Pentecost - C:The Holy Spirit has renewed all people in the priesthood of all believers

Friends

Peace be with you. 

Please permit me to take you on a bit of a deep dive for this homily. I’d like to talk about the nature of priesthood in the Old Testament but I promise I’m going somewhere. And, to be utterly transparent, much of this information comes from a podcast I listen to called Sunday School: a Pillar Podcast. The first priests from the time of Abraham were the first-born sons. It was common for people not in relationship with the one true God to sacrifice their first-born sons as a sign of trust that God would give you more sons to carry on the family name. However, as we can see in the story of Abraham and Isaac, God didn’t demand the sacrifice of the first-born son, instead they would be priests for his people, the intermediaries between God and man. This held true until the Exodus event and one point in that journey in particular. When Moses went up on the mountain to enter into the covenant with God, Aaron, who was a priest as an eldest son, made a golden calf that was meant to replace the one true God. When Moses sees this, he asks if any of the tribes would be loyal to the one true God instead of this false golden calf and only one, the Levites, raise their hands. From then on, only the Levites are allowed to carry out the sacrifices to God. What’s the first thing the Levites do when they’re appointed priests? They slaughtered three thousand men, presumably the ancestral priests who should have been loyal to God but were loyal to the golden calf instead.

Let’s now jump ahead a bit and look at the Pentecost event as it was described in the first reading. The Apostles have been told by Jesus to wait until they receive the Spirit and, when it appears, it comes as a strong driving wind and tongues as of fire. Tongues, in this sentence, means language not the type of tongues we have in our mouth. That’s why they can speak in a way that Pathians, Medes, Elamites, and all these other people can understand. They are speaking some kind of fiery language. They are so effective that three thousand people get baptized. That’s a huge number of people being baptized. I baptized seven people at an Easter Vigil once and was exhausted. If each of the twelve apostles took an equal number of people to be baptized, each would have baptized two hundred fifty people. Makes me tired just to think about it! So what’s really going on here?

Three thousand priests died after the situation of the molten calf. For the Jewish people, on Pentecost, you gather in the grain harvest after, fifty days before, you just saw emerging from the ground. Jesus was the first to emerge from the ground on Easter morning and now we’re gathering in the wheat harvest at Pentecost. He’s doing it by undoing the death sentence justifiably given to the three thousand Old Testament priests by renewing the face of the earth with newly baptized wheat people. Baptism is a participation in Jesus’ rebirth from a life marked by original sin to a life of grace and mercy. So these three thousand people become, in a sense, the new priests of the New Covenant in grace and mercy. 

Baptism makes us all a part of this same priesthood. And, while my ministerial priesthood is different, nonetheless, we all share in the priesthood of all believers, which is ultimately a participation in the one priesthood of Jesus Christ. There are three ways we can live out our common baptismal priesthood. First, we can develop a personal relationship with our heavenly Father through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit can teach us how to pray through Jesus to the Father. We can do this best in adoration but we can also do this at home in our prayer space or while walking in nature. Whenever we stop and ponder the mystery of God, we are practicing our common priesthood. Secondly, we can help build up the Body of Christ by coming to Mass and praying the rosary and other devotions with people in communal prayer services. We can put our gifts and talents in service to the church, not in a way that is meant to lord power over others but in a way that is inviting and welcoming and edifying to others. Lastly, we can teach the gospel to our family, friends, and the whole world. Parents are the best teachers of their children in the faith and we can’t rely on faith formation, even our great program Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, to do it all for us. If we aren’t praying together as a family and talking about God at home, it speaks to the priority we give to God. Is God just something we do on Sundays or someone actively always in our lives?  

How is God calling you to activate your baptismal priesthood?

Ascnension C: It’s easier to be a commentator than to be a player

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

As you’re undoubtedly aware, commenting on social media has got to be the worst invention in recent history. I saw a video recently by a little league parent criticizing the calls of a little league umpire. The parent wanted people to comment if they thought the umpire had done a good job on one particular close call at the plate. There were several thousand comments, most comparing the umpire to either Ray Charles or Adolf Hitler. Nonetheless, some were critical of the person who uploaded the video, asking if this rises to that level of scrutiny. Many of these people reminded the “poster” that the point of little league is that everyone is learning something, including the umpires, and that no one is a professional. But these even tended to receive response comments that were ad hominem attacks on the person or on the person’s grammar.

