We must design our lives to give up everything and follow Christ

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ

Grace and Peace in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit on this beautiful Sabbath Day be with you. I hope you are all having a beautiful Labor Day weekend. I love Labor Day but I also hate it. I hate the fact that I tend to use Memorial Day to work outdoors in order to start getting prepared for winter. I believe there are two types of people in this world; those who pick things up right when they notice a mess and those who wait for a designated time to clean up everything. I know this is a simplification of people’s personality but it has often helped me understand why I am different than a lot of other people. I tend to be the latter of the two; the person who designates one day a week, usually Monday, as cleaning day. This past week, my Aunt and Uncle called on Monday to tell me they’d like to visit. They wanted to see my rectory and take some time to catch up. I quickly looked around the rectory and realized that, in many ways, I’m still not entirely moved in yet. And, by the time they got to my place on Thursday, I knew it would be fairly cluttered. So, in between two masses, several appointments, and, of course, the Iowa State game, I had to also plan in a time to clean up the rectory before my Aunt and Uncle got there. It meant for a very busy Thursday!

Whenever I find myself situations like that, I think to myself that I really wish I could just keep things relatively clean all week long instead of doing it all at once. I think of several people; roommates, family members, and priests with whom I shared a rectory, who all tried to get me to pick up my clothes, put dirty dishes in the dish washer, and put my toothbrush away. I couldn’t help but think of that as I was reading the Gospel today. Our Lord has three points that he is driving home. The first is that we need to “hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters and even our very lives” if we want to be a disciple. Jesus is using exaggeration to make a point. He doesn’t want us to become that angry person who hates the world and everyone in it. Remember that Jesus calls us to love one another in other places of the gospel. Most scripture scholars I read said that Jesus isn’t talking about feeling hate toward other people inasmuch as hating what they can do to us. In other words, the type of hate that Jesus is talking about is probably closer to the way Iowa and Iowa State football teams feel toward each other than the way North and South Korea feel toward each other. North and South Korea are willing to kill each other. Iowa State, on the other hand, simply wants to score more points than Iowa and vice versa. They don’t really hate each other inasmuch as having different goals in mind that cannot coexist. If your friends, family members, or your own desires get in the way of being a disciple, then do whatever you can do to isolate yourself from them. That’s what Jesus means by hate.

Secondly, Jesus calls us to renounce all our possessions. In other words, we not only need get rid of everyone who gets in the way of our relationship to God, we need to get rid of everything that does this as well. Sometimes these are vices in our life. Being an alcoholic gets in the way of a relationship to God. Looking at pornography and masturbating gets in the way of our relationship to God. Sometimes its not even a vice inasmuch as an excuse we use to avoid nourishing our relationship to God. I know of a lot of people who make excuses about only coming to church when it’s convenient. If they are out of town or if they stay out the night before with friends they think this is a good reason to skip mass. It’s actually a good way to not be a disciple.

Lastly, Jesus talks about taking up our cross to follow him. We do this when we make the decision each day to live our lives according to the way God wants us to live. This challenge was taken up at baptism either when the baptismal candidate or the parents speaking for him or her say they will live their lives in the practice of the faith by keeping God’s commandments. This same challenge is given at confirmation when the person is sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of wisdom that guides us in the way of holiness. We renew these promises each Sunday when we come before the real presence of the Lord in the Eucharist and affirm that real presence, not only in the consecrated species but in the body and blood of Christ that is the church. In that Amen we are saying that we want to live our daily lives in such a way that truly makes us a part of the body of Christ on earth.

Life is messy. I think that, in the end, there are times when God calls us to keep the messiness of life picked up as we go and other times when a major flaw is pointed out to us and we have to spend some time cleaning it up. What are the messy areas of life that God is calling you to clean up?

Those who humble themselves shall be exalted

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit on this beautiful Sabbath day. The Archbishop met with the priests at the leadership training conference Fr. Hertges and I attended recently in order to answer a few questions we had. We met with him in a large room at the American Martyrs retreat house in Cedar Falls. I entered the room right at the time we were supposed to meet and noticed I was one of the last ones to show up. The circle of chairs in which the brothers had sat were almost completely full except for the two places right next to the Archbishop. I started to move a chair from outside the circle when I noticed the Archbishop motion for me to sit next to him on his right hand side. So, I casually strolled over to that chair and sat down on his right. Immediately a million different Biblical verses went through my head. From the Gospel of Matthew, “The Lord said to my lord, "Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet" from the Psalms, “I bless the LORD who counsels me; even at night my heart exhorts me.

I keep the LORD always before me; with the Lord at my right, I shall never be shaken.” To be someone’s “right hand man” is an expression meaning that you are trusted to completely that they will put you on the side of their body with arm that they would normally use to protect themselves so that you can be the one to protect them. I felt important. I was a pastor and I was important. That feeling of self-importance lasted until I realized that actually it was just that my brother priests are kind of like their parishioners. They wanted to be close to the door so they could be the first ones out of the room.

There’s more to this reading than a simple miss manners lesson on etiquette. Jesus is showing us an image of what it will be like in heaven. What is your image of heaven? I imagine if we were to take a poll, we would all have different answers to that question. The perfect game of golf? The perfect house? A good steak cooked medium rate with corn on the cob and chocolate cake to finish? What if heaven actually was being totally devoid of all of that? No house. No car. No golf. And the way the meals are served, you have to sit next to a stinky, sick, homeless person that coughs a lot. That doesn’t sound much like heaven, does it. And yet, Jesus isn’t giving us advice on how we should set up our dinner conversation. Not even a fundamentalist believes that. Jesus is trying to get us to realize the kind of humility that will be demanded of us in heaven. Heaven isn’t a Subway sandwich shop. You can’t pick and choose what you do want and don’t want in heaven. You just get it the way it is and, to paraphrase what our parents used to say, you’ll be happy with it.

So, what’s the good news about heaven? Why would anyone want to go there if you don’t get to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it? Do you remember what you hated most about Middle School or Junior High, depending upon what they called it when you were there? Remember how it seemed like the only way people could feel good about themselves was by ripping apart everyone around them. You can’t just feel good about yourself because you’re a person created in the image and likeness of God who is loved by God as you are. You have to feel good about yourself by noticing all the flaws of everyone around you and making fun of them for it. The crazy thing is that, even though it’s most intense in Middle School, don’t we sort of keep doing that throughout our lives. We should just feel happy about who we are and the gifts we have been given but we spend an awful lot of time complaining about the people around us. I think part of what Jesus is saying is that heaven will be a place where we don’t care about others having more than we do or being treated better than us, a place where status doesn’t matter and where we learn the freedom of being truly humble. A place where “every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Seek to enter through the narrow gate

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. The gospel imagery of the narrow gate reminds me of time I spent in seminary in Jerusalem. In the fall of 2000, I spent three and a half months there. It was a really cool experience, in part because of where we lived. There are two parts of modern-day Jerusalem separated by a 15-20 foot tall city wall. The new city is all outside the walls and is all built since 1960. The old city, which would be nearly impossible to navigate for people with claustrophobia, was packed inside the protection of the walls. As you walked through the gates, the streets seemed to get smaller and smaller until you reached the center of the Old City. In the place we stayed, there were two gates. The first was a larger gate that three or four people could walk through at once. This gate stayed open almost all the time. But, when fighting broke out, this gate could be shut and a much smaller door could be opened within this gate that only one person could walk through at any time.

One night, three of my classmates decided that they needed to get out and consume some adult beverages and watch the Minnesota Vikings play on Monday Night Football. These classmates decided that they would close the bar down that night, which turned out to be a really bad idea since the custom in Israel is that the bar remains open as long as there are customers there. My job that night was to make it possible for them to get back in. You see, because there was violence between Palestinians and Israelis, we had started locking the smaller gate. Several times in the night, I snuck out and opened the small gate only to have someone else sneak out and lock it back up. Finally, at three thirty, I was too tired to continue so I opened the gate for the last time and went to bed. Unfortunately, this was not only the exact time the guys left the bar but also the last time our director, Fr. Pat, checked the gate to make sure it was locked.

When my classmates arrived home, they approached the gate and, unsuccessfully, tried to open it. I’m not sure what possessed them to make the next move; exhaustion, frustration or the stupidity that comes from having one or two too many beers, but they decided to help the skinniest of them up and over the fifteen foot high wall so that he could unlock the door for the other two. Even though they failed to wake me, they did wake Fr. Pat. He heard the loud crash of a body ramming against the gate, climbing to the top, clumsily falling over the 15 feet, unlocking the gate, as well as the sounds of three adult males laughing like tee-peeing teenagers all the while. Needless to say, Fr. Pat was not happy. Let’s just say that he somewhat forcefully reminded them that they needed to be invited into the narrow gate.

