reading, but he makes it so clear. The fullness of who God is, the reason why he came into the world to begin to reveal himself to us is because he wanted us to see him as he really is, and why it took so long, I don't know. Why we had to see him grow, almost as if he was learning how to deal with human beings — he wasn’t.  He just revealed himself as if he were a God learning, and what he was learning is compassion and forgiveness.  And so there’s a word in this reading that I think is so interesting.  It says that this Jesus came into the world to die on the cross, to do something for all human beings who had ever lived and would ever live in the future, and he said, “I will obliterate,” what a word, “Obliterate your sins,” not punish you for them but obliterate them.  I looked that up in the Oxford English Dictionary. To erase, to eradicate, to remove as if they never happened.  It’s almost stronger than the word forgiveness.  “I’ll obliterate your sins.  I don’t even remember them.”  If that’s the fullness of his relationship with us, when it comes to sin, it has not yet taken root.  It hasn’t taken root in me yet.  I still feel shame and guilt over my fault and my sins.  I still hear people begging me to pray that they will be forgiven.  I had someone call me the other day who was close to death and said, “I don't know if I’m going to make it.  I don't know.  I think maybe I did more bad things than good things in my entire life.” What?  No, your sins are obliterated.  He took them away completely.  How do we understand that, and what would it be like if that really was the truth, that every sin you or I ever commit is automatically obliterated? By what, the sacrament and confession? Yes, because that’s where we go to be assured and affirmed that that’s really who God is, but then I know many priests who deny absolution to people, which is something I’ve never done in my entire life.  I’m not saying I’m better than them, but that’s what we were taught.  You can deny someone freedom from their sin if they don’t sound like they’re going to change.  Well, what happens, when you’re in a relationship with God, when you have been a sinner, and what is your feeling about this God? Is he judging you and condemning you until you make some kind of major shift and change in the world, even though you’re doing things that you really don’t want to do but you don’t know how to stop?  They’re like an addiction, and we know enough about addiction now to know that that’s not really something somebody can freely decide not to do.  Boom, “I’m not going to do it anymore.”  Grace can change you, but our will can’t.  So how do we understand it?  Well, the gospel is interesting, because it talks so beautifully about this notion that this God of ours is a God of mercy, and so the thing about Jesus that’s so unique is his closeness with God, his intimacy with God. It was what they just — it drove everybody in the temple nuts, because you can’t have a relationship with God of intimacy, because you’re a sinner, and you’re polluted, and you’re disgusting to God until you come to the temple and be purified.  So what is this story saying?  Well, it’s very clear that what it’s trying to say is just Jesus is the one who connected so beautifully with God, and he was fully human.  Of course we have to say that he never sinned, and that’s true, but what is sin?  Is sin human weaknesses?  Did he get angry?  Did he scream?  Did he yell? Did he get mad?  Isn’t that a sin?  People come to me, “Bless me Father, I sinned.  I got so mad at my children.  I screamed and yelled at them.”  Well, then Jesus must have sinned.  No.  Sin is a complete turning away from God, a refusal of his love and his forgiveness. It’s a hardening of a heart that is longing for God, and our will can do that.  But in this story, it seems that, when they’re asking Jesus, “What do you do when you talk to God?  What do you say?  What’s your relationship like with him,” he said, “Well, I believe in him.  I know he’s my father.  I also know that somehow I want so much for his work to take root in every human being and take root in me, and I want to enter into this things he calls the kingdom, which is a place free of shame and fear and anger and jealousy and envy.  It’s a place of truth and reality.  I just want that to happen.  That’s why I came into the world, and I know what he’s doing.  He’s feeding me every day.  He gives me everything I need, and ever fault I have, every human mistake I make, he forgives me.  And I try to forgive everybody around me, and I know he’s not going to tempt me to do evil things.”  But when he says, “Do not subject us to the final test,” he means, “Don’t test us beyond our ability to survive the test.”  It’s as if God is the tester, but God isn’t the tester as much as evil is the tester.  Evil is the one that talks you into doing bad things.  So it’s like, “Protect me from that source that is

Genesis 18:20-32 | Colossians 2:12-14 | Luke 11:1-13   Oh God, protector of those who hope in you, without whom nothing has firm foundation, nothing is holy, bestow in abundance your mercy upon us and grant that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may use the good things that pass in such a way as to hold even now to those that ever endure.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   Sometimes it’s really confusing to figure out who God really is.  So many voices, so many opinions, so many different ways that people present him to the world around them.  I often wonder about the patience of God when people get up and say things about him that are so far from the truth, and they’re not struck dumb, or God let’s them do it.  And you wonder, “Why?  Why don’t you just control all those who preach and teach, all heads of all religion, to make sure they’re always right on target?  Or why did you make the scriptures so confusing at times when we have a God in the Old Testament that seems so, at times, impatient and angry at human beings, and at other times, he’s sort of like milk toast, and you can talk him out of anything?”  Well, I think the reason is because all of those things that I just mentioned are ways in which we can ponder and wonder about the many facets of our God, but there is only one real source of knowing him.  In my growing up as a Catholic and now Catholic priest, I relied so heavily on the church.  I knew the church was the one who would tell me who God is, and yet with all my experience behind me now, entering my eightieth year, I know that everything the church teaches and everything the church directs us to do is not always the will of God.  Does that make me doubt the value of the church?  Absolutely not.  The value of the church is beyond anyone’s understanding, because it’s a gathering place of people who long to be fed every day by this life force that is personal — personal.  I don't know what I’d do without sacraments, without the liturgy, without gathering with people every Sunday and listening to the word and pondering it and singing and eating and drinking.  It’s the heart of it, but the theology, that’s tricky, most especially moral theology. That’s even trickier, because so often we’re told things that people believe because more — it’s more about their background and their own personal history than it is about the religion or who God really is.  So look at this first reading.  It’s fascinating.  Here’s God. He’s just called upon Abraham to become a partner with him, in a sense, an invitation for us to imagine that ultimately everyone is being asked to enter into that kind of partnership with God to work and save themselves and the world.  It’s clear that God — I love this human part of him.  He’s concerned about Sodom.  He doesn’t really know what’s going on, so he has to go down and check it out.  I love that. Like, “I don’t trust the reports. I need to make a personal visit.” So human, and so this God goes down and finds that this place is pretty corrupt, to say the least, and so here’s Abraham, who has just, in a sense, encountered God.  