Today, we celebrate the Ascension of Our Lord, which took place, according to St. John and St. Luke, forty days after Jesus rose from the dead. There is not much description of what the Ascension looked like. The First reading came from the Acts of the Apostles, which was written as a follow up book to the gospel reading, the Gospel of Luke. I feel like you can hear some criticism of St. Luke’s description of the Ascension between the Gospel and First reading. In the Gospel, it merely says, “”he was taken up to heaven”. How? What did it look like? What noises did they hear? Unfortunately, we don’t get many of these types of questions answered in the first reading but we do hear  that “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight”. So, does that mean he rode the cloud to heaven or that he was there until a cloud came and overshadowed him and then he was gone. This pales in comparison to the Old Testament description of Elijah, for instance, in Second Kings 2:11. It says that a fiery chariot came down and took Elijah up into the heavens. You would think the Messiah would merit at least a fiery chariot. 

Why not have a more detailed description of what happened to Jesus at the Ascension? I can think of two reasons. First, St. Luke most likely wasn’t there. He’s a convert of St. Paul so he’s writing down other people’s memories rather than his own and maybe people’s descriptions weren’t great. Second, I tend to believe the most striking part of the Ascension wasn’t Jesus being taken up body and soul into heaven. Even as important as this was, from the vantage point of the apostles, something even more important took place that day. Up until this point, they were followers of Jesus. They could ask him questions. And they had to rely on Jesus to correct them when they made mistakes. Think of Jesus calling St. Peter “Satan” when he questioned whether Jesus really needed to suffer and die. Or, think of Jesus teaching the apostles for forty days about the fact that he had to suffer but that his suffering would end and he would resurrect and ascend and, forty days in, they still ask him when he’s going to restore the kingdom to Israel. They’re still thinking that Jesus the Messiah was going to be a political messiah. He gently reminds them that his kingdom will come but that they have work to do beforehand. They need to witness to the world about his death and resurrection and the incomparable mercy associated with this singular act. However, they still need the final ingredient, the Holy Spirit to make them witnesses. 

Up until this point, they have been passive observers and occasional foot-in-mouth commentators of Jesus’ ministry. Now they are going to be his body, as St. Paul said in the second reading for today. By the empowering work of the Holy Spirit, they will spread the gospel to all the nations. 

But here’s the thing: we are their successors. Not just the bishops and priests, who are their successors in leadership, but every person who is baptized is meant to spread the gospel. We aren’t meant to merely be commentators and proof checkers of what the bishops and priests are saying and doing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to correct a priest or a bishop and be disappointed, especially if they behave in a way that is scandalous or disrespectful or ignorant. But our primary job is to spread the gospel, not merely passively listen and critique the evangelist. We need to be evangelists. 

Critics comment. Evangelists witness. Who most needs to hear you tell them the Good News that Jesus died for their sins in mercy and loves them to glory?

5 E C: We are waiting for Jesus to come down

 Friends

Peace be with you.  

One of the common misconceptions about Christianity that is both internal and external is that we are escapists. You’ll hear it from atheistic philosophers like Karl Marx who said religion was the opiate of the masses. He believed most people who subscribed to a religion did so to numb themselves to the ugliness of this world rather than having to face it. He believes we numb ourselves by creating a perfect, heavenly world that exists after this terrible, imperfect world has ceased to exist. From this point of view, Christians are resentful losers hoping that their enemies will face the fires of damnation but who are, themselves, simply unwilling to stand up to their oppressors.

The struggle is that you’ll sometimes also hear this attitude from within the church. Sometimes Christians will say that this world is awful and that the best thing we can hope for is to die and go to heaven. To be absolutely transparent, I’ve been there. There are seemingly more and more wars breaking out world-wide every day. In our own country, political divisions seem to be getting deeper and deeper making any kind of hope to achieve common ground for common good seem impossible. The concept of family, which is one of the most basic structures building up civilized society, has been slowly unraveling to a point where the word is almost meaningless. And then, in the middle of all of this, someone climbed up on a ledge of our church and stole the copper piping off an air conditioner and wires for our internet. Remember that old commercial where a stressed out woman said “Calgon, take me away”? I’m guessing we’ve all had those weeks where we just wish God would take us away to heaven and get us out of here. 

