13 OT A: The Real Ordo Amoris

Friends

Peace be with you. 

Some of you may remember, shortly after the election of Pope Leo XIV, there was a disagreement between Vice President J.D. Vance and the Holy Father with regard to the treatment of immigrants. The Vice President cited a principle from theology called the Ordo Amoris, or the order of love. Most of us had no idea what he was talking about, even people like me who study theology. The principle, which comes from St. Augustine but was refined by St. Thomas Aquinas, says that, with limited resources, we take care of those closest to us before we take care of strangers. Bishop Barron, in explaining the principle, used an example built upon the California wildfires. Imagine arriving home after work to find your entire city block on fire. If you’re a part of a family, you would be obliged to make sure your family is safe and out of the house before you worry about your neighbors, let alone that annoying neighbor that you don’t get along with. That’s the Ordo Amoris: we first care for those we are obliged to take care of before we care for strangers.

As that debate was going on, I couldn’t help but think of this particular passage of scripture, where Jesus seems to contradict the very nature of the Ordo Amoris. “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me…” St. Matthew is deprioritizing love of father, mother, son and daughter, which doesn’t seem very Ordo Amoris to me. Were St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine ignorant of scripture and too reliant on Plato and Aristotle when they developed this theory? Or were they keenly aware of what Jesus was trying to get across?

Immediately prior to this passage of scripture, Jesus warns his disciples that his message will not be a message of unity but a message of division. He tells them that, if you believe in him, it will cause divisions in your household. He says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man ‘against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household.’ Now that doesn’t sound very Ordo Amoris to me. This sets the stage for today’s Gospel. When we believe in Jesus, it will mean that people we love will hate us or think less of us. It’s one thing when it is parents or grandparents and we are rebellious youths drawing our own paths in life. It’s completely different when it is our spouse who is meant to be our equal, our partner in flesh, or our children, our grandchildren, or our godchildren, people we are meant to mentor in the faith. I know people who have left the faith because they feel like they are failures because their children left the faith. 

Jesus does something really important in the next part of today’s gospel. He says, “...whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” This is the first time Jesus mentioned his cross in the Gospel of Matthew. It will, obviously, play a central role from here on out until Jesus dies on it. It plays a central role in our life as well. It is the goal of the Christian, the ordo, if you will, of our life. Jesus is the one we love first because he put us and them first. Without his death on the cross, not only would we not be able to love those around us but love itself would not exist. His death is the supreme act of selfless love for the world. That’s the Ordo Amoris, not that we need to sacrifice our life to jump into a fiery building to save our family and neighbors, but that we must take up our cross and follow Jesus every day in every act we do. We do it, not because we need rewards but because we are his little ones who feel so grateful for this act of sacrifice that we are willing to sacrifice our comforts, our will, and even our very selves for him. 

How is Jesus calling you today to order your love by taking up his cross?

Easter 2026: We can do great things if we work together!

 Friends

Alleluia! He is Risen. He is truly risen. Alleluia!

There are a lot of news stories about how there is a boom in people joining the Catholic Church this year. Five years ago, there were 70,000 people who joined the church in the US and, this year, that number has gone up to over 90,000. Part of that has to do with getting farther and farther away from fears of being in crowds that happened during Covid. I would think part of this has to do with those people I would call media clerics like Bishop Barron, Cardinal Dolan, and Fr. Mike Schmitz who are showing the world a compassionate, kind, and humorous side of priesthood instead of the insidious side so often portrayed in the media. It also helps having the first ever American Pope who speaks with a Chicago accent...though different than the accent I'm used to hearing on Saturday Night Live. However, I think we priests have also finally recognized how important it is to empower you all, the laity in the church, in the work of evangelization. I think about how priests were threatened by the prospect of Catholic radio and television because we couldn’t control what the lay people were going to say. Oftentimes, those same priests would brag about how they were good at empowering the laity until the laity asked to start some form of apologetical or catechetical media movement. 