They haven’t worked together that long, and all of a sudden — we have Abraham, who is a little more compassionate than God, because he starts talking about, “Okay, if you go down and just send down fire and destruction on the city, you’re going to kill everybody.  What about the people there that might not be bad?”  And as if God didn’t think about that, he’s reminded. “Well, what about the good people? You want to kill innocent people along with the bad?”  “Well, yeah, kind of I do.”  “But if you found so many, would you save the whole city for just 50 or 45 or 30 or 20 or 10?”  Each time God says, “Well, probably not.  No, I’ll let it go for that.”  What is that? What do we learn from a story like that or Moses talking God out of destroying the Israelites that he’s kind of been frustrated with on this long journey, and when they turn back to their ways, when they’re left without a leader, and they fall back to their ways? God is furious, and maybe it’s because the moment is when he’s about to give them their greatest gift.  The greatest thing he’s ever given to human beings are the Ten Commandments, the manual for what it means to be human. We’re made for those things, a relationship with God, a healthy relationship with each other.  That’s who we are.  That’s our essence, and he told us that for the first time then.  It maybe just underscores this part of God that is so like us, so passionate about this relationship.  It’s like he’s a typical human being in a loving relationship that he sometimes just loses his patience and wants to just dump it all, but he keeps coming back and coming back and being more and more amazing in terms of his patience, his understanding, his compassion.So we have, in the second reading, Paul, who’s nailing it to — no pun intended on the last part of the reading, but he makes it so clear. The fullness of who God is, the reason why he came into the world to begin to reveal himself to us is because he wanted us to see him as he really is, and why it took so long, I don't know. Why we had to see him grow, almost as if he was learning how to deal with human beings — he wasn’t.  He just revealed himself as if he were a God learning, and what he was learning is compassion and forgiveness.  And so there’s a word in this reading that I think is so interesting.  It says that this Jesus came into the world to die on the cross, to do something for all human beings who had ever lived and would ever live in the future, and he said, “I will obliterate,” what a word, “Obliterate your sins,” not punish you for them but obliterate them.  I looked that up in the Oxford English Dictionary. To erase, to eradicate, to remove as if they never happened.  It’s almost stronger than the word forgiveness.  “I’ll obliterate your sins.  I don’t even remember them.”  If that’s the fullness of his relationship with us, when it comes to sin, it has not yet taken root.  It hasn’t taken root in me yet.  I still feel shame and guilt over my fault and my sins.  I still hear people begging me to pray that they will be forgiven.  I had someone call me the other day who was close to death and said, “I don't know if I’m going to make it.  I don't know.  I think maybe I did more bad things than good things in my entire life.” What?  No, your sins are obliterated.  He took them away completely.  How do we understand that, and what would it be like if that really was the truth, that every sin you or I ever commit is automatically obliterated? By what, the sacrament and confession? Yes, because that’s where we go to be assured and affirmed that that’s really who God is, but then I know many priests who deny absolution to people, which is something I’ve never done in my entire life.  I’m not saying I’m better than them, but that’s what we were taught.  You can deny someone freedom from their sin if they don’t sound like they’re going to change.  Well, what happens, when you’re in a relationship with God, when you have been a sinner, and what is your feeling about this God? Is he judging you and condemning you until you make some kind of major shift and change in the world, even though you’re doing things that you really don’t want to do but you don’t know how to stop?  They’re like an addiction, and we know enough about addiction now to know that that’s not really something somebody can freely decide not to do.  Boom, “I’m not going to do it anymore.”  Grace can change you, but our will can’t.  So how do we understand it?  Well, the gospel is interesting, because it talks so beautifully about this notion that this God of ours is a God of mercy, and so the thing about Jesus that’s so unique is his closeness with God, his intimacy with God. It was what they just — it drove everybody in the temple nuts, because you can’t have a relationship with God of intimacy, because you’re a sinner, and you’re polluted, and you’re disgusting to God until you come to the temple and be purified.  So what is this story saying?  Well, it’s very clear that what it’s trying to say is just Jesus is the one who connected so beautifully with God, and he was fully human.  Of course we have to say that he never sinned, and that’s true, but what is sin?  Is sin human weaknesses?  Did he get angry?  Did he scream?  Did he yell? Did he get mad?  Isn’t that a sin?  People come to me, “Bless me Father, I sinned.  I got so mad at my children.  I screamed and yelled at them.”  Well, then Jesus must have sinned.  No.  Sin is a complete turning away from God, a refusal of his love and his forgiveness. It’s a hardening of a heart that is longing for God, and our will can do that.  But in this story, it seems that, when they’re asking Jesus, “What do you do when you talk to God?  What do you say?  What’s your relationship like with him,” he said, “Well, I believe in him.  I know he’s my father.  I also know that somehow I want so much for his work to take root in every human being and take root in me, and I want to enter into this things he calls the kingdom, which is a place free of shame and fear and anger and jealousy and envy.  It’s a place of truth and reality.  I just want that to happen.  That’s why I came into the world, and I know what he’s doing.  He’s feeding me every day.  He gives me everything I need, and ever fault I have, every human mistake I make, he forgives me.  And I try to forgive everybody around me, and I know he’s not going to tempt me to do evil things.”  But when he says, “Do not subject us to the final test,” he means, “Don’t test us beyond our ability to survive the test.”  It’s as if God is the tester, but God isn’t the tester as much as evil is the tester.  Evil is the one that talks you into doing bad thi

Genesis 18:1-10a | Colossians 1:24-28 | Luke 10:38-42   Show favor, oh, Lord, to your servants, and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity, they may be ever watchful in keeping your commands.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   We human beings have some amazing talents.  Some of them work for the good.  Some of them get in the way of who we’re supposed to be and why we’re here, but one of them is the fact that we can create a world of our own making.  We can say the world is wonderful, the world is terrible, the world is filled with riches, the world is empty and dry.  It’s almost like we have this ability in our mind to imagine something, and then the power of that imagination is so real that it can actually give us a sense that the world we have created then is the world we live in.  There’s such a terrible risk in that, because in our Judeo-Christian tradition, what we have is a God who is entering into our life. Throughout history, for 4,000 years, he’s been communicating with human beings in a truly intimate way, trying to help them see the world as it really is, as he created it, and I want to see if I can get to that issue because of one simple truth, or help you get to a better insight of what the world is about by one simple truth that is so clearly depicted in the scriptures today.It’s hospitality to the truth, openness to what’s real, receiving message after message after message that God is placing in our lives so we can open our eyes and see.  