In the passage before our first reading, St. Paul and St. Barnabas were evangelizing in a town called Lystra to a group of non-Jewish residents who become so impressed with what they say that they believe St. Paul is the god Hermes and St. Barnabas is Zeus. Hermes is Zeus’ spokesperson so it makes sense that these healers are contextualized by the people as being Greek gods. However, the two are quick to correct this and encourage the crowd to move past their pagan beliefs in many gods in favor of knowing Jesus Christ. A group of Jews who had come with them from their previous two stops became so enraged that Paul and Barnabbas were thought to be gods that they whipped up the crowd to kill Paul by stoning him. Somehow, St. Paul survives and is taken to a town called Derby to recover. He and Barnabbas preach there and they convert many other people while recovering. 

What’s amazing is what happens next. You would think that, if a group of people from Antioch and Iconium had just tried to kill you in the town of Lystra, the last place you would go is Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra. Shake the dust from your feet and find other, more welcoming places. But not for Paul and Barnabbas. In the first reading, we hear that they went back to each of those towns to strengthen the believers there with the message “It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” They appoint presbyters in each town, which is where we get the word priest. The presbyters will work with the previously appointed bishop and deacons to maintain holy order there. In this way, Paul and Barnabbas may die, but the church will continue through this early version of the hierarchy. 

In doing this, Paul and Barnabbas realized what the second reading from the Book of Revelation taught. A new heaven and new earth are coming from the sky to replace the current one. This isn’t a way of describing some far off heaven we need to get to or the belief that God is slowly making this world better such that heaven will just magically appear one day. This is the belief that, even as bad as it seems to be, God is going to make all things new. It’s not escapism. We engage the world because God is going to send from the clouds a new heaven and a new earth because the old one has passed away. This means that, while we respect the gifted nature of the world, we focus primarily on the conversion of people. That may mean we see the ugly side of humanity, like being in a part of the city where people steal and damage other people’s property. But it also means we pick ourselves up and keep winning souls for Jesus, keep encouraging young people to become priests, and keep spending time with other apostles to build up their faith and our own.

Who do you lean on to help you when you're really struggling to find hope? Who needs you to be that for them?

Easter 2025: Who left the door open?

Friends

Peace be with you.

Occasionally, early in the morning, I’ll get a text from the person who unlocks the church letting me know that a door was left open the night before. Most recently, it was one of my garage doors, which prompted me to run downstairs to make sure that my car and my bikes were still there. I wouldn’t have been this concerned if I still lived in Bellevue but, in downtown Cedar Rapids, things have a tendency to walk off if they aren’t properly secured. Thankfully, everything was still where it was supposed to be but I felt unnerved for the rest of the day, wondering if something that was supposed to be there aside from my car and bikes may have been taken.

I wonder if this was the feeling this group of women felt as they approached the Tomb of Jesus that day. As it was, they were probably going to have to find someone to break them into the tomb because a rock was intentionally put in the doorway to make sure no one could steal his body. It had to be a double gut punch, first to see the stone rolled away and then to see that their fears were realized, his body wasn’t there. It certainly would be enough to make me fall down terrified thinking about who had stolen the body and what might be happening to it.

One of the amazing details about the resurrection is how few details there are about the actual event and how unspectacular it is compared to other events in the life of Jesus that lead up to it. Jesus’ public ministry begins with his baptism, in which a dove comes down from heaven and the voice of God is heard saying “This is my beloved son, whom I love.” That’s huge! That gets your attention. When Jesus prefigures his resurrection on the Mount of Transfiguration, his clothes become dazzling white, Moses and Elijah appear, and again a voice is heard saying “This is my beloved son, listen to him.” You know Peter, James, and John talked about that with other people after the resurrection. Lastly, think about what we heard last week about the crucifixion during the reading of the Passion. It said, at noon darkness came over the land and the veil of the temple was torn down the middle right before Jesus said “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” and died. That’s a spectacle that got people’s attention.