In a sense, Fr. Pat was acting like a prophet that night. We 21st Century Americans tend to confuse prophets with psychics. Psychics claim to predict the future. A prophet’s job, on the other hand, is first and foremost to live, speak, breathe, taste, and even fight for the Kingdom of God. A prophet is one who sees injustice and is compelled to correct it because it goes against God’s will. A prophet is one who warns sinners to return to God before the narrow gate is shut and the people are locked out. In the Old Testament, there are specific people who operate as prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, and others. All of these prophets warned Israel that they were falling away from God and told them that they need to follow closer. Isaiah, in our first reading today, warned them that the exclusive right that the Isralites had to God had been revoked and that others would be admitted to worship of the one true God.

This was a foreshadowing to Jesus’ role in salvation. Himself a prophet, Jesus came to open the doors and help all people learn to follow God. Nonetheless, in gospel today, he cautions us about being lazy in regard to the Kingdom of God. In a sense, Jesus calls all believers to have a prophetic role of spirit-filled leadership within our communities. He tells us that we must listen carefully to the Spirit breathing its teaching into our hearts or we may find ourselves, like my classmates, staring at a locked narrow door. Only, unlike my classmates, we won’t be able to limb the wall to get in.

In our times, it has become rather fashionable to believe that everyone will be saved, everyone will go to heaven. We don’t like to believe in hell because it sounds so mean and God is nice. I have yet to go to a funeral where the departed isn’t put into heaven, where mourners don’t say something like, “I know I will see Aunt Margaret in heaven some day.” We declare saints faster than the Catholic church does. Yet, Jesus doesn’t refer to the gates of the kingdom of heaven as narrow simply because we’re all going to have wait in line and take our time, like heaven is a really popular amusement park ride. What we are doing now is, in part, preparing us for the Kingdom of God. We must live our lives not as though we are entitled to go to heaven but as though we must prove to God that we deserve to be there. “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.”

Something to ponder

One of my former students who is very bright and a deep thinker pointed me in the direction of an article on the website "Big Questions Online." It's a rather fascinating but theologically deep article. What really struck me was this...

It's important to understand the point I'm making here. I'm not mounting (in this post) an argument against gay marriage. I'm saying that it's inevitable, given that the deep culture-shaping power of Christianity has been shattered, and the only religion people are coming to understand is one that has no real power to bind, only to be therapeutically useful. (There's a reason that Rick Warren's model of church is doing so well -- it offers the simulacrum of traditional Evangelicalism, while focusing heavily on practical therapy). In large numbers, we are seeing those 30 and under walking away from the churches -- both liberal and conservative churches -- and not into atheism, but into an unaffiliated, "spiritual but not religious" category. They want to feel some nominal sense of spiritual connectedness, but only insofar as it ratifies their feelings. They could have formal religion that embraced their views on sexuality by becoming Episcopalian, or joining one of the other liberal Protestant churches -- but they're not. Though they still profess a preference for God, they don't want religious institution, or authority. Rieff saw this coming, and indeed said consumerist religion was the logical fallout from the eclipse of Christianity and its teachings as authoritative in the psychological life of Western man.

A religion that "ratifies the feelings" of her followers...very profound. I wonder if this is why people drop out of religion when they suffer hardship and death and why so many people want to get the crucifix out of churches. It doesn't validate feelings to think that Jesus suffered. We can accept a God who wants to hug us and love us. We can accept a Christ who offers sage advice about good living. But, we can't accept a God who calls us to put aside our feelings of personal satisfaction and comfort. Give me salvation because it will make me happy.

Either our faith grows or it dies. It will not just sit there.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ

Grace and peace to you in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. I have a friend whose grandfather passed away in the late eighties. The grandfather wasn’t the richest man in the world but he did have a small farm to pass on to his 5 children. He passed the buildings on to his oldest child, a son who was so upset at the passing of his father that he let everything sit unchanged for several years. He would go and mow the lawn but everything else went totally unchanged. The roof, which was in need of repair when my friend’s grandfather died, had holes in it that let in rain and snow. The garage started to lean as though it would collapse. We used to drive by once a month or so just to see if it had collapsed but his Grandfather had built it too well for that to happen. For thirty years, the buildings that my friend’s grandfather had worked so hard to build and maintain slowly became worthless lumber. Eventually, the only thing for which they could be used was as practice for the local fire department as they burned to the ground when the friend’s uncle finally died.

The short version of today’s gospel focuses on the return of Jesus and how important it is to be prepared. We are to “gird (our) loins and light (our) lams and be like servants who await (our) master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes.” The implication is that we to be constantly prepared and not slack off. I think this is related to what the writer to the Hebrews was talking about in his or her definition of faith. “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.” There is a longing and a yearning that goes along with being faithful and a contemporaneous searching that goes with faith. Contrary to what our fundamentalist brothers and sisters believe, there isn’t a moment in our lives when the light switch goes on, we declare our belief in God, and we are saved. Instead, faith is a life-long journey that becomes more complicated, frustrating, and difficult as we get older. Yet, aren’t the only truly rewarding things in life complicated, frustrating, and difficult?

The example in book of Hebrews is Abraham. Abraham was first told to leave his homeland and travel to a land chosen for him by God. That would be pretty challenging. As one who recently moved, I can tell you that it’s much easier to stay where we are rather than moving. But, Abraham did so because he had faith. Abraham wasn’t just called to leave, he was called to wander in the wilderness before he would settle and it was by faith that he lived in a tent so many years. He had to trust that God would take care of him and provide food for he and his wife. In that land, Abraham was promised that, despite being quite old and passed the age of child rearing, he and Sarah would have so many children that he could start his own nation. It must have taken a lot of faith for Abraham to believe that, though barren up until this point, God could still give him children that would become a nation of God’s own people. And, a little later in this same book, it says that when Abraham thought that his faith could not be tested any more, God asked him to sacrifice the very son that he thought he would never get. This is what is meant by “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.” Faith is revealed to us partially and we continue the life-long search even as our life and our faith becomes more complicated, frustrating, and difficult awaiting the full revelation of God in heaven.

We maintain our faith by taking time each day for prayer. The rosary, novenas, and the Liturgy of the Hours are but a few of the ways we can do this. One of the best ways we can do this is by making time in our weekly routine for daily mass. I was struck in the gospel today at the thought of a master who comes back from a wedding and serves food to his servants because of their vigilance. To me, this is a wonderful insight into the mass. Despite the fact that God brought us into this world and he can take us out, despite the fact that God is our master and we are his servants, God is the one who feeds us with his body and blood in the Eucharist. This is a great gift of ongoing nourishment for the church.

Ultimately, we are handed on a great gift of faith and we have a choice. We can be like the good servants who kept vigil waiting for the Lord to return or we can be like my friend’s uncle and squander all the good things that come to us. What are you doing each day to maintain the faith God has given you and not allow the difficulties, frustrations, and complications of life rot it away?

What might be the fall out...

Right now, we are losing one front of the so-called culture war. From what I understand, the pro-life message is making inroads among several young people such that more people classify themselves as pro life than pro choice.

Yet, even as we (hopefully) start to liberate the lives of tens of thousands of children from the unholy scourge of abortion, we now face the cultural experiment of gay marriage. We've had it in Iowa for a while but I sort of believed that, if the most "progressive" among us in California could see the dangers of it, then there was hope that Iowans would get there too. But, once again, the will of the people has been subverted by one person who reminds us why Jesus had such antipathy to scholars of the law. Of course, I can't totally blame the judge for this ruling. The truth is that the people defending the will of the people did a really crappy job of articulating it.

Society needs to promote marriage because it is the only way that society can ensure a next generation. That's the uniqueness of marriage; it's the only situation in which the next generation will be present to "replace us". Homosexual relationships cannot naturally create a second generation. And if, as some have said, they can through adoption and IVF, can't we pretty much say that of any relationship? A single person can adopt. A man and two women can adopt. A man who used to be a woman and hiser lesbian life partner can adopt. It's not because homosexual people don't or can't love as well as heterosexuals. To be honest, I've met a lot of very loving gay people in my life. It's just that they are incapable by their very nature of benefiting society by contributing the next generation to carry society forward.

My concern is that, if we in fact lose this war it will not only affect American society leading to her downfall, but that Christianity will be forever changed as well. It's truly ironic that some of the people who broke from the Roman Catholic Church because we didn't take the Bible seriously enough are now blessing same-sex unions and choosing openly gay and lesbian leaders. Where sola scriptura when you need it? And, even though I know the Catholic Church will never fall victim to this abomination, I just wonder at what point the persecution will begin. How many priests will collapse under the pressure of gay rights lobbyists and carry out a mock wedding ceremony? When will we lose our tax exempt status because of discriminating against a protected class? When will they start putting Catholic priests in jail for committing hate crimes for refusing to marry two homosexuals?

Unless we can somehow help judges see the integral connection of creating new life with marriage, I fear it's just a question of time.

One more thing

Three posts is a bit much for me in one day. But, I forgot to write this last week and wanted to do it quickly before I go to bed.