That’s one of the big promises he made to human beings.  “I’ve come to restore your sight.”  It’s been distorted by your experiences in life.  It’s normal that we grow up with other people who are not fully mature yet, and we pick up a lot of things that are not healthy from our family of origin, from our culture.  It’s normal, but our job is to work out of that, to work through that.  The very heart of what I’m trying to say today is going to be found in that second reading from St. Paul when he is talking to the Jews, trying to convince them that this system they belonged to that was so much about control and about laws and rules has been obliterated, and what’s in its place is a God of such generosity and such intimacy that he wants to enter into us. Paul said, “The mystery is Christ in us, God in us.”  And to make it even more poignant to the Jews, he’s saying, “And he’s in the Gentiles, the sinners, the bad people.  If he can be there, then think how much more he’ll be with us.”  It’s like, “Can you get past all that sense of God being disgusted by our weaknesses and seeing us as polluted by our sins and wanting to have nothing to do with us?”  He said, “That’s over.  It’s not true.  It was there. It was never the full intent of God, but it was the best thing the humans could come up with in trying to control people through a religion.”  It’s the shadow of all religions, human beings in charge that need to control, not to free and open people to the most dynamic experience of an intimate, real relationship with divinity.  So in the first reading and in the gospel, we have two encounters with something that I hope and pray you will hear me say to you, and you will believe it with me.  The divine force in the world, this God, this personal God is constantly, constantly longing to communicate with us, and it’s up to us to be in a disposition of what we call hospitality, which is a great virtue in Judeo-Christianity, because it’s about openness to the mystery of God speaking to you, to me.  So look at the first story.  It’s got every element of what I’m trying to teach you about the world. It’s about — here’s two people, a man sitting near his tent, in his tent, and he sees some strangers walking by, insists they come in.  He wants to feed them, nurture them.  He just wants to be hospitable.  Turns out they’re three angels.  He doesn’t know that.  These angels are messengers from God coming to him to say something that is going to be so far out that they — well, the reaction of the news that the angels brought to them was ludicrous.  Sarah overheard it, and she started laughing.  And he said, “This is impossible,” but here’s this messenger coming and saying something about new life being born to this family that was considered barren.  It’s a perfect image of a way of life.  When you see it, there’s no life in it, and here these people are coming and saying, “No, no.  There’s another way to look at the situation you’re in.  Yeah, you’re 90 years old.  You can’t have a baby, but God can do anything.”  He can give you something when there’s no possibility of you producing it yourself.  Trust him. He can come into your life and change everything in a minute if he wants, and I always wonder what those months and months would have been for Sarah and for Abraham, thinking, “My God, you really are pregnant.  This thing is really changing.  Oh, my God, my God.”  I don't know what it would have been like, but it’s so fascinating that it’s about God’s capacity to enter into someone’s life, when there’s no possibility of change or growth in a particular area, and if you’re open to the hope — you have the hope that God can do this kind of work, you enter into what I call the mystical world, the mystical life.So we see the same thing in the story of Jesus, only it goes a little bit deeper.  Now it’s not Abraham and Sarah who are greeting angels.  It’s another couple, Martha and Mary, receiving the incarnate God. He comes, and the two of them choose a little different response to his presence.  Notice the first time they laugh in disbelief.  Now Martha is very busy of all the things you need to do to take care of the guests.  So just think that’s a perfect image of all of us in our relationship with God where we say we’ve got to get all this stuff done so that I please God.  Be at church and do this and don’t do that and all the obligations, all the obligations in order to please this master/God, and that’s what Martha is working on.  And here’s Mary, lazy Mary.  She’s sitting there listening, listening, attentive to the guest.  It’s beautiful.  He’s here.  He’s speaking to us.  And it must have pleased Jesus so much.  I would say the same thing pleases God now, that whenever you feel that you are really receptive to whatever information God wants to show you, give you, you want to sit there, ponder it and wonder about it, and that’s what Mary represents, the part of humanity that is willing to ponder something that doesn’t make a lot of sense, at least at first hearing.  But she’s listening to Jesus, because she knows he’s got something.  I just can’t imagine the presence of this man Jesus that resonated out of him, because he was pure divinity inside of a pure human being. By pure I don’t mean — well, yes, sinless, but I mean human, fully human.  He’s got it.  He’s got what we are supposed to be.  He’s the representative of how we become the person that God wants us to be, a fully human being infused with some kind of wisdom and power to affect change in people. And how do we do it?  We do it through communicating with each other. That’s how we do it, but the way we tend to communicate with each other is often through a kind of — I don't know. Maybe it’s control, criticism, judgment. Why is it we have this negative energy? It’s because it’s evil, because it’s in the world, but when you think about the way we relate to each other, when we’re not functioning in the way that we feel that the other person should function, it’s often not a suggestion or a conversation about transformation slowly. No, it’s an attack.  We attack.  Why?  Why do you attack?  It seems to me the attack is almost always in response to something that’s been done to you, and what’s been done to you, if it’s pushing you to a point where you’re asked to look at something you don’t want to look at, face something you’re afraid of, and somebody pushes you on that, then you know what kicks in: self-survival, fight or flight.  So you either — my mother went to her room when she had arguments with my dad. Other people come back with vengeance. So how do you learn to listen to what’s happening between you in your relationships, believing that, in the tension that’s there and in the struggle that’s there, there’s a work going on that is natural to human beings but is supernatural in its capacity to change you?  What if every day you wake up and you say, “I want to be part of the process of what God does in the world,” and that is to awaken people, open their eyes to see what’s real and true.  “I want to be a catalyst for that.  I want to communicate truth, light, wholeness.”  And then we’re human, right?  So we’re not going to do that just perfectly.  We can’t go around and all of a sudden imagine that we’re these peaceful gurus who never raise our temper.  No, we’re going to continue to attack and counterattack.  So what would it be like if you take those counterattacks and attacks and look at them more deeply and just break them apart and say, “What’s being communicated right here?  God, what are you showing me?  What do you want me to look at?  What do you want me to see?”  What would he say?  You’re there to feed each other.  You’re there to welcome each other into each other’s heart.  You’re there to comfort but to challenge, and you’re there that — when you act in a way that is part of your most natural human nature, you have someone who’s mature enough to say, “All right, I understand that, when we act that way, we go to a lower level of consciousness, and we spew stuff out.” So does that mean that we are that lower level of consciousness?  No.  It means we got pushed there, and the more you get pushed down in there and feel the anger and the bitterness in it, the more likely you are