When we get to the central experience of Christianity, the resurrection, we hear about a group of women approaching an open tomb terrified that someone left the door open and stole his body. That’s why there are two important details. First, there are these two men who are later identified as angels who call Jesus the living one and ask Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and May the mother of James why they are looking for him among the dead. The angels then remind the women that he had told them in his ministry of his trial, death and resurrection. Still, you get a sense that the experience left the women feeling a little wanting. On the one hand, they run back to the upper room to share the gospel story with the 11 apostles and some other people but it sounds like nonsense to their hearers.

It’s not until Peter runs to the tomb and notices something they missed: the burial shroud is still there. Most people acknowledge that this detail is put there to point out that it wasn't a grave robbery. If his body had been stolen, they wouldn’t have taken the time to remove the cloths. They would have taken the body still wrapped in them and removed them when they were somewhere they wouldn’t be noticed. But the cloths themselves also tell a story that Peter and the Apostles might have known that, possibly, was a bit lost until recently. Assuming this is the Shroud of Turin, Fr. Robert Spitzer, a brilliant physicist, notes that something dramatic happened to make the image on that shroud. He says it would have taken a powerful, brief burst of vacuum ultraviolet radiation (equivalent to the output of 14,000 excimer lasers) emitted from the body to make the image. Now, that would have been a sight to see! But it seems to have happened when no one was around and the door was shut. It seems, instead, Jesus was resurrected in some kind of powerful burst of energy, he removed his burial cloths, and then either moved the stone himself or had the stone removed by these angels before he went to the underworld to save the souls of the just who had already died.

I think this was deliberately done. I don’t think Jesus’ resurrection was meant to be seen and written down. It wasn’t meant to be a spectacle like the fourth of July. It was a fulfillment and deepening of people’s faith. But people have to have the eyes of faith to understand what happened. I think that’s one of the reasons so many people reject the gospel, not because they have seen and rejected the gospel but because they haven’t taken the time to let God open up their eyes of faith. It’s not something we can do for ourselves. It’s not something that can come about because of the perfect argument. Faith is a gift given to us by God developed on our knees in prayer, in conversation with God. It makes us feel vulnerable and confused, like those women did when they saw the empty tomb. But it grows in us if we take the time. Like the grass, flowers, and other plants that are just starting to grow this time of year, if we take the time to talk to God, our faith will likewise grow. Now that our Lenten journey of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving is done, what are we going to do for the next fifty days of this Easter Season to ask Jesus to open our hearts to greater faith?

Holy Thursday 2025:Eucharist, Priesthood, and Service

Friends

Peace be with you. 

What’s the point of Mass for you? I have a friend who I’m pretty sure would say that the point of Mass is to be as brief as possible. When he comes to a Mass I celebrate, he tells me I could have had a shorter homily, used a shorter form of the readings, used a shorter Eucharistic Prayer, had more Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion so it would go faster. He tells me all about how fast his home parish celebrates Mass. Most weekends, our Masses at St. Patrick’s last fifty minutes to an hour. When I talk to my friend, his Mass is always shorter. 

On this night, this night that is unlike any other, we celebrate the Institution of the Eucharist and Institution of the Priesthood. We remember that Passover Liturgy that Jesus celebrated with his followers in which he changed two elements, the bread and wine, from being merely symbols of past oppression into being his body, blood, soul, and divinity. This is the tradition that St. Paul hands on to us in our second reading today. Jesus uses a specific term to describe the significance of this altered Passover Liturgy. He says, “Do this in remembrance of me.” The word that is translated “remembrance” is the Greek word Anamnesis or the Hebrew word Zikaron and it means more than just simply a calling to mind or a memory. We, moderns, suffer here because of televisions and smartphones and even the availability of books when it comes to this concept of memory. At the time of Jesus, obviously, there was no technology for recording what happened at an incident, let alone an easy way to transcribe them for posterity. You had to remember it in your mind and then share it with others verbally. They prioritized precision in their remembrance because the retelling of a story was the way the people who were not present not only learned about what happened, but participated in what happened. If you witnessed your mother or father die and other members of your family did not, it was your obligation to tell the story accurately and descriptively so that they can feel a part of what happened. The Mass becomes a way to remember, to bring the members together to be part of a past celebration. 