All the gospels say that Mary Magdalene was the first to see the empty tomb. Some list other women there but they are all in agreement that Mary Magdalene was there. What’s the significance of this person? Contrary to Dan Brown, it was not a wink toward some kind of romantic relationship between Jesus and her. Jesus loved her just like he loves all people who show faith in him. I think Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene specifically because she was NOT one of the twelve apostles. In other words, I think he wanted his first post-resurrection contact not to be with those he had ordained as leaders, but specifically among one who was, in a sense, the disciple of disciples, St. Mary Magdalene. He appeared to Mary because, unlike the Apostles who will have to get busy organizing churches and spreading the gospel far and wide, she can stay in one place and work behind the scenes building up the faith of a particular community. It’s why I’m not only not in favor of women’s ordination or widespread ordination of married men and not worried about declining numbers of priests. I feel like we are just now seeing priests recognize we can’t micromanage everything that happens in our parish and I’ve seen lay people feeling empowered to start catechetical and evangelical initiatives. I have seen lay people take on the responsibility of starting small group Bible studies. I’ve seen lay people reach out to invite people to Mass or confession with them. I’ve experienced lay people leading prayer over people for healing. When this happens and lay people feel like they have an important place in the church that isn’t dependent on the priest’s involvement nor in competition with the our responsibilities, we start to work together and our love for the church grows.

One week from today, I will stand at this ambo and read a letter from our Archbishop announcing the next step in our Journey in Faith. I will finally be able to tell you what parishes you will be working with as a pastorate and who will be the local leaders starting in July. I know this has been a very difficult process for some people and I wish I could say it’s about done but, the truth is that this is just beginning. Next we’ll have to figure out Mass times and roles for staff and how centralized to make the offices. Please keep two people in mind as all of this is going on. The first is Jesus. He is our hope and our strength. He wants to appear to us daily, hourly, to give us hope and lead us to the Father. Keep Jesus always in our heart. 

But also think of Mary Magdalene. She may have started off scared and confused on that Easter morning but she ran to the apostles with the kind of joy that allowed Jesus to appear to her on the way. We may not have Mass in as many churches as we used to but that doesn’t stop us from telling everyone He is risen. Indeed, even as great as 90,000 new Catholics are this year, in the year 2000, 174,000 new Catholics joined the church in the United States. Almost twice as many! There’s too much work to do to sit around licking our wounds. Too many of our family have the left the church and too many people have no hope because they do not know Christ. He has arisen and has appeared to Mary Magdalene. Can you be like her and spread the gospel message to those most in need of hearing it?  

3 L A Stop scrolling and experience freedom

 

Friends

Peace be with you. 

I was thinking about ways to modernize my homilies. Fifteen years ago, I heard about a Protestant pastor who would show cute videos as part of his sermon, but none of the six churches I pastored at the time had a TV or a video screen in front so I missed that opportunity. Ten years ago, I heard from a Catholic deacon with a projector and screen in the front of his church using Powerpoint to highlight the main points of his homily and I thought that it seemed like a boring adaptation of what that Protestant pastor was doing five years before. So, here’s what I’m thinking: let’s call it homily scrolling. I’ll start a homily and if anyone finds it boring, you can stretch out your arm directly in front of you and move your finder up, like you do on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or any of those other video streaming platforms. You scroll past a video you don’t want to watch by swiping at it and the video changes. If I see a finger swipe the homily and I’ll know it’s time to change the topic. 

So let’s get started. This passage reminds me of an experience I had when I was in seminary….and I see someone has swiped up because they’ve never been to seminary so they don’t find it relatable. Okay…This passage reminds me of the movie Good Will Hunting…I see another swipe up because I’ve preached too often about movies recently and even fairly recently preached about Good Will Hunting. To understand this gospel you really have to understand women’s role in society at the time of Jesus…I see two people swiping up, one because the message is too sociological instead of theological and another because it’s obviously too controversial. At this point, I’m going to have a yellow lab come running from the side of the church and jump into a pile of leaves because everyone loves that…except someone swiped up because they got bit by a yellow lab. So, I’m going to have a shirtless buff dude and a bikini-clad woman come out and reenact this gospel passage, which I expect people would immediately swipe up on but for some reason it takes a lot longer than the other attempts at a homily but eventually someone did. Next, I talk about the first reading and the idea of God being a rock and immediately someone swipes up because Peter is the rock and I clearly don’t know what I’m talking about. So, I have a police officer come out and try and arrest someone who is a sovereign citizen and the two argue about whether the police officer has the right to pull over the person until the police officer pepper sprays the guy and pulls him out of church. At first, no one swipes anything but eventually we do hoping that the shirtless dude and bikini clad woman could come back because we felt something with that one different than we did the others. 