Deuteronomy 30:10-14 | Colossians 1:15-20 | Luke 10:25-37   Oh, God, who showed the light of your truth to those who go astray so that they may return to the right path, give all, who for the faith they profess are accounted Christians, the grace to reject whatever is contrary to the name of Christ to strive after all that does it honor.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   Every time we gather as a community in liturgy in our tradition, we think about our sins, and we say or sing what you just heard being sung, a plea, a prayer, a request.  “Lord, have mercy on me please.  Please have mercy on me.”  Why we begin every gathering of Christians celebrating the Eucharist with that particular action is because we sin.  It’s part of who we are as human beings.  It’s part of the plan.  A lot of us have tried to figure out God’s plan and try to make it better, easier, and one of the things, I remember, I used to think about a lot was, “Why didn’t you just take away sin?  You told us it no longer has power over us, but you didn’t take it away.  We still experience it over and over again.”  It’s taken me a long time to understand what he’s really doing.  He’s allowing sin to be there, because it has a purpose.  It has a role to play.  It’ll always be there, and the shadow of sin is, when it is not understood in the way God intends us to participate in a sinful world, it tends to cause separation, worse, revenge, retaliation, anger.  “How could someone do that to me?”  It’s interesting.  What we hear in the first reading is a description of law, the law that God has given us.  Human beings will always come up with laws and rules if they live together.  It’s essential.  We have to have all kinds of rules and laws to govern the way we act, the way we drive, the way we treat each other.  Those aren’t the laws of God so much.  They’re the laws of human beings, created to protect human beings from abuse, and they’re affective, and they’re important.  And they always go back to something called punishment, fines, imprisonment, even death.  So the law that God has given is quite different than that, and it’s so interesting to me that, in the Old Testament, we have a story of God’s people so longing for the law that, when God gave us his laws, Ten Commandments, he made a statement about it.  It’s so fascinating, and he’s talking about in relationship with God.  Don’t make any other rules and laws, and for goodness sake, don’t exclude any of these.  How more direct and simple could that be?  Yet there developed in the Israelite community over 603 more rules that had to do with your relationship with God, and so many of them, you look back, were kind of laws that would make great sense, in terms of hygiene and health and all that.  But somehow, all rules that are attached to God seem to come across as equally important and valuable, and that’s what’s so dangerous.  No, there are ten, three that deal with our relationship with God, one, our relationship with those who have given us life, and the others about how we treat each other, how we deal with each other’s weaknesses and faults.  But the most beautiful thing in that first reading is the way God is saying to us, “The reason I gave you these laws is because these laws are your nature.  This is who you are.  This is who I’ve made you to be.  These aren’t laws that have to be imposed upon you.  If you would sit and think on your own and come up with the rules that you felt were the most advantageous for you, if you were a healthy, whole human being, you would come up with these very ten.  It’s the way we relate to God and to each other, and it’s not something you have to go figure out or wonder why that law’s here or others aren’t. There is such a beautiful summary of what it means to be in relationship with other people and to be in that relationship in a way that you are both receiving and giving life.  So don’t cheat.  Don’t lie.  Don’t steal. Don’t kill.  Don’t want what other people have.  Connect with divinity.  Honor everyone who’s there giving you life.  It’s so beautiful.  Yet sin continues to be a major, major problem for human beings, still is and even, perhaps, more today, because there’s so much emphasis, it seems to me, at least in our Catholic Church, that the rules and laws that we have to govern people’s relationships with others have gone way beyond these laws that were in the Ten Commandments.  But they’re very specific about very specific actions that you can and cannot do, and I know the church is doing that because it sees these things that we do that are dangerous and potentially destructive, and so it says, “Okay, whenever these things happen, you are seriously sinning.”  And then you add to that the notion of sin separating people from one another, from God, from the institution called the church. In the hands of the church, with that kind of situation, what you have is a church that’s demanding that certain actions never happen, and if they do happen, you’re cut out, you’re separated. It’s interesting.  In the Old Testament, sin had a very interesting dimension to it when it came to temple worship.  If you were a Levite — and then among the Levites, there were priests.  If you were, in order for you to be close to God, be involved with anything with the temple, whether it was moving furniture or doing sacrifices or cleaning the floor, whatever, you could not walk in there if you had any sin in you or on you, and you had to cleanse yourself, because sin, in the Old Testament, equated to being somehow polluted yourself, sinful, and you couldn’t be in the presence of God with that in you. Couldn’t.  It would be a blasphemy.  So what do you feel from that?  The God who created us can’t stand the fact that we do bad things or we fail, like it’s disgusting, and it’s not only disgusting, but somehow it makes impossible the kind of relationship God promises with us, intimacy.  It can’t happen. Divinity and humanity are radically disengaged, or at least the part of humanity that sins, it’s completely — they can’t get anywhere near each other.  And when you think about that, you understand more importantly the radical experience of Jesus’ teaching.  It’s summarized by Paul so beautifully in the next reading.  He just says, “This Jesus, he’s everything.  He’s all power.  He can do anything.  He’s the fullness of everything.”  And he came into the world to do one thing, to reconcile sinners, to bring people who stray away and fail and become, if you want to follow the Old Testament image, polluted, evil.  He did one action, hanging on a cross, stripped naked, blood dripping, and that action, he said, “That takes care of every single thing in you that God would ever look at and think, ‘This is intolerable, disappointing.  I can’t be with this person.’”  It’s so radical.  It’s so completely different.  Wait a minute.  You mean God loves sinners, that he prefers them to self-righteous people who are following the letter of the law?  How more radical could you be in your teaching if you came into the world to proclaim that to a group of people?  No wonder they killed him.  No wonder it was intolerable to think that the business of the temple, which was to purify people so they could get to God, were already purified.  In a way, it simply took away their power.  So now we go to the gospel, and we see this radical change being challenged and questioned.  