But it’s different from other memorial celebrations, too, because Jesus left himself, his real presence, in the Eucharist. When we share past stories in order for people to be included in a significant event, we normally don’t have something that physically connects us to that past event but; in the Eucharist, we do. That’s why we need a priesthood, not just to confect the Eucharist, but to connect us to Jesus himself. The way we do this is that the priests all have a bishop, to whom we owe our allegiance. That bishop is connected to the 12 apostles through a succession of giving authority in the laying on of hands. Those 12 apostles were, in turn, given authority by Jesus to “do this in memory of me”. That’s why it’s so important that we don’t speak for ourselves in Mass, we don’t just do things intended to make Mass overly personal. It’s not our Mass. It’s Jesus' way of inserting himself into our modern lives by bringing us back to his time through this powerful tool of memory. 

That’s why we have to be of service to the Mass and not expect the Mass to be in service to us. In other words, we should never ask what we got out of Mass but what we put into it. For some people, they put in a lot of time and effort as ushers, readers, Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, servers, musicians. They are great and, tonight, we celebrate that service as well and encourage more of you to help in these ministries. But, even as great as that kind of service is, the most important service we can give is to take off our watch or turn off our smartphones so we’re not preoccupied with how long Mass is. Then we can listen to the prayers, perhaps even follow along with them in the Missal if we tend to be more visual learners, and let God speak to us through them. We can sing the antiphons and hymns and truly give thanks to the Lord, our God through them. We can relish in the silences of Mass and not just wish Father would hurry up so we can get back to our lives so often lived in order to get something out of them 

Remember my time-conscious friend I talked about at the beginning of this homily? The truth is that it’s really a little voice in the back of my head that worries about how many people are coming to Mass and what people are saying about me or this parish. It’s the voice that worries when I hear about people no longer attending Mass here but attending in another Catholic Church and celebrates when I hear about someone attending Mass here who used to attend Mass elsewhere. I’m not proud of it, just letting you know that, if you struggle to pay attention or struggle to get motivated to come to Mass because you don’t get anything out of it or wish something was different, you’re not alone. The guy in the front with the funny looking robe on is with you. How can we make sure we’re not so worried about how we or others feel at Mass that we miss out on the opportunity to be of loving service to the shared memory by which we are truly present to Christ at his Last Supper? 

3 L C Take off your shoes and stay a while

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

What situations make you take your shoes off? For most people, it’s the end of  a work day, arriving at home and finally being relaxed. I listen to a podcast by a guy who thinks shoes are protection from dirt and disease, so he wears them whenever he’s outside of his house but immediately takes them off when he gets home and insists on his family and friends doing the same. I’ve never associated shoes with dirt and disease so I tend to wear them in my house and I’m not always cognizant when I visit other people’s homes of this norm. My guess is that, if the host of that podcast came to my house, he would be horrified and never take his shoes off. 

In the first reading, when Moses approached the burning bush, the first thing he heard was the order to take off his shoes. Moses wasn’t worried about germs or dirt, however. He was in the desert so sand would already be everywhere. He was curious as to how a bush that’s on fire doesn’t just quickly burn up. Apparently, in the heat of the desert, spontaneous combustion is fairly common. It gets hot and the heat of the sun gets magnified somewhere causing a dry plant to just start on fire. So, the first image of this theophony, this experience of God revealing himself to a human being, is with the powerful symbol of fire. It’s powerful because it can be used for good or evil. Jesus called the abode of the evil one Gehenna, which was the name of a garbage dump on the outskirts of Jerusalem that was always on fire. I think burning garbage is a pretty good scent to describe a place I never want to visit. But fire can be good too, as in the tongues of fire that come to rest on the disciples at Pentecost. This image from our first reading, a bush on fire but not consumed, has been used to illustrate how the Holy Spirit wants us to empower us to energetically use the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love in a way that will not exhaust us. That was also a clue to Moses that something divine is happening. As I said before, Moses approached the Burning Bush and heard a voice ordering him to take off his shoes. Imagine being in a place where things are spontaneously starting on fire and being asked to remove your shoes. You can’t run away. It’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s like someone is asking you to walk on hot coals. It takes a lot of trust. God revealed to Moses that he needed him to return to Egypt in order to save all the Israelites from slavery. Remember that Egypt was a place Moses had recently left because he killed someone who was mistreating a fellow Israelite. God was telling Moses to go back to Egypt and do, on a grander scale, what had just caused him to flee from the country; to stand up against, not some unknown Egyptian, but the leader of the Egyptians to defend, not one beat-up Israelite, but all God’s enslaved people. 