A few years ago, one of my previous assignments very sadly closed down. I asked the people in the church if it would be all right to have their presider's chair and server's chairs to use for my personal prayer space. I've used them all for several years to pray but now I've got a church connected to my rectory so I don't really need them anymore. I just walk 10 feet and pray in front of the Blessed Sacrament. In the last move, it was obvious that I need to live a simpler life. I have too much stuff! So I've found them a new home. I took them up to St. Patrick's Church in Lake Mills, Iowa. Their presider's chair kind of looked like a nice living room chair and the server's chairs started out as dining room chairs. The really neat thing is that I can continue to remember the people in the closed church when I celebrate mass in Lake Mills. I'm sure they'd love to know that their chairs are still being used to gather the people in prayer, even if it's a different church in a different location.

Being Pastor

Yesterday, I went to see a play at the Guthrie Theater in the Twin Cities called Scottsboro Boys. Supposedly, the play is going to Broadway, which is really cool. It's filled with gallows humor and times when you were laughing uncertain if you should be. Before I go up to the Cities to watch the plays, I always wonder if the travel is worth it and that was exacerbated by being "in charge".

I go to these plays with one old friend from seminary and two new friends who my seminary friend introduced me to. They asked where I had moved to and I said, "I'm Assoc...I mean, I'm pastor..." And I sort of laughed and went on with my explanation of being assigned to six churches at once. I love being pastor. I requested it from the Archbishop several times before the he finally allowed it. And I've always thought I was glad the Board and the Archbishop waited so long to make me a pastor. I just wonder when being pastor will be old hat...when I'll stop needing to correct myself and get comfortable in this new skin.

… the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ
Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit on this beautiful Sabbath day. History is loaded with examples of people who have been falsely written up in newspapers and websites as dead who were, in fact, still alive. Probably the most famous of these stories lies with Alfred Nobel. We probably remember Alfred Nobel because of the Nobel prizes given out each year, including the peace prize most recently won by President Obama. But, prior to that, Nobel was known for one thing. He liked to work with chemicals and searched for ways to cause larger explosions using chemicals. Eventually, he combined nitroglycerin with an absorbent substance to make Dynamite. In 1888, there was an explosion at a dynamite factory which killed 8 people including Nobel’s brother Ludvig. The initial story got Alfred and his brother confused and proclaimed loudly to the world, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." Imagine for a second if that was what you read in your obituary. I’m sure part of the reason Nobel created those awards was because the very substance he created was the reason his brother died. Yet, it seems obvious that part must be attributed to seeing how he would be remembered in that obituary that forced him to change his life and seek ways to encourage peace.

Most commentators, when talking about today’s readings, focus almost entirely on the fact that possessions can distract us from the Kingdom of heaven. And, it’s true, greed is a problem in any society and especially true today. Yet, I have to admit that I think there’s something more profound going on in both the first reading and the gospel than a simple call to simplicity of life. The parable of the rich fool is Jesus’ long answer to someone in the crowd who asks him to negotiate a fair settlement for his brother who had excluded him from an inheritance. The parable talks of someone with a bumper crop who decides to tear down his barns and build larger ones in order to keep all the grain for himself. God, in an unusual speaking role, takes the man’s life and then asks this question, “the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” It’s a rather interesting question because I don’t get the sense from the story that the man was selfishly trying to keep his possessions from anyone. There’s no indication of that anyway. I think the point Jesus is trying to get across is that he had simply paid no attention to anyone else throughout his life except for himself and so his stored treasure may go to some relative who barely even knows him and will, as a result, have no appreciation for all the work he and his servants put in to making the stuff.

This is what Qoheleth from the first reading calls vanity. For him, the deepest vanity is that people work so hard to amass a fortune and then hand it on to children and grandchildren who never had to work a day in their lives. Yet, what connects the first reading and the gospel is that there is a disconnect between one generation and the next. It’s what the song writer Harry Chapin sung about in Cats in the Cradle. “we'll get together then…You know we'll have a good time then.”

One of the things that Americans have been taught is that we are supposed to work really hard in order to make sure that the next generation has an easier life. We are supposed to make any sacrifices we can in order to make sure our children have it easy. In High School, I learned this is the definition of the American Dream. Yet, I’d like to suggest that that is exactly what the first reading and gospel are cautioning us against. Our first priority shouldn’t be making sure that life is easier for the next generation, that they will have enough money to live like a celebrity. Our first priority should be to get to know our children so as to instill within them a love of God and a sense of goodness and right. We shouldn’t rely on the schools or on a visit to faith formation classes and occasional attendance at mass to instill these values. It’s what being a parent and grandparent is all about and what it means to be the domestic church. “…the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong? ”

Short version

This weekend I preached about the story of Sodom. God wanted to destroy it because of the evil that was taking place there. But, Abraham talked God out of it because there could have been ten good people there. I talked about how we sometimes judge a group of people by the actions of the most and ignore the fact that there are undoubtedly good people. It's even possible that there are good people in Iowa City.

"...What if there are at least ten there?" 
(The Lord) replied, "For the sake of those ten, I will not destroy it."

Vengeance is mine!

I finally figured out how to stop the Asian pornographer who keeps posting links on my blog! There's a way to allow members to just post things while making non members posts to be approved first. The filth monger struck late on Thursday night but I never allowed the person to post anything. Take that! I promise that any legitimate comment (even one I don't particularly like) will still make it onto the site.

Here's my weekend schedule:
Friday night: Baptism in Forest City (done)
Saturday: Funeral in Forest City with burial in Lake Mills, 110th anniversary parade in Duncan, mass in Buffalo Center
Sunday: Mass in Britt followed by mass in Garner. Afternoon camping somewhere close.

I will be in all six towns for one reason or another. I can't wait for camping. First time since coming here.

Welcome to being a pastor!

I had a funeral on Tuesday on one side of my cluster of parishes and I'll have another funeral Saturday in the middle parish with a burial on the other side of the cluster. The last funeral I had before this was in February...I think. And the amazing thing is that God just keeps putting me in the right place at the right time for these funerals. I was in Britt when I found out about the first funeral so I could go over and meet his widow. And, I went to visit the man whose funeral is Saturday last night before I saw my nephew play in sub state baseball.

I chose two of my readings for my own funeral. Hopefully, it will be a long time until they're used, but I want to be prepared. I can't decide about the gospel. I'll keep praying about it. If pressed, I could always go with the same gospel from my ordination.

Good Leaders, Good Shepherds

For the past year, I've been in a leadership training class with the above name. It's a good experience of taking the best practices in the business world, adding prayer and morality, and utilizing it as priests.

Yesterday's session was about problem solving. It emphasized that, when we are presented a problem, we tend to rush through the problem solving process. Priests don't often get to the heart of the real problem, ask for all the ideas for solutions, or troubleshoot problems that could arise because of the solution of one problem. My biggest problem is typical of priests. When someone presents a problem to me, the easiest solution is to personally solve the problem instead of helping them through a process of figuring it out for themselves. And then, next thing I know, I'm sitting in my office on what is supposed to be my day off resentfully solving the problems that someone else should be solving. I can see how, if I'm going to make it for the long haul of priesthood, I really need to pay close attention to this lesson.

Ora et Labora

My Dear friends in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ in the Power of the Holy Spirit. Part of the message of the readings for this Sunday is the importance of hospitality. Being your new pastor, I want to thank everyone who has made me feel welcome to these parishes. Fr. Huber told me good things about you and I look forward to getting to know you over the next few years. I hope you will allow me to provide hospitality for you in the same measure that you have measured it out to me.

There’s a story told about an abbot of a monastery looking over all the monks in his monastery trying to decide which one should replace him. Brother Dominic, the person in charge of the kitchen, was very dependable, hard-working, and respected by the brothers. He was generally up before all the other monks getting the food ready for breakfast and stayed late in the kitchen getting ready for the next day. The abbot was so impressed with Brother Dominic that he often thought of giving him an assistant to help him with the work but he knew both that the number of monks didn’t allow for a second person and that Brother Dominic wouldn’t have wanted someone else around to have to supervise. The abbot also thought of Brother Francis who was the most deeply spiritual man he had ever met. Brother Francis, who worked in the small print shop with two other monks, would spend many hours in the chapel each day praying long after the other monks had left. His motto was that work can wait for prayer. The other monks all wished they had as deep a spirituality as Brother Francis, even if they sometimes had to do the work that he had neglected in favor of prayer. They felt privileged just to be in his presence.

The abbot decided to switch things up a little. He put Brother Francis in charge of the kitchen and Brother Dominic in charge of the print shop. After just one day, the entire monastery was frustrated. The monks were all starving because Brother Francis never did get the food cooked and the two monks in the print shop were frustrated because Brother Dominic had done a month’s work in a day and seemed to be changing everything. After just one LONG day, the abbot switched things back to the way they were confident that he knew who his replacement should be.

One commentator that I read summed up the issue from today’s readings in these words, “Is true hospitality found in giving personal attention to the guest rather than in being distracted from that person by the duties associated with hospitality?” In some ways, it would seem that Jesus is saying that one should definitely neglect household duties when a guest is over. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her. And yet, as many women have commented to me in the past, if all we had in church was a bunch of people who spent all their time in front of the Blessed Sacrament, our structures would be in pretty bad shape.