The interesting thing about this story is the man that comes forward is not asking Jesus because he wants to know.  He’s wanting to challenge him — challenge him.  So chances are he could have well have been a Levite, a priest in the Levite tribe, but whatever it was, he’s going to say, “Let’s see if we can trip him up.”  So he basically says, “What’s at the heart of this whole thing you’re teaching?  What are you doing?”  And the most fascinating part of this is that the one challenging comes up with the right answer.  “Yes, I know I’m supposed to love God, love my neighbor, love myself.  I know all that.”  So it’s like, “Okay, I know I’m supposed to love.”  But the question, “Who is my neighbor,” is so set in this man’s intention.  I think he wants to say, “Let me hear if you’re really saying I’m supposed to love sinners, because that is blasphemy.”  So who is this person we’re supposed to take care of?  Who is my brother that I’m supposed to love?  Not a sinner of course, and Jesus in his genius tells this story.  I love that he tells stories.  This man, he was robbed of something dear to him.  He’s stripped.  He’s beaten. Who does that sound like?  What did these Pharisees, scribes, Levites, priests want to do and did do to Jesus?  Took his ministry away from him, they thought, in this world and humiliated him and beat him, killed him.  So I don't know whether the man that is listening to this story caught that part, but then he goes on to say, “There’s a priest that comes along and a Levite.” Now, the reason they walked to the other side of the street is because that was the law.  That’s what they had to do, and so he’s talking to these people who are living that life, and he’s saying, “See, they just didn’t have any interest in this man who was unattractive and broken.”  And he said, but a Samaritan, somebody not following the law at all, would come and do exactly what Jesus came to do to every sinner, bind his wounds, pour oil — that’s to empower, anoint — and blood, forgiveness, healing.  He’s looking at this man, saying, “You know, the problem with the institution you guys are following and living, you won’t do that.  You don’t care about somebody.  In fact, it probably makes your life pretty easy, because all you’ve got to do is sit back and wait for some rich sinner to come and have enough money to get out of the situation of alienation from G

Isaiah 66:10-14c | Galatians 6:14-18 | Luke 10:1-12, 17-20   Oh, God, who in the abasement of your Son have raised up a fallen world, fill your faithful with holy joy, for on those you have rescued from slavery to sin, you’ve bestowed eternal gladness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   The theme that we started last week is continued in this set of readings, freedom, freedom from the slavery of sin.  We begin with a reading about the temple.  It’s from Isaiah, and it’s about the change that God has always planned to take place within his relationship with people. He’s had to take the place of a lawgiver.  He’s had to tell people what to do, because they didn’t know what to do.  But his plan would be that they not stay under the law like that, but they would evolve, and they would grow, and they would change, and they would be able not to turn to an exterior law to find out what to do but to go interior, to go inside and listen to a voice that is there inside of them.  It’s a beautiful image of God entering into human beings’ lives and changing them. The law controls them.  God changes them.So we have in this first reading an image of the temple being something new.  A new heaven and a new earth have been created, in the words of Isaiah, because the temple is now different.  It’s been restored to its original ideal.  It’s like a source of life for human beings who are struggling to live according to the law of God, not by forcing them to do what they’re told but empowering them to do it, and so we go from this negative image of the temple that Jesus had when he walked this earth.  It’s the shadow of all religion where it begins to take over, and instead of empowering people, it controls them, tells them what they must do and robs them of something that is their inheritance.  And our inheritance is that, from the beginning, God made a promise to you and me that he would awaken in us the fullness of what we were intended to be by him.  So what would be — if you’re looking at the evolution of a human being growing into who they’re supposed to be, what image would you use for a temple that would be a source of life for that kind of movement from immaturity to maturity, from self-centeredness to other-centeredness as we grow in our consciousness?  Well, it’s a mother.  As you see in this first reading, the image of the temple as a beautiful image of a life-giving, feminine figure who one would delight in being nurtured and fed and encouraged and held and loved unconditionally like a mother, that’s the image of what God wanted the temple always to be.  But it turned away from that and fell into the trap of power, and so in a way, when Isaiah is describing this new temple, he’s really talking about the Messiah, an image of God that would come into the world not to judge, not to condemn, not to demand but to empower, enrich, strengthen, fill them with the wisdom that the law is based on.  But that wisdom is potentially able to reside in every human being so they don’t need the law, and that’s what Paul comes in and says. It’s the same argument he had last week in the letters.  It’s this group of Israelites, the followers of the temple that are upset about these new creatures called Christians, who weren’t called Christians yet, but in other words, they were coming into this incredible relationship, this intimacy with God without following all these rules and laws and without being circumcised, which was a major requirement for a person to be a relationship with God that was a covenant bond, and so they’re upset.  How can they have this gift without earning it through doing the law? And Paul is pretty clear.  Those things don’t really matter.  What matters is what’s happened to the human race. They’ve become a new creation. Something is different, and what the law was trying to achieve, this new creation achieves on its own by radically changing the consciousness of the person who receives this grace.  It’s new.  It’s never existed before until Christ.  So you get a sense of the importance of making a shift from Old Testament to New Testament, but I swear I know very few people have made that shift completely.  They still dwell in that place of we have to be told what to do.  We’re somehow still wounded so deeply that we’re not able to do what we’re called to do without a pressure from outside of us forcing us, at times, to do it.  That brings up the issue I talked about last week.  There’s also this idea that God has promised to you and me that we can go inside, find God inside of us in this mysterious place, just like the temple had the Holy of Holies.  The core of it was filled with this image of God’s divinity, and it was given out to people by the work of the temple, meaning following the rules and offering sacrifices when you fail at those rules.  And basically, what we’re being told now is that temple, that inner space where God dwells is inside you and me.  That’s what it means to be redeemed, and so you can go there and listen to God teaching you and showing you what to do.  I often find people so resistant to the notion that we have a personal conscience that they refuse to accept it.  Literally they’ll say, “Well, you can’t just do that to people, saying that it’s up to you to determine what to do, as if you are now, by being given the power to turn to your conscience to find guidance, that you’re able to change reality, that you’re able to make something evil good.  That’s ridiculous.  You can’t do that.”  