In my mind, that’s what makes Moses’ trust so remarkable. He merely asked for God’s name. Of course, that’s not as simple as it sounds. Part of this has to do with control. If you know a deity’s name, you can summon him. However, the other really tragic thing is what needing to know God’s name implies. Moses has lived among God’s people and he knows them. They have been living for four hundred years in Egypt because Joseph brought them there to escape a drought. For four hundred years, they’ve been living among people who have multiple “gods” with names and Moses feels like they have forgotten their own God. So, he needs to know his name to tell it to them. God’s response is really a non-response because he won’t be categorized as one God among many. It’s like when people say they don’t believe in God because they can’t see him. I think to myself, “Do you not believe in the author of your favorite book because you can’t find her anywhere in it? Do you not believe a building has a designer because you can’t find him anywhere in it? God isn’t just another thing that exists in this world, he is existence itself. His essence is existence, to use philosophical language. Still, God sort of gives Moses an out because also said that he was the God of their Fathers, the patriarchs. 

I would describe God as being frighteningly gentle in this encounter. In other words, a bush on fire that isn’t being consumed could be a scare tactic, but it becomes an object that draws Moses into conversation. Asking Moses to take off his shoes could seem like God’s cornering you, putting you into a situation that you can’t leave. But instead he’s asking you to relax around him and put your trust in him. He was, in both ways, inviting Moses to show his vulnerability by showing that he trusted God was merciful and that God doesn't delight in punishment or dirty tricks. Most religions with multiple gods believe they could play tricks on human beings. In contrast, the one true God is all powerful but also all trustworthy and all merciful for those who seek his mercy. 

That’s how the gospel intersects with the first reading. In it, we hear about people delighting in other people’s suffering. Most scholars believe that the blood Pilate mingled with the Temple sacrifices would have been his political rival's blood and that he probably dropped a tower on a group of other dissidents. It’s easy to celebrate other people’s suffering. On the internet, they call it instant karma. If God operated this way, he would wipe us all out and create a world made up entirely of golden retrievers. But, instead, using the fig tree as symbolic of God’s people, Jesus recommends giving some extra time. Perhaps, with fertilizer, the tree of humanity will produce good fruit. 

The good fruit God wants from us is repentance. He knows we make mistakes and, while he doesn’t delight in our mistakes, he does delight when we seek to be forgiven. God loves us most when we recognize our own imperfections and ask for forgiveness. It can be frightening to do this, to take off our shoes metaphorically and come into the confessional to admit our imperfections. But remember that God is frighteningly gentle. We may think he should yell at us or slap us around but that’s not how God works and that’s certainly not how he wants me to work either. Instead, he wants to reveal himself when we are vulnerable. I hope you will experience the frighteningly gentleness of God in the sacrament of reconciliation this Lenten season. 

1 L C Confess with your lips

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

There’s a saying attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, though Francis’ scholars cannot find it anywhere in his writings, that says “Preach the gospel always and when necessary use words.” It implies that we should live the gospel message and only use words when we absolutely have to, almost as though there’s something wrong with using words. On the one hand, I see the value. A person who preaches about Jesus but doesn’t live his or her own life in a way that exemplifies the gospel message is a hypocrite. On the other hand, I think it unnecessarily hamstrings Christians in a time that, more than ever, we can’t just expect that people will notice how we live our lives and, thereby, be attracted to salvation in the church of Jesus Christ, that is the Catholic Church. 