The real lesson that Mary understood is that, at that moment and in this situation, she needed to be at the foot of Jesus more than she needed to be in the kitchen preparing food for him. In the Gospel of Luke, there’s a point when Jesus turns his entire attention toward the cross in Jerusalem. Along the way, he stops in the houses of important individuals including Mary and Martha. While there, he wants to spend time with them and tell them all about what’s going to happen to him but Martha is so busy preparing the meal, that she misses who whole point of his visit. It actually kind of reminds me of a friend that I hadn’t talked to for a long time who called me a couple of months ago. I was kind of excited to hear from him but he was so busy working on his computer while we talked that I kind of felt like I was talking to myself. I wished that, in this situation, he would have been a little more willing to listen to what was happening in my life and been willing to tell me about his own instead of being distracted by his computer.

In the end, the Abbot realized that neither Brother Dominic nor Brother Francis would be good for the job. He needed someone who could be a prayerful worker, someone who could balance the demands of life with the important work of prayer. As I begin this assignment in these six parishes, I ask for your prayers that I may cultivate this same sense of balance in my own life and be the best father I can be.

Back normal and a few other things

I put the comments back to what I believe is normal. I changed it a little over a month ago because of a spammer and I'm hoping that person has found someone else to pester.

So, here's how a normal parish works. I left my rectory this morning at 7:00 am for 7:30 mass. After mass, we went to the local restaurant for some food and conversation. I get to do this three times a week in three different towns. At the diner, I got two phone calls. The first was my business manager telling me that I needed to pick up some stuff at the bank. The next was the business manager telling me there'd been a death in the town I was eating and they were wondering about arrangements. I finished eating and jumped into my car to find the house of the (now) widow. I visited with her and met some family. I went to another parish to finish filling out some stuff for the banks and then headed back to my rectory.

All in all, a pretty good start to the day. Of course, the fact that the tire for my truck decided to get a sharp piece of metal stuck in it kind of threw a wrench in it. But I got to figure out how to use my jack, which is always a good thing. And I got to drive onto the local car dealership to have them fix the thing and then they'll know who I am when I need to get a new truck. Plus, it could have been worse. I'm heading out tonight to meet a bunch of Winnebago Camper owners tonight as the local town has its WIT rally. I don't know what WIT stands for so don't ask. All I know is that it involves a bunch of people driving their Winnebagos back here where many of them were made. Should make for an interesting weekend with lots of visitors to town as I'm being introduced.

New responsibilities. New Opportunities

I've arrived in Forest City, Iowa and am officially the pastor of six churches. The strange thing is that, even as I type that, I can't help but think about how little has changed. I tend be a creature of habit and I was sort of able to set up a routine before I left Ames that is working (thus far) here in Forest City. We'll see what happens tomorrow when I have mass a half hour away at 7:30...in the morning. Up until the last six weeks in Ames, I was almost never awake at 7:30 in the morning. I have a few scattered reflections thus far.

1. I wonder when it will hit me that I'm really the pastor and not just subbing for Father Huber. This is my home not just a place I'm visiting for a few days.

2. I already miss the college students. I keep thinking about them because we had a death two days before I left. I wish I was there to help process some feelings. I wish I could give Bridget one more hug.

3. I moved way too much stuff. I need to make a list of stuff that a priest should move and stuff a priest shouldn't move so that I'll know that for when I move again in 12 years. Here's a start...

Do move:
Books
Computer
Clothes

Don't move:
Bed linens
Old liturgical furniture
A Bed

...probably the best thing I could do is fill my truck once with the important stuff and, whatever doesn't fit, isn't important. Of course, that just encourages me to get a bigger truck but I'll deal with that when it happens.

Learning from suffering

My Dear friends in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. For the past several weeks, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on the time I’ve spent here at St. Thomas. Sometimes it happens because a former student emails, text messages, or even calls to reminisce about old times. It certainly happened two weeks ago at the coffee and donuts when you threw me a going away party in listening to the stories that people told. It also happened when I was cleaning out my office and found a note reminding me of something that I should have followed up on two years ago. To be honest, I’m still not certain if it’s too late to call that person back or not. I guess I’ll just leave it for Fr. Jack.

On Friday, I was helping a former student roof his house and, one of the other roofers came up to me and said, “You’re the priest from St. Thomas, right?” I, of course, said that I was, although I’ll admit that I wondered where the conversation would lead. He said that he was present at church when I gave a homily about God’s love. He said, he remembered that one of my examples of showing love was the Obama fist bump with optional explosion. He said it was one of the best he’d ever heard. The funny thing is that I only vaguely remember giving that homily. I sort of remember walking into the congregation to display the aforementioned fist bump but not much else. And the really crazy thing is that, even though I don’t remember that homily, I’ll never forget the ones when I got a complaint email afterwards. I think it’s always tempting to hold on to the struggles and trials of life even when life is much better, the struggles behind us, and we have learned lessons from those trials.

The first reading today from the Prophet Isaiah is dealing with just such a situation. Despite being defeated in war, exiled to Babylon, and suffering as slaves, God tells his people “Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad because of her, all you who love her; exult, exult with her, all you who were mourning over her!” The people are told to not look back on past disappointments but to live in their current condition of renewal.

The question then arises, of course, what do we do when we are in the middle of suffering? Paul answers that question in his letter to the Galatians. This letter is somewhat unique compared to Paul’s other letters because he is so disappointed by the Galatians’ willingness to believe in these people called Judaizers who want pagans first to become Jews before they become Christian. You might remember me talking about this group in a previous homily. In this concluding passage, Paul is talking about how he has been marked with the marks of Christ. The suffering Paul has felt is that the Judaizers have put so much focus on the mark of circumcision that they have driven away people he evangelized who have been marked by faith in Christ. Paul exhorts them to remember that the only mark that matters is the mark of Jesus and nothing else. It’s rather doubtful that St. Paul was talking about this but this is the passage that was a source of support for St. Francis, St. Pio of Petriclina and others who were graced to receive the stigmata and truly “bear the marks of Jesus” on their bodies. Their stigmata are a sign of their faith in Jesus and his church. Nonetheless, most of us will never have actual physical stigmata but will wear the spiritual marks of Jesus on our bodies given to us in baptism by faith.

It was in faith that Jesus called 70 of his disciples to go forth in evangelization in the gospel today. He challenges them not to bring a lot of stuff but just to go and he gives them advice on how to handle those who aren’t open to the gospel message. It’s almost like he’s trying to help them to deal with the very things that Isaiah and Paul dealt with in their writings but trying to prepare them ahead of time. On the one hand, a lot of suffering comes from our own dependence of physical objects. Anyone who has ever packed up a house or apartment knows this is true. But Jesus knows that some of their suffering will come from people who are unwilling to listen to the gospel message. Jesus first says not to be concerned if people spurn your offers of peace because your peace will simply come back to you. He goes on to tell the disciples to say as they leave the hard hearted, “'The dust of your town that clings to our feet, even that we shake off against you.' Yet know this: the kingdom of God is at hand. I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom on that day than for that town." In other words, the disciples had to be prepared to let go of whatever unreceptive people said and did to them as they began to evangelize.

Suffering is a confusing and frustrating thing. We tend to try and avoid having to go through it, hate every second we are in it, and hold onto it too long once it’s done. Suffering gets in the way of our relationship to God and others and makes living a holy life a struggle. Our constant challenge as believers is to know that suffering is one of the marks of being a Christian. It’s what unites us ever closer to Christ who suffered and died for us on the cross. We cannot avoid it. We cannot ignore it. We can’t even always be prepared for it. But, when it comes, we can draw strength from the one who suffered for us.

Silent Passivity

I talked in my homily this morning how the real punishment that people get with excuses is being left behind. The gospel reading talked about Jesus recruiting his disciples and how several came up with excuses and couldn't go. Their punishment was being left out of the mission of Jesus and, ultimately, the Kingdom of God. But, the first part talked about how the disciples entered a Samaritan village that didn't accept Jesus so James and John, true to being sons of thunder, tried to ask God to destroy the city. But Jesus rebuked them. So, if you don't follow Jesus because you feel like you want the security of a home or want to bury the dead or want to say goodbye to family, the real way that you will suffer is by being away from God instead of something violent.

I remembered with fondness when Pope John Paul II apologized for injustices done by certain members of the church and said that we are supposed to be the persecuted not the persecutors. And then I used this to talk about Sts. Peter and Paul since this week is the patron of my little country parish where I was preaching. My point for them was that we should follow Jesus with our whole hearts just like the disciples Peter and Paul did.

I should have used incense, however since it was their patronal feast day. I regret not doing so. I feel like we only use incense at funerals and that makes it seem like something somber. But, in truth, it's a symbol of celebration and of our prayers rising to God. I'll have to think of that for the feasts of St. Patrick, St. James, St. Boniface, and St. Wenceslaus when I get in my cluster of parishes in just two short weeks. It's hard for me to believe my ride in Ames is coming to an end.

Figuring out how to say goodbye without needing to know you did a thing.