Now, I’m obviously being facetious here. You can “swipe up” all you want to but I’m not going to change the topic of my homily but I do hope that it illustrates something that is common in contemporary culture. Today is Safe Haven Sunday, a time for us to reflect upon how we can keep ourselves and our families safe from the serious sin of pornography. There are a lot of statistics I could throw at you about why it is sinful and unhealthy for people to engage with pornography. But the biggest reason for me can be seen in the gospel for today. 

Jesus is in Sychar, the capital city of the region referred to as Samaria. Unlike most Jews, who walk around this area to the East along the Jordan River, it says Jesus had to go through this place. He sends his disciples off to get some food and then stays by a well. A well, at the time of Jesus, was a place for what today we would call hook-up culture. If you wanted to meet someone for what we euphemistically refer to as a “romantic encounter”, you would meet them at a well. This is probably because it’s one of the rare times when a woman would be by herself away from her husband or father. This woman approaches and seems kind of harsh to Jesus. Part of that is because there was a lot of enmity between Jews and Samaritans but part is revealed by Jesus when he says she has had five husbands and the one she is with now is not her own. A woman cannot divorce at the time of Jesus so that means this woman has been married five times and, each time, her husband has divorced her. It’s possible that this woman is harsh because the last person she wants to talk to right now is some Jew who has come to Samaria looking for a clandestine romantic encounter. The whole reason she’s gone out in the middle of the day is to avoid having to talk to people. If she went in the morning, all the people of town would be there and they’d be judging her for whatever reason they heard about her being divorced and for living with a man who is not her husband. She’s probably got a reputation and she thinks that’s why this Jew sent his friends away so he could be alone with her. 

But Jesus isn’t interested in romance, he’s interested in love. And he knows it has to start by removing shame. Shame gets in the way of love. Shame comes from having to hide our activities away from people with whom we should be transparent. Some people think that the best way to get rid of shame is to live and let live. I’m not going to judge you and you're not going to judge me regardless of what we do. However, we can’t deny that morality matters. Even the biggest live-and-let-live person has a problem with child pornography and human trafficking, which a lot of pornography involves. And there are definitely adverse health effects to exposure to pornography that a lot of psychologists are discovering that have made them throw up red flags. 

When it becomes clear to the woman at the well that Jesus is not there for romance or religious debate, she becomes intrigued and calls him a prophet. Jesus shows how compassionate he is by inviting her to salvation. He says, not that she needs to go worship in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, but that God will come to her in Spirit and truth. And she realizes that God HAS come to her in the person of Jesus and that he knows what she has done but that he’s still offering her forgiveness and mercy. That’s why she celebrates that Jesus told her everything that she has done, not because she’s proud to be a sinner but because Jesus says, in effect, you can be free from this sin if you come to know him. 

If you feel trapped by shame surrounding pornography or other sexual sins, it’s important to bring it to the light in a way that will help you be free. There are materials on the back counter of the church with resources such as website blockers and online counselors that can help. Joining an SA group can help. Having an accountability partner can help. Giving me a call to talk about your problem can help. The biggest thing is to know that God doesn’t want you or your family to be trapped in a hidden life of shame or in some morally relativistic life where we pretend objectifying people is healthy or natural. God wants us to know that he knows everything that we have done and he still loves us. He wants us to know true freedom. He wants us to see each other the way he sees us, not as objects to be exploited but as brothers and sisters with the dignity of being created in his image and likeness. Swiping in search of stumbling onto a tantalizing video may provide short-term pleasure but it cannot give us the true joy that God’s freedom alone can provide. Can we stop swiping long enough to allow God to tell us what we’ve done so we can find the joy of true freedom?