Each of our readings has a pretty clear example of this message and, I think, builds a challenge for us. Let’s start with the second reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. In the passage we read, St. Paul emphasizes two interconnected concepts that are integral to Christian living. He says, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.” Scripture scholars call this a chiastic structure, meaning that St. Paul states something and then repeats it in reverse in order to emphasize the middle point. So, belief is what St. Paul is trying to emphasize but confessing is the way the belief is lived out. In other words, we are called to have faith in the saving acts of Jesus Christ but we are also called to confess it to others. The way St. Paul is using the word confess is, obviously, not in the sense of what we do in the confessional but in the sense of speaking spiritual truths. St. Augustine wrote a great book called the Confessions which remains one of the greatest explanations of the Catholic Faith ever written. Part of having faith means confessing that faith to others. It’s not just about doing good deeds but also about reminding ourselves and telling others why we do them. 

Some will counter that, by telling others why we do good things, it’s a form of bragging. I see the point, however I would say there’s a way that we should confess our faith that is anything but bragging. The way we do that is by modeling our confession on the confession of Jesus. The desert for Jesus is not a place of escape. Jesus knows that he is going into the desert to be tempted by the devil. A national speaker and founder of the group Acts 23 named Fr. John Riccardo, recently presented to me at a conference that the reason Jesus went into the desert is to make sure his disguise is working. Had the second person of the trinity come in all his power and majesty to defeat the devil, the devil would have left him alone because he would have realized he’s out of his league. However, by becoming fully human while remaining fully God, the second person of the trinity is going into the desert to make sure the devil will treat him the same way the devil treats us, trying to get him to abandon his faith and become like a “small g” god. Jesus wants to make sure the devil hasn’t figured out that, by dying on the cross and fulfilling the punishment Adam deserved, that by eating from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil he would die, Jesus alone could remove death as a punishment and open the way for eternal life human beings. So Jesus goes into the desert to be tempted. I’d caution people that this isn’t Jesus’ way of saying that we need to set ourselves up to be deliberately tempted by the devil or to confront the devil. In fact, I’d say we need to do everything we can to avoid having experiences with ouija boards, seances, freemasonry, palm readers, mediums, psychics and other things and people that purport to expose us to the so-called spirit world but are really opening us up to a world that we and they are unprepared to deal with, the realm of the devil and evil spirits. So, don’t think Jesus is telling us to play with fire here. He is uniquely qualified to be tempted because he is the second person of the Holy Trinity and because he is filled with the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and because it’s all part of the loving plan of his heavenly Father, the first person of the Holy Trinity. 

I think one of the reasons we don’t confess our faith, is because we fear being called a hypocrite or we fear not knowing what to say. On the one hand, no one is perfect other than Jesus and, because of her unique role in duping the devil, his mother Mary. We are all striving to be perfect but, ultimately remain imperfect. That’s why confession means, not only telling someone what we believe but also telling a priest when we don’t live up to the standards God has for us. But, on the other hand, if we wait until we are perfect before we talk about Jesus, we’ll never do it. So, we have to talk about Him and, if we feel like we’re not ready to do so, we can model Jesus and ask the Holy Spirit to put the right words in our mouth. It’s not a replacement for studying the faith but we also can’t anticipate every question a person is going to ask so we have to rely on the Holy Spirit’s help. Come Holy Spirit! Teach us to pray. Teach us to confess our faith. 

Lastly, looking at the first reading, one of the things Moses teaches the Israelites in Deuteronomy, the second book of the Bible, a book that can be really challenging to read because it tends to get bogged down in legislation, is that they need to have something basic prepared about why they believe what they believe. In other words, if someone were to ask you why you were a Catholic, why you waste an hour of your free time on the weekend coming to some outdated religious service with priests who are so out of touch with society that they can’t get married and are always asking you for money, what would you say? Could you do it in a three minute response to a friend? A one minute response on the bus? A thirty second response to a Jehovah’s witness door knocker? A 15 second video on TikTok or Instagram or Youtube shorts? This is a skill that takes some prayer and practice and I hope lent is a good time to ask the Holy Spirit to inspire you with an answer. How is God calling us to confess our faith with our lips?