This coming Sunday morning between the 8:30 and 10:30 masses, I'll say goodbye to the people of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Ames. The strange thing will be hanging around for three more weeks after I've said goodbye. But, I'm sure it'll go a lot quicker than I think it will and I'll be settling into Forest City before I know it.

I really haven't had all that much to do with the party. It's my responsibility to get someone to talk at it. I'm still working on that. As I do so, the challenge that I feel is from my retreat spiritual director a couple of months ago. He said he was talking to a Protestant pastor after the death of John Paul II. The pastor said that the Catholic Church was in trouble because the next Pope would have big shoes to fill. My spiritual director immediately corrected him and said that the church hates personality. We don't like it when our popes and bishops and priests become celebrities. It distracts us from the real message of the gospel.

A lot of very good people have come up to me the past few weeks and said some really nice things. The most edifying thing they say is that they will really miss my presence to young people or my preaching or my singing or something else. And, the most difficult thing I know however is that, even though they are saying that now, in five years I will basically be totally forgotten. I'll be remembered as "that one priest...you know...the bald one." The college students will have all graduated and moved on. The residents will have either moved to a different town or found things to love about Fr. Jack. It's hard to think that I've given five years of my life to this place and will be lucky to be mentioned in a sentence about associate pastors in a forthcoming history book. 

But I guess that's the way it's supposed to be. It reminds me of a story that I heard when I was in Santa Fe New Mexico. There was a church that had a balcony that no one could get to. They figured you'd have to use a ladder since a staircase would take up too much space. The nuns prayed a novena to St. Joseph, patron saint of builders, and a stranger arrived on the ninth day and offered to build one for them. They obliged and left the stranger to his work. When completed, they had a spiral staircase with two 360 degree turns and no visible means of support. When they went to ask the stranger what it had cost to build the stairway, he had vanished. The nuns believed that St. Joseph himself came to build it. Maybe they're right. On the other hand, maybe it was just someone who realized the staircase should speak for itself and not have a builder's name attached. 

Last Sunday's Homily

I talked about the importance of women in the ministry of the church last weekend because of the woman who bathed Jesus' feet with her tears in the gospel as well as the separate list of women who were included in Jesus' ministry toward the end. I talked about an important woman in my life, my Mom, who kept me humble as a child and keeps me humble now. And I talked about how one of the great gifts women offer the church is an authentic sense of humility.

I had one of those moments where my mouth was saying something that it hadn't planned to say, however. In talking about the humility of the woman washing Jesus' feet, I suddenly realized that she was prefiguring the very act that Jesus would do on the night he was betrayed to symbolize the humility of the cross. I was caught up in spiritual ecstasy repeating over and over "She was doing the very thing that Jesus would do to his disciples at the Last Supper in order to show how we should all serve each other. She was doing what Jesus wants us all to for each other even before Jesus told us to do it..." I probably read that at some point in my history and it just popped into my head but it was definitely one of those moments where I sort-of had to "pull it together" in order to make the rest of the homily work.

Change in Blog Policy

As some of you may have noticed, I have an Asian pornographer who has become overly fixated on my blog. He or She will add a comment with Asian characters that are all links to various Asian-themed pornographic sites. At least I'm assuming they are as I only made the mistake of clicking on the links once. So, I'm going to limit comments to people who are followers for a while. I don't get many comments anyway so I doubt that it will affect anyone but you deserve to know not only that it is happening but also why it's happening. Hopefully, in a month or two, I'll remove this provision because the pornographer will find somewhere else to peddle their smut. In the meantime, please join me in praying for this lost soul.

More digging, more learning

I did a little research into the site of my future "home base" parish in Forest city, Iowa. It appears that the church was linked to several parishes and missions throughout it's life. It moved location at least three times from west of town to downtown to its current location north of town. The parish was founded basically because of a large group of Irish immigrants in the small town of Bristol, Iowa, which I can't wait to drive through to see if the first Catholic Cemetary is still there.

To me, the most intriguing fact of the history book I've been using (that unfortunately only goes until 1937) is, "The missions attached to Forest City at this time were: Lake Mills, Northwood, Thompson, Buffalo Center, and Armstrong." So, a previous priest was responsible for six ecclesial communities. I need to look up this Father John P. Taken and ask for his intercession as I begin this assignment. And, if anyone can find where Lakewood was, (No, not the one that's close to Des Moines! It'd have to be somewhere in North Central, Iowa), I'll appreciate it. I have a feeling I'll file it under the category of "places that aren't really towns in Iowa but the locals all call it that so I better learn that name if I plan to have any credibility with the locals."

The trinity: A Community of Hope

My dear friends in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the Power of the Holy Spirit on this Solemnity of the Holy Trinity. We give thanks this day for the revelation of God, which has made clear the divine and subtle mystery of the Trinity. This mystery is definitely one of those that defines who we are as Christians. To my knowledge No other religion in the world, believes that, without compromising the unity or the “oneness” of God, God is also a trinity of persons. We do not have three gods nor are Father, Son and Holy Spirit merely three names for the same person. God has made clear through Jesus that he is one God in three persons. In some ways, it would be a lot easier if we simply talked about God and ignored this dogma of our faith because of how difficult it is to explain. It would be easier if Jesus were merely a prophet, perhaps the greatest of all prophets, sent by God to open revelation to all the world. Unfortunately, it would also mean that we are not justified in the eyes of God and, thus, not saved. Or, it would be easier if we simply believed, like the ancient Greeks did, that the angels were gods so that there are innumerable gods capable of doing whatever we ask of them. But then we would face the difficulty of determining whose god is the strongest. This could be the source a very entertaining reality show but, thankfully, is not.

In the most recent round of sexual abuse, I’ve heard a rather consistent and somewhat disturbing message being spread. It is said that the Catholic Church has good people but a bad hierarchy. I remember reading a New York Times op ed forwarded to me by a staff member at St. Thomas that expounded this opinion. I can understand the frustration that would lead a person to believe it. As I said at the Holy Thursday mass, I feel a certain amount of sympathy for people who are really struggling to have trust in their bishops. I was ordained in the middle of the mess in Boston and there’s a part of me that worries about what you all are thinking every time I reach out and pat a kid on the head or get a hug from a grade schooler.

Yet, one of the realities of having one God in three persons is that it means that community and relationship are at the very center of our Faith. The persons of God are in relationship to one another just like we are in relationship to one another. One formula that I heard in seminary was that the Father loves the Son and the Holy Spirit is the love that binds the two. The Holy Spirit’s love does not destroy the individuality of the Father or the Son but amplifies it so that it spills out into our lives. The Trinity’s relationship built upon love is, thereby, communicated to us, the faithful, in our daily lives. We are called to live lives that value community and take us away from selfishness.

Part of living a life of community is, to use a word coined by St. Paul in the second reading today, affliction. Relationships are wrought with affliction. It could be the affliction of being a teenager and wishing you had more freedom or the affliction of watching your teenager make bad decisions. It could be the affliction of watching an aging parent grow old and feeble or the affliction of job loss. It may be the affliction of being part of a church struggling to deal with sexual abuse or the affliction of hearing an Archbishop tell you that he needs you leave the parish you love to take on a new assignment. If we try and deal with this affliction alone, it is meaningless. When we do so from the perspective of Christian Community, from the perspective of being the body of Christ, then our affliction connects us to the Hope of Christ in Faith. And, as St. Paul reminds us, Hope does not disappoint.

Part of why we have a Christian Community, a church, to guide us that is hierarchically ordered is to keep us united by the wisdom of God. I love the first reading today which describes wisdom as existing before and during creation; joyfully playing at the foot of God and finding delight in the human race. I think this is why Jesus, in the gospel, tells us that the Spirit’s main job is to continue the wisdom, the truth, that he has begun to give to the Apostles. The Apostle’s job was to teach the truths revealed by the Holy Spirit to their successors, the Bishop’s. Yet, wisdom’s job is not done and there is always more clarification that needs to be done. We certainly need to pray for our Bishops as they struggle to understand the best way to deal with this latest round of sexual abuse. Yet, I would hope we can all see that, even as hurt and upset as we may justifiably be, we shouldn’t go to the extreme of getting rid of part of our community because they have caused us affliction. To paraphrase St. Paul again, let us pray that affliction leads us to endurance as we put up with unfair stereotypes and oppression and that the endurance leads us to the proven character of being the first large institution to deal with sexual abuse in a way that protects people and that this proven character will give us hope to help others. Because, truly, hope never fails.

Something from my next assignment

As a Campus Minister, I could sleep until 8 or 9 in the morning because I would stay awake until midnight or one o'clock. Now as I start to prepare for a new assignment in July, I've been waking up earlier and going to bed earlier. My new pattern is to wake up at 6, pray, breakfast, and be on the bus by 7:30 to that I'm at work when I used to wake up in the morning. I somehow feel a lot more productive since I get all my clerical work done in the morning and go back home around 2 or so. It's amazing.