So why would God give us the notion that there’s something deep inside of us that’s going to guide us and we don’t need the law?  What is that all about?  Well, maybe we can learn something from this gospel passage. This is very interesting, because what God is doing is sending out disciples to do the work that he hasn’t yet accomplished.  It is his death and resurrection, his surrender to evil.  It’s his giving in to it without resistance, without judgment. That is what changed the world, made it new.  That’s what broke the bond or the block that is there from the beginning between humanity and divinity.  So you have this powerful image of these men going out, and they’re sort of tasting what’s coming.  It’s interesting.  They go out not to plant and to grow but to harvest.  So he’s saying, “Here’s what ministry is going to be like.  I do the work of changing the hearts of human beings. You go out, and you nurture that, and you work with that, and you encourage them to continue to stay with that kernel of life and truth that’s in them, and don’t be seduced by the world and all of its lies.”  So they’re sent out to start a harvest, and I love the image where Jesus is saying to his disciples, “The harvest is rich.  I’m changing people, and they have the potential of this rich, rich new life. I need you to come and harvest it,” which is an interesting image, “To take what I’ve done and turn it into whatever,” let’s say grain or whatever it is and feed people with it.  It’s like, “I want you to feed people with this miracle that I’ve done inside of people by opening them to a truth that was hidden.” And the fascinating way in which he does it, he enters into them and makes them these new creatures.  So it’s like he gives them a new insight into who they are and what they’re here for, and they’re taking baby steps to try to live that.  That’s the role of the church, to come along and to nurture that.  That’s always the role of religion, to nurture what God has done inside of each human being.Notice the end of Paul’s passage in the middle reading. He’s saying, “May the Spirit of God be in your spirit.”  Paul understood it, God living in us, becoming one with humanity, but when that miracle happens, it’s in its seed form, in a sense, and has to be developed and exercised and used.  So out go these men to, in a way, prefigure the mission of the church.  They go as a community, so the church is always community, and then they go, and they do things.  And I don't know if it’s so important to pay attention to all those advice things that are given.  Certainly if you don’t take — don’t take anything along, because it’s clear that this work is not their work.  It’s not nurtured by them literally.  They’re going, empowered by the very thing they’re trying to awaken in someone else. So they have this energy inside of them. They don’t need sources from outside of them.  They go to the inside to find this ability, and they find it in such a way that they’re shocked and surprised, because this power inside of them — it’s called the truth — completely obliterates the power of evil.  It’s like, “Wait a minute.  These demons are subject to us, and you know what else we’re doing, God — Jesus,” when they came back.  I keep calling Jesus God today, so I don't know what that’s about.  When they come back to Jesus and say, “This is amazing. We watched people be healed like you do, but the most interesting thing is, you know all those temptations to do evil and all that desire to hurt people or to compete with them or all those things that are lies,” — that’s what the devil does, or the evil does. It convinces us that lies are truth. “It’s like it doesn’t have any power over us anymore.”  Amazing. So they go out, and they come back, and they say, “If this is what you’re creating, oh, my God, this is going to be so wonderful.”  And that’s really what he was doing, giving them a taste of ministry, and the ministry is to encourage people to live in the freedom of the truth that has been infused in their hearts.  And that’s why the church teaches that a person who is struggling with moral decisions or with questions about anything — it doesn’t have to be just morals, but, “I don't know who I am, God.  I don't know who you are.”  He said, “Well, don’t go rushing to an

    

Genesis 14:18-20 | 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 | Luke 9:11b-17   Oh, God, who in this wonderful sacrament have left us a memorial of your passion, grant us, we pray, so to revere the sacred mysteries of your body and blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption, who lives and reigns with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   Of all the things that my priesthood has enabled me to do, of all the times in which I feel most like a priest, it’s when a celebrate the liturgy, the Eucharist, and it’s a two-fold ceremony, as you know.  There’s the liturgy of the word, that ritual, and the liturgy ritual of the Eucharist.  When I was ordained, I think I really thought in my heart that I was going to be so empowered, and I have been empowered, to use sacraments to minister to people.  It was my way of bringing God to people, through a sacrament, but then I realized, as soon as I was ordained, that there was another even, perhaps, more — a bigger responsibility, and that was to do that first part, the liturgy of the word, in other words, preaching.  So in a way, when you come to mass, you’re watching a priest do his two most essential things.  He is helping you understand the mystery of what is hidden in these stories, opening your eyes to what is true, guiding you to a place of peace and fullness, and then he becomes this mystical character, this Christ figure.  We wear special clothes that fit more the clothes that Jesus would have worn, and we go through this ritual, because it’s easy to make it rote for a priest or for the people there, because it’s written.  It’s not a spontaneous experience of the priest’s own faith, like a homily is, but there’s something when you go into it and you let it take over.  It’s like you drift into a place of reflection, and it’s so sweet and powerful. And then the coolest part of it is you come forward, and you eat this bread.  And the fullness of the celebration of the Eucharist is when you also offer the cup to everyone present.  So you drink this wine.  You do it, and the words around the Eucharist, around the experience of preparing the community, or how the community experiencing the preparation that the liturgy itself is gives them, it’s so beautiful, because it keeps saying, over and over again — when I was growing up, all these prayers were in Latin, and even when I was ordained, part of them were in Latin, and part of them were English.  But those prayers, the meanings of those prayers were always hidden from me as a young child, but they’re so beautiful in terms of saying something over and over again.  Before you receive the Eucharist, you are forgiven.  You are forgiven.  You are forgiven.  The reason that seems so important to me is, when I was growing up, the Eucharist was a kind of exercise wherein you were showing God that you had done everything you can to free yourself of sin and imperfection by going to confession, which was not necessarily demanded, but it was considered to be a really wonderful devotional practice.  You’d go to confession on Saturday night and go to communion on Sunday, and so many times people wouldn’t go to communion.  You’d say, “Why didn’t you go to communion?”  “Well, I haven’t gone to confession lately.”  So there’s an image of you had to be pure and clean before you could receive the Eucharist, and yet somehow, in the ritual, when you read it, you say, “Wait a minute then.  Why all these words about, ‘you’re forgiven, you’re forgiven, you’re forgiven’?  It doesn’t say blessed are those who have gone to confession and now come forward.”  It fact there are times when a priest will feel obligated to say to a congregation, “Don’t come forward unless you’re totally prepared and have no sin on your soul.”  