2 L A: Be willing to live differently

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

There’s a scene in the 1985 movie Clue that I thought about as I was preparing this homily. If you’ve never seen the movie, it’s a secular comedy that is probably more for kids 12 and above because of some suggestive humor. It’s based on the board game in that all the characters are either in the board game or logically related to a mansion, like a cook, a butler, and a maid. The movie begins with the characters all discovering their host, a man named Mr. Body, has been blackmailing them for crimes they’ve committed. In the course of the movie, Mr. Body and other ancillary characters are killed, leaving the main six characters to search the house for clues. At one point, after several frantically funny scenes, as Colonel Mustard and Ms. Scarlett are locked in a room screaming to be let out, the maid, named Yvette, runs with the revolver to shoot the lock. She accidentally trips, shooting the rope holding up a chandelier and then, gets her bearings, and shoots the lock to the door in which they are trapped. Colonel Mustard comes out frantically shouting “Why are you shooting at us? You could have killed us, we could have been killed. I just can’t take any more scares” and for a brief moment it feels like everything is starting to calm down right as the chandelier falls to the ground shattering into a million pieces and causing everyone to start to scream again.

The first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis are a manual for how the world got to be the way it is. God makes things good and human beings break them. God gives us life and an order to the world and creates us in complementarity to each other as man and woman and the first thing that happens is man and woman find a way to use the complementarity against each other. They discover there’s this whole other moral concept they weren’t supposed to know called evil. They were only supposed to know good. So, God sends them eastward, gives them better clothes than leaves, and starts to pick up the pieces. However, then Adam and Eve’s children, Cain and Abel, introduce murder into human history. Then the angels, spiritual entities intended to be unseen helpers to people, turn on each other and some of them decide to create a hybrid human angel species called the Nephilim. And just when you think it can’t get any worse, God decides he’s going to send a flood on the world and start over. However, there’s one family, Noah’s family, that seems worth keeping so he wipes everyone else off the planet and enters into a covenant with Noah’s family. You’d think that would be where things start to get better. But they don’t. Instead, like the chandelier falling from the ceiling, Noah’s descendants decide they’re going to build a tower to heaven and God disperses them throughout the world and confuses their speech so they won’t get that idea again. And it’s only at this point that God decides that he’s going to work with one guy, one family, Abram’s, to see if things go better. And they do. 

Similarly, in the gospel, seven days before the Transfiguration, Jesus had gone on excursion with his Apostles to Cesearea Phillippi and asked them who people say that he is. Some say Elijah, or the prophets. It’s Simon Peter who says that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the most high. Peter gets the keys to the kingdom and is the rock of the papacy for the church. Then, right after, Jesus starts talking about how he’s going to go to Jerusalem to be condemned and tortured and die on the cross. Peter’s response is to take him aside and rebuke Jesus leading to Jesus calling him Satan and demanding Peter get behind him. We hear nothing about what happened for the next six days. Presumably, Jesus and the apostles went home and, being men, refused to talk about what happened at Casarea Phillippi because the apostles were upset that Peter got the answer right, Peter is mad because Jesus called him Satan, and Jesus is disappointed at everyone’s lack of faith. For seven days they stew on this and then Jesus appears out of nowhere and says, “Hey, Peter, James, John, let’s go pray on that mountain.”  For, this inner circle of the apostles Jesus had cultivated, they’ve probably been stewing about what they should have said or what they can do to fix things. They’re probably thinking they’re going to get some quiet time with Jesus and get another chance to react. Instead, again like that chandelier falling, they look over and Jesus’ face and clothes are pure white and two ancient figures, Moses and Elijah, are standing next to him. And then a voice comes down from heaven saying “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased, Listen to him”. And what was supposed to be a quiet, reflective time to put all the conflict they had in Cesarea Phillippi to rest is upended as Peter, James, and John are laying on the ground afraid.