In my leadership class, I learned that the first thing I should do in the morning is do something that's not urgent but is important. So, I've been researching my future parishes one at a time. In the process, I found out that there were two parishes that have closed that used to be connected to a parish I will be responsible for. It makes sense considering what the current pastor was talking about when he said he's got a couple of extra cemeteries that he oversees. It seems like we're often willing to sell the church building but not the cemetery. One of the things that impresses me about where I'm going is that the three I've researched so far are all very old churches. All three were organized before 1900, even if their church buildings didn't get built until after. And there's a history of cooperation between them before they were eventually separated. Being a fan of history (and historical churches), I can use this as a way to bring about greater unity.

What does it mean that the Holy Spirit is an Advocate?

My Dear Friends in Christ

Grace and Peace in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit be with you as we conclude this Easter Season today. Today is Pentecost, a term that can be literally translated as 50 days, describing the number of days that have elapsed since Easter. We borrow the term from our Jewish brothers and sisters, although our Pentecost feasts are very different. The Christian understanding of Pentecost, as we heard in the first reading today, is the giving of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles in the upper room. The Jewish understanding of Pentecost, or what they call Shavuot, although taking place 50 days after Passover, is actually a feast of the grain harvest. During the time of the Temple, the Jewish people would have offered some of the harvest back to God on Shavuot as a thanksgiving for the good things God gave them. Of course, we are just starting the planting season on Pentecost so we’re far from harvest time.

Several times during the Easter Season, we heard the same chapter of John’s Gospel, chapter 14, which is a brief explanation by Our Lord to explain all the events that happened between Good Friday and Pentecost. If I were to give it a theme, I would say Jesus is trying to explain to his disciples exactly what he means when he says, “Peace be with you” and “Do not be afraid.” He is trying to explain to them what will happen so that they will be prepared. The apostles have been Jesus’ followers and will now take on the yoke of leadership that Jesus had provided for them during his earthly life. In our calendar, we believe that 40 days after Jesus’ resurrection, he ascended into heaven and that 10 days after that (50 days after Jesus’ Resurrection) the church was given the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. To prepare them to receive the Holy Spirit, Jesus used a very unusual word to describe her, a word that has caused me to ask the question: What did Jesus mean when he called the Holy Spirit the Advocate? This term is usually used describe a lawyer in a trial, someone who is meant to present the best case for us to a judge. I don’t know about you, but I don’t usually think about my relationship to God in legal terms. Yet, I think this is the context that Jesus is using today. And, while we may be tempted to believe we have outgrown this image of our relationship to God, let’s investigate what Jesus is saying when he uses it.

Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth in the verses right before our reading begins today. If we view the Holy Spirit as our Advocate before the Father, the first thing that we need to know is that it is the Spirit’s job to get to know our true selves in order to plead our cause. She wants to be in relationship to us throughout our life. St. Thomas Aquinas said regarding this that grace builds on nature. In other words, it’s not as though the Holy Spirit forces herself into the lives of those who don’t want to get to know her in order to force them to a life of holiness. The Spirit comes into our lives as we strive to grow in holiness and builds on and perfects the good work we are already doing. That is why Jesus said the Holy Spirit will, “teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.” She not only has placed into our heart a natural law sense of goodness but remains with us in order to tell the Father all that we have done to grow in holiness.

Yet, the Holy Spirit is not only our Advocate to the Father. She is also our Advocate to the world. The Spirit of Truth guides us in our daily interactions to be beacons of light and faith even if we aren’t necessarily speaking about God, faith, or the church. The Holy Spirit gives us gifts that we are, in turn, invited to put into the service of the church. In some ways, this is what connects this celebration to the Jewish understanding of Passover: we are all given gifts and are invited by God to build up the kingdom with those gifts. Part of our challenge is to listen intently to the Spirit to make sure that the gifts we think we have correspond to the gifts we truly do have and to make sure we aren’t so involved in so many things that we cannot effectively use the gifts God has given us. As we celebrate this feast of Passover, let us be reminded of our need to get to know the gifts God has given us and to make sure we are doing our best to use them to build up the church.

Being an Iowan

I am an Iowan, partially by birth and partially by attitude. I've taken sides in the famous debate over whether Iowa or Iowa State is better (Sorry UNI...you'll always be our cute younger sibling even when you beat both of us), I have visited every part of this state, and I consider pig poop a normal smell that people just need to put up with while driving.

Last week, I was on retreat. I spent a week in Missouri visiting the monks at Conception Abbey. It was an awesome week of prayer and reflection with some truly holy men. But, the crazy thing is that on Friday I felt the greatest joy at crossing the Iowa/Missouri border. It was just so good to be back home.

There's a part of me that hopes that's what heaven is like. I don't really need the perfect city with gems for roads and perfect symmetry in its construction, although if that's the way it is that's cool. I just hope I look around and feel truly at home. No more suffering. No more worrying that something was left undone. No more lying awake knowing that people will send nasty emails to you because you've got to take a stand on a controversial issue. It's like seeing the big sign saying "Iowa, Fields of Opportunities" and realizing that you belong there.

Peace which is Christ’s and not of the world

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ

May the Peace of Christ be with each of you, especially the mothers during this Mother’s day weekend. On my retreat this past week, I spent some time reflecting on the phrase from our Lord in today’s gospel, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” I couldn’t help but pause to ponder what made Jesus’ peace different than that of the world. I looked in a concordance to see other instances of the use of the word peace in the gospels. For the most part, it is used as a greeting, a use which is still done by both Jews and Muslims to greet one another. “Shalom,” in Hebrew and “Salaam” Arabic. Jesus would have greeted his Jewish followers with peace each time that he saw them just as we greet each other with a hearty hello.

There was, nonetheless, one passage that I found in the gospel of Matthew that says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword.” This verse prompted a question for me: Is Jesus talking about his own peace or the peace of this world when he said the above? Edward Gibbon in his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire notes that, at the time of Jesus, there was relative peace throughout the Roman Empire that was largely kept by the sword. There were no major wars or uprisings between 27 BC and 180 AD because, in general, the Roman Emperors favored consolidation ahead of expansion. The Messiah was supposed to come and bring true peace to his people by driving out all Gentiles from the Land and set up a United Israel as a world government. That’s the peace of this world that Jesus is talking about in both the Gospels of Matthew and John that is won by the sword, the kind that he didn’t come to bring. Instead, the peace that he will bring is one brought to the church by the Advocate, the Holy Spirit.

So, how will the Holy Spirit’s peace be different than that of the world? One person described the Roman understanding of peace as not so much the absence of war and conflict as the point when your opponent has been so decimated that he or she is wiped out. I think the difference between this and Christ’s gift of peace is clearly seen in the first reading today. This story from the Acts of the Apostles tells about the first real controversy in the church. While Paul and Barnabas are evangelizing in Antioch, certain Jewish Christian believers claim to have authority to explain what it means to be a Christian. They claim that you have to first be Jewish in order to be considered Christian. It would be like an excommunicated priest coming into Ames claiming to have authority to speak about who should be ordained, especially if his view contradicted the views that the bishops and pope have stated over and over again. Of course, such a person would have no authority to speak for the church and would only be causing the same division that the Jewish Christian believers did in the first reading. It’s too bad that the Gentile Christians didn’t simply pay more attention to Paul and Barnabas and simply ignore those who would try to divide them.

Nonetheless, I find Paul and Barnabus’ reaction instructive. They could have simply taken up a counter stance to say that there needs to be a division in the church’s practice. This was the way the Apostles had handled the situation with the deacons, for instance. There were deacons to deal with the Greek speakers so that the Apostles could be focused on the Aramaic speakers. Paul and Barnabas could have said that the Jewish Christians needed to maintain the Jewish laws while the Gentile Christians were free to live a life of grace, basically dividing the church in two. However, that’s not what Paul and Barnabas did. Instead, they went to Jerusalem, to the seat of Apostolic authority at the time, to get a ruling from Peter, James, and John: a ruling that removed almost all of the Jewish ritual laws for all believers in favor of the life of grace offered to the church by the Father through the Holy Spirit. They trusted that the apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit and given the charism to lead the church, would not lead them astray. This action of trust ultimately lead to the peace of the church so that we could move forward with the mandate to evangelize the world.

Jesus says to us, his church, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” The peace of Christ doesn’t mean that there will not be war or conflict. As we have seen almost continually since the time of Jesus, there have been and probably always will be conflict, fighting, disagreement, and war. The peace that Jesus offers is a peace that gives us assurance that we are not so separated from God through sin that he would stop loving us. It is the peace of Christ whose death and resurrection has inextricably connected us to the Father in his loving, Spirit-filled plan of salvation. It’s the peace that calls us to trust in the teachings of the church and her apostolic successors who guide us through the violence and strife still present in this world. And it’s the peace that this world cannot give because it deals more with our internal ability to trust the church than our own ability to control and manipulate.