Well, the problem with that is the definition people have of sin.  If sin is an imperfection, which it is for most people — it’s our humanity showing itself — it’s almost like saying, “Well, if you’re human and you really need the help of this Eucharist, don’t come unless you’ve got it all worked out,” or something like that.  Really this is food for sinners, for people struggling. The church has always required reconciliation for what we call mortal sin, which is a very, very severe fracture in your relationship with God.  It’s not a fault.  It’s not a weakness.  It’s a well-planned, well-intended decision that says, “I will do a violent, horrible thing to my relationship with God.  I will cut God out of my life.”  Then you need the prayer of the church to reconcile you.  That’s confession, but for most people, at least my experience with confession, is people are not confessing other than their humanity.  So I want to talk about that, the relationship between going to the Eucharist, after listening to the powerful images in scripture, and what’s in your heart when you think about what you’re about to do.  The easiest thing to happen is you just do it because it’s time to do it, like you stand when you stand, you kneel when you kneel, you go forward and get the Eucharist, you come back.  It’s rather rote and not very conscious, and of course human nature gets into that rut. But no, for it to work, for anything to work, in terms of the spiritual world, you need consciousness, and you need to know what you’re doing.  You need to be open to the mystery that is being affected in you at that moment. That’s the way it works.  “I know what this is.  I believe that this is what it’s supposed to be, and I want what it is that it’s going to offer me.  And I humbly receive it, and I’m so thankful for receiving it.”It’s funny.  The word thankful is just so perfect for Eucharist, because there’s nothing else you can say to God when he says, “I have chosen to come and dwell within you. My body, my existence is for you, and this life force that’s in me, I want it to be in you, my body, my blood in you.”  How do you — “Oh, thanks.”  No, it’s overwhelming when you think about it, and it’s not saying, “I come to you in your perfection.”  No, “I come to you in your humanity.”  Your humanity, all the stuff that makes you you and me me, the really wonderful gifts that some of us — all of us have some gifts for some way for the good of all those around us, but some are gifted more than others.  But if you see your life as itself a gift to the people around you and you understand that what Eucharist is asking you to do is receive this incredible gift, God’s presence inside of you, his life coursing through your veins, which means somehow you as a human being, in your humanity, you carry God into the world.  That’s the issue.  You become his vessel, his carrier of what he brings, and what does he bring?  The most beautiful thing is clear in the ministry of Jesus when — what was he so noted for?  What was the church so upset about what he was doing?  Because he was doing things that didn’t — that were completely out of the church’s control, the temple’s control, and people just got better. They were healed.  They just — I don't know.  I love that image.  He goes everywhere.  They were healed.  I always thought he did some pretty amazing healings where it was cripples and blind people, but those are all images of the inability we have when we’re caught in an illusion where we can’t work, we can’t get to where we need to get to. The withered hand, we can’t do the work we’re called to do.  The opened eyes, we’re not able to see what we need to see.  Most especially, one of the things we need to see is how blind we are in certain areas so that we can invite the light of this presence of God inside of us to enlighten us and show us things, but what I want you to feel is not what I used to feel as a child, that I had to be pure and fixed before God would enter into me.  That is the biggest misconception I received, partly my fault, I guess, partly it was, maybe, what my parents felt.  I don't know. It was never the official teaching of the church literally, but I got it.  I get this feeling that, in fact, maybe it was because I had to fast, and you couldn’t have food in your stomach.  You couldn’t touch the Eucharist with any part of your body, not even your teeth.  You had to just let it melt on your tongue into your empty, clean stomach, and there was even a cloth they would put over your hands just in case a little piece, a particle would touch your contaminated, sinful body.  That’s what it felt like, and all that’s gone, thank God, with Vatican Council.  We can touch. We can be given it.  It’s given to us.  We put it in our hand, like in a throne, and we pick it up, and we put it in our mouth, and we can chew it.  We can eat it, and we can go — it was impossible to ever think you could ever drink the blood.  Only a priest could do that.  You go and receive the cup and hold it and drink it, taste the wine.  It’s wonderful.  It’s sensual.But the most interesting thing is not that it has all those qualities of what I think God wants us to sense when he says, “I want to come to you.”  It’s not like, “I’m just going to dwell as this little mysterious ghost inside of you.” No, “I’m coming to you, and when I come to you, it’s energy.”  It’s like energy.  I can’t think of anything else.  It’s like a full, rich meal in the form of bread, and the image of the wine is so beautiful.  And that was always hidden for me, because I was told sin would keep me from going to the Eucharist.  I was never told that Eucharist forgives sins.  Go to the Eucharist, and you receive forgiveness.  Does that mean that’s where you get rid of your mortal sins? No, that’s confession, but you go with your weaknesses and your brokenness and your longings for things to be different.  You wish you didn’t have that particular thing that gives you pleasure that you’re embarrassed to death for anyone to know.  You take all of that, and you walk up there, and you say, “En

Proverbs 8:22-31 | Romans 5:1-5 | John 16:12-15   God our Father, who by sending into the world the word of truth and the spirit of sanctification made known to the human race your wondrous mystery, grant us, we pray, that in professing the true faith, we may acknowledge the trinity of eternal glory and adore your unity, powerful in majesty.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   This feast, the Feast of the Trinity, is one of those times when I want so much to be able to awaken you to the mystery that is hidden in everything that God is and does.  We are children of the Father God, but we are so slow to fathom and to accept and to take in the majesty, the wonder, the awesomeness of this God and what he’s done for us, what he’s doing for us on a daily basis.We live in isolated worlds of our own concerns, our own needs, and I remember, when I first learned about my faith, my first understanding of this Judeo-Christian tradition that is my root to everything real in the world, when I think back to the time as a child I was learning about it, there was something so clear about the teaching I got.  It was somehow God is very, very much there as a lover, but he’s also like a human father.  He asks us to do things, and if we fail him, if we don’t do what he wants, he’s upset with us, and then we’re punished.  And so there was something in that early image that was given to me that is so part of my unconscious right now that I deal with.  It’s my first reaction to so many things.  What have I done that I shouldn’t have done?  What mistake did I make?  How can I make up for it?  Yet when you really listen to the fullness of the message of God — you can’t stay just in the Old Testament.  You can’t even just stay in the New Testament.  You have to stay in the reality of God’s relationship, which is dynamic and alive and effective in human beings’ lives.  