There are three endings to the movie Clue but they all start after the chandelier has fallen. It marks a turning point in the movie where things actually get better because someone takes charge. Similarly in the first reading, Abram’s going to let the one true God be in charge of his life and move him into the holy land. For Peter, James, and John, the Transfiguration is a turning point in the formation they needed to be the leaders of the early church in the wake of the death of Jesus, even if they're still going to smash a few chandeliers after this. It may have taken an extraordinary event, a chandelier smash, a scattering of the nations, or a frightening transfiguration, for the change to take place but it was all a part of the plan, in the case of Clue it was the filmmaker’s plan but in the case of the first reading and gospel, it is God’s plan. 

When we started Lent a week and a half ago, we may have entered into spiritual practices that we knew would help us grow closer to Christ. There may be a moment when, if we follow through, it will mean tension with family, friends, coworkers, or even the way we perceive ourselves. For example, if we know we have trouble with alcohol and need to stop drinking but we also know our friends will make fun of us or pressure us into drinking if we stop, it may seem difficult to decide not to hang out with them or to be willing to take the abuse. We may even ask ourselves if that’s how we want to live the rest of our lives: as boringly sober. We may have even tried to stop before and failed so we feel like we’re just meant to be trapped in the life we know God doesn’t want for us. Even if you’re late to the start, allow this lent to be the chandelier dropping moment, a moment of transfiguration where Jesus promises us blessings instead of the curses we so often feel. Invite him to change our hearts and be willing to follow wherever he leads, even if it seems like a change you don’t think you can do. Can you allow Jesus to lead you away from sin so you can be faithful to the Gospel?

Solemnity of John Lateran: Christ is our temple

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

In the Fall of the year 2000, I studied for a semester in Jerusalem. Early on, my classmates went to the Temple Mount to take a tour but I was reluctant because I was leery of going to places in the Old City without a guide. At the time, I was worried we would walk into a place we weren’t allowed and that we wouldn’t know because we didn’t speak Hebrew or Arabic. I also figured I’d rather go for the first time with our archaeology professor so he could explain where things were at the time of Jesus rather than simply seeing what it has become 2000 years later. Unfortunately, when the time came for us to go to the Temple, fighting had broken out between Israelis and Palestinians and it wasn’t safe to go there. So, I’ve never been to the top of the Temple Mount. I have been next to it at the site where Jews pray called the Wailing Wall. I remember having a conversation there with a classmate about how disappointing it was that we’d never get to walk on the place the site that was so important to the life of Jesus, the place of his presentation as a child, the place where he turned over money changers tables, as we heard about in the gospel today, and the place where he was tried by the religious leaders before being sent to the Roman authorities for crucifixion. My classmate, however, had a different view. He looked at it all and said he’s just grateful that, as Christians, we don’t have a site like the temple that, if lost, we’d fundamentally lose a component of our faith. 

For the Jewish people, the Temple is the site of encounter with God. When Solomon built it, it contained the Ark of the Covenant and became the place where the Jews would sacrifice to God. It got repeatedly plundered and rebuilt until 68 AD when the Romans removed all the Jews from Jerusalem and the sacrifices stopped. Someone pointed out to me that Jerusalem is not built on a river. Until fairly recently, most important cities were built on a river. Chicago, Boston, Rome, and even Dublin are all built along rivers. A river is useful for hydrating your people and for transportation of goods and people. Jerusalem is an exception. Its main source of water is a spring that they dammed up to create the Pool of Siloam but they don’t have a river connected to the city. In the first reading, Ezekiel is saying that the Temple is like a river for the people of Jerusalem. The waters flow from the temple to the Jordan river and, eventually, to the Dead Sea, which it makes fresh. It’s the Temple itself that is their river but also more than a river because of its cleansing properties. That’s how important it was for the Jewish people. 