Learning how to be comfortable as sheep

My Dear Friends in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, through our Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. When I was at Loras my first year, one of my friends basically forced me to go on the Antioch retreat. I say she forced me to go on it because, in all honesty, I had made up my mind that Antioch was not going to be my thing when I first heard about it. I didn’t do retreats. I viewed them with the same kind of suspicion that one has for a cult, that simple-minded people needed them so that they could stand around and sing Jesus songs. But this friend was both particularly persistent and one of those people you just didn’t want to upset so I headed out to my first Antioch during October of my Freshman year. I can remember being surrounded by a bunch of people that I didn’t know, which was intimidating. I can remember seeing a priest not walking around in a polo shirt and jeans and thinking that that was a really weird thing. But, the thing that would have sent me driving back home had I had a car, the thing that I’ve resolved never to do at our Antioch retreats, was when they came around with a brown grocery bag and had us throw our watches into it because we were on “God’s time.” I actually tried to put my watch in my pocked quick before they came by but I got caught. I hated the idea of being deprived of my God-given right to know approximately where the sun was in the sky and what relation we were to Grenwich, England. It was just wrong and unnerving that this cult thought they could take my watch away. How dare they?

This Sunday is Good Shepherd Sunday. Both the responsorial psalm and the gospel called God the Shepherd and called us the sheep. When I was in seminary, we had a rather heated debate about the usefulness of this image. In some ways, it is rather patronizing. Sheep are not exactly the most intelligent animals in the world. Being a sheep is often equated with unquestioning loyalty to the point of being willing to jump off a cliff if your friends asked you to do it. It’s what you call the person whose viewpoint you don’t agree with. Democrats believe Republicans were sheep to President Bush with the war in Iraq and Republicans believe Democrats are sheep when it comes to health care. Let’s face it, if we were writing the gospel today we’d probably say something like, “We are the dolphins, the intelligent, helpful, charming herd of the Lord”. Or “We are the Koala bears, the non-threatening, eucalyptus eating, hugging marsupials of the Lord.”

And yet, I’d like to contend that, despite its shortfalls, being a sheep isn’t really that bad. The second reading from the Book of Revelation reminded us of a deep theological reality tied to this image of sheep. The vision that John, the writer of Revelation, is having appears to be of heaven. There is this large gathering of all the saved, a group that is so large that it is beyond counting. The group are all wearing pure white robes, robes similar to the ones you may have see our newly baptized put on during the Easter Vigil and which they continue wearing in church during the Easter Season. This gathering is surrounding God who is referred to as one seated on the throne. Yet, Jesus, being depicted as a lamb, is also seated on the throne because, as we know, Jesus is fully God, “of the same substance with the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God…” And the Lamb will shepherd us by leading us to the life-giving streams of baptism and Eucharist just as blood and water flowed from Jesus’ side on the cross.

It seems to me that the writer of Revelation is saying that we are sheep because Jesus was the lamb. In case you didn’t grow up on a farm, a lamb is a sheep that has not bred more sheep. One could say that Jesus is the innocent sheep while we are the sheep who bring the baggage of original sin. Yet, we are sheep because we are the sinning but redeemed body of Christ on earth.

Part of what I find helpful in the image of being a sheep comes from the last line of this reading. Not only will God give us what we need, it also says that the Good Shepherd will, “wipe away ever tear from (our) eyes.” We, the Iowa State community, have suffered a lot over the course of the last few weeks. We’ve seen three students die: one on spring break and two last week. I’ve been visiting with a lot of you who have friends and family who are either seriously ill or have died and I have a hunch that a lot more of you are hurting about that or Jon, T.J. or Tyler than we here at St. Thomas will ever know. Just know that if you do need to talk to someone, my door and the doors of all the staff members are always open here at STA. We can’t quite wipe away all the tears but our shoulders may be able to take some of them.

Part of what is so difficult about the image the sheep is the loss of control, the same loss of control I felt by giving up my watch on Antioch. And yet, that weekend turned out to be the best thing I would do during four years at Loras College. I connected with God on a deeper level than ever before and I made friends there that would become my roommates for the next three years. I had to give up some of that control and trust God for that to take place. I had to let God be the shepherd in order to be led to life-giving streams and have my tears wiped away.

To go boldly where men have gone before...

The Archbishop of Dubuque has appointed me to a new assignment. In July, I will become pastor for St. Patrick Parish, Britt; St. Patrick Parish, Buffalo Center; St. Wenceslaus Parish, Duncan; St. James Parish, Forest City; St. Boniface Parish, Garner; and St. Patrick Parish, Lake Mills. If you're not sure where any of those towns are, look at most northern and central two counties of the state of Iowa and you'll find all of them. I'm very excited by the prospect of becoming pastor and a little overwhelmed by the Archbishop's confidence in me. I'll have the responsibility of pastoring six parishes and helping a brother priest (my associate pastor) continue his formation to become a pastor. There's a part of me that wonders if the Archbishop has made a mistake. I mean, I still make mistakes and say stupid things. Lieutenant Riker was still second-in-command to Jean-Luc Picard after like 20 years on the Enterprise. And, trust me, I'm no William T. Riker.

Thankfully, as I have done since June 22nd 2002 in the beginning of the American sexual abuse crisis, I trust in the Archbishop's statement that my own feelings of inadequacy are reminders that being a priest really isn't about me. I didn't choose to become a priest, God chose me. To put it in the words of the ordination liturgy, "Remember that you are chosen from among God's people and appointed to act for them in relation to God. Do your part in the word of Christ the Priest with genuine joy and love, and attend to the concerns of Christ before your own."

Last Sunday

I really didn't like my homily from last Sunday so I didn't put it here. It was one of those homilies that started out rough on Saturday and never really got polished in four times.

What was cool, however, was being part of a very unusual confirmation. In this diocese, we have three priests who have the title of Episcopal Vicar. They stand in the place of the Bishop for certain events like this. Monsignor Russ Bleich is one and he was supposed to confirm the kids. But, then he got sick. Laryngitis, to be specific. He couldn't talk, one of he few traits still absolutely necessary in order to celebrate mass. So, he gave the authority to the pastors here. The kids got to be confirmed by their pastor. That was very unusual and I'm sure they'll remember it for a long time.

I'm not saying that it should happen every year...maybe once every 20 years or so. It was nice to see the pastors working together in the same way that we ask the confirmation students to do so for the prayer.

What prompted the change in Peter?

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ

He is Risen! He is truly Risen! May the grace of the risen savior, Jesus Christ, come upon you this Easter day and remain with you throughout the 50 day Easter celebration. I’d like to especially welcome those of you who haven’t been here in quite a while.

For one of my summer jobs during college, I decided to become a short-order cook in a small country restaurant in Marshalltown. It was one of the hardest summers I ever had because I had to be awake at 5:30 to be to work at 6:00. I’m not a morning person so this was quite a challenge. The other challenge was the job itself. I would be handed a ticket with a list of food to prepare and I had to know the timing that it took for one piece of food compared to another. For instance, I had to know how long it took to make eggs over easy so that I could have hot hash browns and toast to be served at the exact same time. That was the hardest part of the job for me and, to be honest, I quite often had to call the owner in the kitchen to help me catch up because I’d fallen so far behind. But, I can still remember the day that I finally succeeded. Several tickets all came up at once and I started all the things that took a lot of time right away. I remembered to flip the eggs quickly for the one woman who liked her eggs runny and even remembered to push the toast down. As I completed the last ticket that day, I had this tremendous sense of accomplishment. The owner, who was not known for his warm loquacious demeanor, came back to the kitchen, patted me on the back, and said, “Good job, kid.” I had made it. It felt good.

The focus of the gospel is always Jesus. But, in the background, there are a bunch of people who interact with the savior and we see quite a transformation in one of these people today. Peter, the rock on whom our church is built, has his good times and bad times during Jesus’ ministry. Sometimes he seems to comprehend things perfectly, like when he recognized Jesus for the Messiah he is. Other times, he seems to get things very wrong, like when he thrice denied knowing Jesus during Jesus’ trial. And the amazing thing from today is that the background character is called up to the front in the course of today’s readings. In the gospel, we hear about Peter’s reaction to hearing about the empty tomb. Whereas Mary Magdalene seems to react with doubt and fear by running to tell the disciples that they have stolen his body, Peter runs to the tomb, enters it and sees the burial clothes neatly wrapped up. For him, this is the beginning, a call to faith that will continue to grow for the next several years through the careful fertilization of the Holy Spirit.

Peter makes five speeches in the Acts of the Apostles, all of which are creedal catechetical statements of belief. In other words, the student becomes the teacher by the Acts of Apostles. His bumbling errors are a thing of the past and he now speaks with the clarity of our first Pope, telling the world all about the forgiveness given to us by the cross and resurrection of Jesus. He was a witness and now he’s got to witness.

And, he calls each of us to witness to the faith. We are called to live our lives affected by the resurrection of Jesus by loving one another, especially the persecuted. We are to reach out to the lost individuals in our life and invite them to come to church with us. Maybe for some of us, the best witness you can give is to make church on Sunday a priority in your life on more than just a monthly basis. Maybe for some of you, you need to get the demons such as addiction to drugs, alcohol, or sex out of your life in order to be a witness and you need to join a group like AA or SA in order to kick the habit.