That has been going on for — millions of years?  I don't know, but what I’m trying to say is that the revelation of God is an ongoing, uncovering, unfolding discovery of who he really is, and certainly in the Old Testament we have a certain image of him as a God who was very demanding in the beginning, and he kept changing his requirements of us, when we couldn’t respond correctly to him, to stay in a relationship with him.  He didn’t expel us or get rid of us.  He said, “Well, let me change.  If I’m demanding that you must do what I ask for you to be in touch with me, well, maybe I’ll change that.  If you’re not in touch with me and don’t do what I ask, I’m not going to leave you like I first said I was.”  Actually, when he said, “I’ll still be with you when you mess up,” then he realized, “Well, maybe what I have to do is do something for you so that you will see something, be given something that will awaken your heart and mind to the way in which I’ve always wanted you to live.”  And that issue of God wanting us to live a certain way, I thought, was somehow to please him, but it’s not at all.  All he wants is for you and for me to live the life we’re called to live so that we can be experiencing it as it was intended to be experienced.  It is marvelous.  It is overwhelmingly beautiful and full and rich.  That’s his gift to us.First, he started with the law and his image as our Father, and we were told that these were the things that human nature was intended to be. Now try to do what your nature is calling you to do.  Don’t follow a nature that is not really truly you.  That’s just called evil, but it’s mostly — it breathes, and it lives in our indecisions, our doubts, our not being convinced of who God really is. He’s a loving father who created us in a world that is so beautiful and so wonderful, and what he longs for is that we engage in it, experience it and share it.So look at the first reading.  It’s a beautiful reading of this notion of when God created the world, and he created it with a part of him that this feast is asking us to become more aware of, the Holy Spirit.  And this is so exciting to me to listen to this, because it so goes beyond anything your mind can fathom.  That’s meaning you’re closer to the truth.  If it all makes sense, it’s logical and practical and fair, you’re not anywhere near the kingdom.  No, but here we have this image of this Spirit of God that didn’t come until later in terms of our being able to attach ourselves to the gifts of this usually feminine figure, wisdom, but in the story of creation, you see this part of God. This feminine, life-loving part of him was there at the very beginning.  Everything that he created, she was there, and the feminine part of that story is, as everything was happening, she somehow was the artisan participating in its creation, the mountains, the hills, the waters, the skies, the stars, but the beautiful thing in that passage is she danced.  She danced all around.  She took delight in it.  The word is play, but it’s translated in other translations as dance.  So this part of God that is dancing and thrilled with creating this place for his people —and it says, “I love these human beings.”  That’s an image I was never given of God, that he created this world for us and wanted us to experience it in a way that gave us extraordinary joy, and that’s what it really is.It’s a world, it’s a life that we are supposed to be experiencing, and listen to this Trinitarian image.  The Father is the one who creates.  The Father is the aspect of God that is like a Father, like the one who gives life, creates.  The Son is the manifestation of who the Father really is.  So we have Jesus is the word.  The word is truth.  God is truth, Jesus, the word made flesh.  So we have in Jesus then this beautiful experience of a human being filled with divinity who is living his life in a way that we are intended to live ours.  He’s not living an extraordinary life in terms of something radically unusual that we sometimes think it’s that.  No, he’s living the life that you and I are called to live now.  Jesus said that.  “All the things you see me doing, this ability I have to affect change in other people, that I have this love for them, this forgiveness for them, and I want to see them whole and complete, and wherever I go, this intention of mine is so intense that it changes people, that their bodies change, they get better, that’s what human beings are made to be.”  That’s what our destiny is.  What else would he be saying when he said, “I am the one who’s come to explain to you who you are, and everything I ask you to be, you have the potential in you to be. And I want you to be like me,” engaged in the world in a way that is so beautifully disinterested and almost discouraged by the selfish separation of stuff that human beings come up with of being better than someone else and judging and condemning.  All of that has no place in the kingdom, because it’s all about this one thing we prayed for in the opening prayer.  It’s all about unity.  We adore, we worship the unity of this thing that God created, our life — our life in him, in each other.If there was anything I could say today that I want to say so much it is that there is this unity that exists in the world, and evil has come to rob us of its fruitfulness, and what happens is we become judgmental and condemning and separate individuals competing with each other. How foreign is that to the intention of the God who created us?  We are to be one, one in our love of the Father, one in our openness to receive what the gifts of the Son truly are, and then one in this mysterious thing that — this liturgy really does focus, it seems, more on the Holy Spirit than the other dimensions of God, but the Spirit is this thing that has to come later.  I love that.  When Jesus was talking about the Spirit, he said, “You can’t handle the Spirit, the wisdom, the understanding of the Spirit now.  You have to go through some more evolution. You have to change.  You have to understand more, but there will come a day when you’re going to understand.  You’re going to understand something that is so powerful, so beautiful, and when you see it, you’re going to be astonished at what this God ultimately is up to.  It’s going to seem so much of a surprise, so unexpected, so inexplicable.”  And it creates in us a kind of curiosity, a bewilderment, a perplexity that could the world be really this good?  Could there be something in this world that would bring us to a place, while we’re in this world, of great unity, oneness? Yeah.  Look at the evolution of humanity.I just spent time in Italy the last couple of weeks, and these beautiful little villages, these high-top little towns that are so beautiful were built on these mountaintops, because it was the only way to defend themselves from each other.  And they had walls around these cities, and they would go to war with each other. Five miles apart, they would go to war over something.  I don't know, whatever it was, political, social, economic, and these little villages right next to each other, constantly at war — not constantly but often at war.  And you look at these places now.  How could they possibly have been at war with each other?  Think of the divisions we have created in the world overtime. They’ve evolved out of, I think a more primitive understanding of who we are, a less conscious sense of what human beings are, but look at the transformation.  I’ll just take it in my lifetime, which is a good chunk, 80 years.  So you look at it, and you see, when I grew up, a black and a white family never lived next door to each other.  Germans in Cincinnati never married Irish people, because that was considered to be somehow lowering the German bloodline or something.  All these divisions, and one by one they keep going away.  They keep going away, and I pray they continue to ke