That’s, also, what makes Jesus’ actions so controversial in the gospel for today. The Gospel of John is different than Matthew, Mark, and Luke in its presentation of the temple. He is concerned that the Temple is becoming a marketplace but he doesn’t talk about how they should make it a place of prayer. Instead, he connects the temple to his death and resurrection. The Temple has been under construction for 46 years. Jesus says that he could destroy the temple and raise it up in three days. So, he is the new temple, the new place where God dwells among people. 

The fact that we use these readings on the Solemnity of St. John Lateran is significant because you would think it would be one of several churches, mostly in Rome, that would be our Temple. How could Christianity survive without St. John Lateran, the Pope’s Cathedral? Or St. Peter’s Basilica, the church built over the bones of Peter? Or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem? The answer is that it would go on. We would mourn the loss of the building but it would not impede us from the mission Jesus gave us, to spread the gospel to all the world. Our mission is more important than any building that has been built and the buildings have to be at the service of the gospel not places for social interaction. They need to be places of prayer that empower us to spread the gospel.

How are you inspired by this temple to live out the gospel mandate of the man who is our temple, Jesus Christ?

19 OT C: Gird your what?

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

In the past several weeks, people have expressed concerns to me after Mass about seeing people receive but not consume the Holy Eucharist. They say they’ve seen someone who came forward, took the host in their hand, moved their hands toward their mouth, but not only didn’t put the host in their mouth but, in a way similar to a magician doing slight of hand tricks, palmed the host into their pocket, Now, it’s always possible that the person reporting the incident simply didn’t see what was happening correctly and only thought that the person palmed the Eucharist. But it causes me enough concern that I feel like I need to bring it up. You may be asking “What’s the big deal? Someone walked out with the Eucharist in their pocket. Maybe they took it home to a sick family member.” If so, please talk to me because there are more respectful ways to transport the Eucharist and I’d like to train you how to do that. Or you may think that the person just didn’t know what to do so they accidentally took the Eucharist and didn’t want to consume it so they put it in their pocket. If that’s you and you still have that host, please bring it to me sometime or put it in the little glass jar before or after Mass next to the tabernacle no questions asked. What really concerns me is that satanists are known to sneak into Catholic Mass for the express purpose of stealing the Blessed Sacrament for their so-called Black Masses. I’m sure you agree with me that we do not directly or indirectly want to help in this sinister practice. 

One of the stranger sayings in scripture happened twice in today’s gospel. I  feel like Mayer Shinn from the Music Man would caution us to watch our phraseology if he heard us utter “gird your loins” in public, let alone from the pulpit of a church. Yet, it seems to come up fairly often in Sacred Scripture. It means to tuck in your garments so they don’t impede free movement. In the Old Testament, most of the time the reason a person is cautioned to tuck in their garments is because they are fleeing. In the story of the Exodus, the Israelites are told to eat with the loins girt because they are in flight from Pharaoh and the Egyptians. The prophet Elisha cautions his servant to gird his loins in order to rush to save a young man who was dying. In the Gospels, it tends to be used slightly differently. On the night of the Last Supper, Jesus girded his loins, tucked in his garments, and washed the feet of his disciples. It becomes a symbol of humble service. Notice, in today’s gospel, that girding your loins is a precursor for being prepared. So, rather than tucking in your garments to be ready to run, Jesus is saying to be prepared to serve. Who are we preparing to serve? If we are the servants in the parable, then he must be the master who is returning from a wedding. We are supposed to be ready to serve him when he comes.

One of the tools I use to prepare for homilies has been talking about how escapist the church has become and how unbiblical this is. To be escapist is to believe that this world is by its nature evil and that heaven will be a completely different place we’ll be transported to. That’s the belief of cults like Jim Jones and the Branch Dividians. Instead, the Bible says that Jesus is coming here. Yes, he will create a new heaven and a new earth but it will take place here. He is coming back. The rest of the world may be evil, acting like they are in charge and taking advantage of any perceived power they have over others, but Christians know all power comes from God and we are meant to be his servants and servants of one another. We are not creating the perfect world according to our own world view but waiting for him to create it for us. 

Where is this world being created most palpably for us? In the Mass! It’s here that he comes to us in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. Our job, therefore, is to be prepared. How do we do that? First and foremost, we only receive Holy Communion if we know what we’re receiving. We must be an initiated member of the Catholic Church who has taken classes to understand what we’re receiving. Secondly, we should receive without having knowledge of committing a serious sin. If we know we have sinned, we should go to confession beforehand. Lastly, we should take time before mass to quiet our minds and hearts to be prepared to receive Jesus. Now, don’t get me wrong, we can all be momentarily distracted in Mass and need to get focused again. But if we come in at the last second or don’t pay attention to a single thing at Mass, we may want to consider not receiving and trying again next week. 

How do you prepare yourself to receive Jesus?

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?

Ash Wednesday 2025: Just be authentic

Friends

Peace be with you.

Is salvation fundamentally an individualistic pursuit or a group endeavor? What about forgiveness of sins? What about penitential acts? These questions come to mind as I read our readings for Mass today. The first reading describes God calling everyone together for a communal penitential liturgy. The Prophet Joel encouraged God’s people to do communal acts of fasting, weeping, and mourning for their many sins. The priests are to blow the shofar, a hollowed out ram’s horn that our reading calls a trumpet, to gather all God’s people in prayer to beg God to forgive them so that the neighboring nations will know that the one true God exists.

In the second reading, St. Paul explains how evangelization works with human beings acting as ambassadors for God. He doesn’t go into detail about how reconciliation with God takes place but he recognizes that it is done through Christ because “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” That is the most confusing yet profound part of our faith and certainly one that I’ll return to in the coming weeks and months. I bring it up to highlight the fact that St. Paul says, because Jesus has made us the righteousness of God, we are supposed to work together to live out our life of holiness. So it seems like both the first reading and second reading say that salvation, forgiveness of sins, and penitential acts are all group acts, things that we, the members of the church, are to do together.

That’s what makes the gospel so confusing. It offers a kind of formula of how to handle prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. In all three cases, we aren’t supposed to do them publicly so that others will see them, but keep them entirely private, so that your Father, who sees in secret, will repay you. Jesus even goes so far as to not allow your right hand to know what your left hand is doing. That’s super private, not letting your entire person know the good works you are performing!

Still, we have two readings that seem to favor a public performance of penitential acts and one reading that prefers strictly private acts. This is important to iron out. In the early church, if you made a break with the church by sinning and wanted to come back, you’d have to profess your sins at Mass and go through a process of standing by the door of church, possibly for as long as a year, without receiving Holy Communion. I’m guessing none of us want to return to that, if for no other reason than because I know I would be standing by the door and then who’s going to celebrate the Mass? But I worry that certain aspects of our faith have become so personal, so private, that we can forget about them. For instance, as Catholics, we are supposed to go to confession at least once a year and we are supposed to go when we are conscious of committing a mortal sin. Yet, given the number of confessions I hear every week, and that this is a rather typical experience in terms of numbers of confession I’ve heard in my twenty two years as a priest, I have a feeling some of us aren’t going once a year. Has the privacy of confession meant that we don’t feel any communal pressure to go?

I think one challenge is that I’ve conflated three different readings with three different agendas into one message. The first reading is a desperate act by a desperate people. The people feel punished because they have turned away from God and so they’re communally turning back to prove to their neighbors, not how great they are, but how great God is. In the Gospel, Jesus is encouraging his followers not to become like the Pharisees who make public spectacles of their penitential acts but don’t take the time to let it sink into their hearts. In both readings , the point is St. Paul talked about in the second reading, that penitential acts are meant to confect a personal conversion of heart above all else, whether they are done communally or privately. They can’t just be done for show. They have to be done to draw us away from sin and closer to God.

Now let’s think about whatever we’re doing for lent. Are we really doing it for self improvement, to lose weight, or to get other people’s attention at how prayerful or generous we are? Or are we trying to draw closer to God? If it’s not entirely to draw closer to God, we should take some time today to rethink what we’re doing.

7 OT C: Love who? Pray for who?

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

There are three instinctual reactions to violence: fight, flight, and freeze. If someone jumps out from a dark room, what is your reaction? I remember, a few years ago, watching a video of a person hiding in a trash can who popped out and scared people as they were being interviewed by an accomplice. Most people screamed and ran away. Some people put their hands up and screamed frozen in place. The experiment ended, however, when one person punched the guy as he popped out and knocked the guy out cold. I’m guessing most people watching the video cheered internally with the last guy because the man in the trash can got his comeuppance. However, as Christians, we believe there is actually a fourth option we are called to cultivate. If fight, flight, and freeze are animalistic, instinctual responses, natural responses as St. Paul might call them, there’s a spiritual, or supernatural response that is a charism that we need to ask for from the Holy Spirit if we are to live out our Christians lives. 

We can see an example of this in the first reading and an explanation of it in the gospel. In the First reading, there are essentially two kings of Judah, one currently on the throne and one that has already been chosen as his successor by God. The king that’s already on the throne is named Saul. King Saul has consistently disobeyed God and has allowed the power to go to his head. Even when things go right, if they don’t go right in a way that makes King Saul look good, he gets upset and seeks revenge on the person who does look good. And it’s always King David who looks good so Kind Saul keeps trying to kill him. There are three instances in the First Book of Samuel where, while trying to kill David, Saul actually ends up putting his own life in danger. In this passage, King Saul and his men have been walking all day and are sleeping. The Hebrew word for sleep that they use is also used when God puts Adam to sleep to create Eve, so there’s a sense of divine anesthesia going on here. King David and his second in command, whose name is Abishai, walk among the three hundred soldiers of King Saul’s men. They see King Saul’s ceremonial spear stuck next to his head and it’s Abishai who has the reaction most of us would probably want to have had. This guy has been trying to kill us so, if we get rid of him, we get rid of the problem. They’ve tried flight and freeze to no avail. Maybe it’s time to fight. But David refuses because he will not hurt God’s anointed. Saul may be a terrible king but he’s still God’s choice to be a king so, by killing King Saul, he would really be killing God’s choice for king. For King David, he had to show mercy. 

This same notion of mercy is littered throughout the Gospel. It’s founded on something that the Lord has made very clear to me that I must emphasize today: Love your enemies and pray for those who mistreat you. Remember love is willing what is best for the other person, not just a feeling or some kind of bland tolerance. Love is the basis of mercy; you show love to the person by not reacting in our animal instinctive way but by showing mercy instead. But it’s a distinctive kind of mercy, one that marks Christians as being different than the rest of the world. There’s a defiance to it. When someone smacks you on one cheek, turn and offer the left. That’s not a fight or flight or freeze response. It says that a person will not be embarrassed or hurt by someone smacking their cheek. The same is true when someone takes your cloak so you offer them your tunic as well. Think about the tunic like a sweatshirt or hoodie under a winter coat on a cold day. Giving a tunic on top of a cloak is a response of mercy and kindness to an act that doesn’t deserve it. Both of these show a willingness to suffer for someone else. Why suffer for someone else? Think of the scene from Les Miserables involving Jean Vajean and the Bishop. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, early into this play or movie, a man recently released from prison is given a place to stay at the local bishop’s house and the man responds by stealing the bishop’s plates and silverware. When the police take the man back to the bishop to return what he has stolen, the bishop thanks them and then hands the man two silver candlesticks, claiming he not only gave the man the plates and silverware but those as well. Instead of putting the man in jail, he tells the thief he has saved his soul for God. 

This is the kind of mercy Jesus wants us to have in our interactions with one another. It’s one that lives constantly in hope that an entitled person will recognize his or her need for God. It’s the kind of thing that made a pagan author named Aristides of Athens comment in the second century that Chrstians are amazing because we love one another. But we don’t just love those closest to us, those easiest to love, we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. We want them to be converted and we’ll do whatever it takes, even to the point of embarrassing, inconveniencing, and even possibly hurting ourselves to make that happen. We want them to be saved.

Who do we find it difficult to be patient with or merciful toward? How is God calling us to be merciful in a way that saves their soul for Him?