The challenge always is that we don’t feel like we can do it. Maybe we feel energized and excited now but there will be a time when reality will set in and we’ll have to commit to actually doing it. We may even remember past failures and use them as an excuse as to why we can’t witness today. Let us use the inspiration of Peter, the one who first failed before he succeeded, to commit to being witnesses to the resurrection.

Good Friday...heck it was a GREAT FRIDAY!

I've been a priest for 8 years now. I've done mass almost daily for 8 years of priesthood. The one day that I'm not allowed to do mass is today, Good Friday. For the last three years in a row, I've been out at my little rural parish, Sts. Peter and Paul in Gilbert, Iowa. I know my people out there and they know me. They trust me and I trust them.

We didn't do anything unusual at Sts. Peter and Paul. But there's something awesome about knowing what to expect because I've done it all before. The Passion Gospel was so powerful. I love to speak with the people, "Take him away! Take him away! Crucify Him!" It emphasizes just how privileged we are that Jesus really died for our sins.

Probably the most touching thing that happened was during the veneration of the cross. There were several parents holding children allowing the children to touch the cross. There was even a number of High School students that came forward and kissed the feet of Jesus.

I closed my homily with a quote from an early Holy Saturday Homily. "Something strange is happening -- there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear."

The Year of the Priest/Holy Thursday

My dear brothers and sister in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ who sent his Holy Spirit to fill us with his grace. This year, Pope Benedict asked all the faithful to pray for priests. As a priest, I really haven’t done much about this. I’ve felt encouraged by people who tell me that they are praying for me and thinking about me. And, as a priest, I can be honest enough to admit that it is always a joy to come here and celebrate with you because so many of you are complimentary of me and my ministry. Nonetheless, I have struggled to preach about the year of the priest because it seems like it would, in some ways, only affect me. Yet, in the past week, I’ve been paying close attention to the unfolding events in Europe regarding clergy sexual abuse. It’s been very interesting to find that our older brother in the faith is just now dealing with the same problems that we started dealing with eight years ago. In this light, I think it’s important to preach about priests on this Holy Thursday, this day that is considered the Institution of the Priesthood.

When the Pope asked us to reflect on priests, he told us to do so through the lens of St. John Vianney so I looked up what he taught on the matter. I found a really great passage from his writing entitled Catechetical Instruction. The Saint says, “(Holy Orders) raises man up to God. What is a priest! A man who holds the place of God - a man who is invested with all the powers of God. "Go, " said Our Lord to the priest; "as My Father sent Me, I send you. All power has been given Me in Heaven and on earth. Go then, teach all nations. . . . He who listens to you, listens to Me; he who despises you despises Me. " When the priest remits sins, he does not say, "God pardons you"; he says, "I absolve you. " At the Consecration, he does not say, "This is the Body of Our Lord;" he says, "This is My Body.”

This is an interesting point about being a priest: We don’t speak on behalf of ourselves. We speak on behalf of God. For me, this has two ramifications: it means that priests need to be cautious about what we say because people will take it as authoritative. And, I ask for your prayers for the priests who have decided to misstate church teaching because it better suits their disposition or beliefs. We should not do that. St. John Vianney says that we must be willing to speak the truth of the gospel even if it means receiving the contempt of the people and, as he says, being shot upon leaving the pulpit.

The other reality is that the priest must be the leader and model in holiness. St. John Vianney says it in the negative, “Leave a parish twenty years without priests; they will worship beasts. If the missionary Father and I were to go away, you would say, "What can we do in this church? there is no Mass; Our Lord is no longer there: we may as well pray at home." When people wish to destroy religion, they begin by attacking the priest, because where there is no longer any priest there is no sacrifice, and where there is no longer any sacrifice there is no religion.” In other words, the priest reminds people of God’s presence and makes God present. One of my favorite things to do as a priest is to wear my clerical clothes to things like sporting events, plays, and even a bar or two. The priest should be a reminder that God doesn’t just want us for an hour each week but wants to be in relationship with us in all aspects of our life. Since the Second Vatican Council, I’ve think this aspect of priesthood has been on the decline. Many of my brother priests say that the document on the church said that not only the priests should be holy but that all the people should be holy. And, while I agree with them on this point, it did say that we are all to be HOLY, not that we are allowed to be as unholy as we think our people are being. We are to model holiness for our people so that they will likewise want to be holy.

As a priest, I have to admit that I’m not perfect about this. I give in far too often to secular concerns and find it way too easy to allow my tongue to slip towards unkind speech. In this year of the priest, perhaps what we priests need most is for our lay people to remind us of your need for us to model God’s love and mercy. Remind us that you don’t need an entertainer or a best friend, you need someone to bring the grace of Christ into your life in the sacraments. Continue to support and love us but also call us to be the image of the Father that you want us to be.

Archbishop Levada

I read this lengthy article while watching TV tonight. With a great deal of clarity, it describes the muckraking that has been happening to the Holy Father by the press.

No real homily this weekend

So, this weekend is Palm Sunday. Go to church to get your palm so that you can make your cross. It's a big Sunday. We read the entire passion narrative from one of the gospels, which takes a lot longer than normal. That comes after we read the gospel about the procession with palms from the gospel of Luke.

My homily generally goes like this: This is the week where we remember the central mystery of our church. From Holy Thursday's Institution of the Eucharist to Good Friday's focus on the Cross and death of the Lord to Easter Sunday and the Resurrection, we remember all of what is at the heart of the church. I strongly encourage you all to make a point to come to church to celebrate all three days. This is our Holy Week.

To be a compass

For some reason, the following dialog from the movie Mr. Holland's Opus keeps coming up in my conversation. In case you forget, Mr. Holland is played by Richard Dreyfuss and is the new music teacher and Mrs. Jacobs is played by Olympia Dukakis and is the seasoned principal...

Mrs. Jacobs: “Mr. Holland! Just the man I was looking for. We’re forming a textbook committee for next year’s curriculum and I would like to have your ideas and suggestions. We meet next Tuesday in the library.

Mr. Holland: Oh, I’m sorry Mrs. Jacobs. I’m I’m I’m very busy.

Mrs. Jacobs: You know for a good four or five months now I’ve been watching you Mr. Holland. I’ve never seen a teacher sprint for the parking lot after last period with more speed and enthusiasm than his students. Perhaps you should be our track coach.

Mr. Holland: Mrs. Jacobs, I get here on time every morning. I’m doing my job the best I can.

Mrs. Jacobs: A teacher has two jobs: Fill young minds with knowledge, yes. But more important, give those minds a compass so that knowledge doesn’t go to waste. Now I don’t know what you’re doing with the knowledge, Mr. Holland, but as a compass, you’re stuck.

I keep thinking about it because that is what I feel to be the difference between a normal parish and a good parish. A normal Catholic parish either seems to just want to do the basics of the faith or has such deep divisions within what is happening that you have to be part of a "camp" in order to feel a part. It seems that the pastor's constant challenge is to be the compass that keeps the parish together walking in the right direction.

Jesus calls us to conversion not tolerance

My Dear brothers and sisters in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father and Jesus, our savior through the reconciling power of the Holy Spirit. A generation ago, it was quite common for certain derogatory terms to be used when describing people of certain races and ethnic backgrounds. In the course of the last 20 or 30 years there’s been a constant changing of terms in an effort to clarify what you can call a given racial or ethnic group. Oftentimes, this is called political correctness, a term which itself is decidedly not politically correct. Of course, the goal of all of this is to get people away from seeing others as the terrifyingly, different “other” in order to see how all of humanity is connected. The difficulty has been when it becomes obvious that there are legitimate differences in the way two different groups of people look and do things. In other words, regardless of how hard I concentrate on the similarities, the life-experiences I have and the morals and values I have imprinted on me are different than what someone growing up in the inner city of a major metropolitan area has. For instance, I often laugh at people who turn on car alarms in this town. Do we have a rash of car theft taking place in our tiny little town? When I look at the cars whose alarms are going off, I quite often see an Illinois license plate. I have to admit that my first thought is that the person must be from Chicago and hasn’t quite figured out that there’s no need for a car alarm in Ames.

There are other several areas of life where our experience and culture make it difficult to live next door to someone different. Quite often, we are then called to live out the moral precept of tolerance. I’m supposed to be tolerant of the guy who leaves his car alarm on because he was raised believing that’s essential and he’s supposed to be tolerant of me when I wear my priest clothes across campus on my way to an IRB meeting. Tolerance is, in some ways, a very useful attribute toward morally neutral things. A girl from small town Iowa who believes there are two types of music: country and western, comes to college in part to learn how to be tolerant of other people’s music and cultural traditions.

The problem I have with tolerance is when it comes to morals. We are told that we need to be tolerant of other people’s attitudes and behaviors when it comes to sex, money, and politics. And, ironically enough, this gospel is often used to substantiate this attitude of tolerance. I, however, don’t believe we are using it correctly when we do. Jesus is teaching in the Temple area. Let’s not forget that this is taking place in the Temple because I think it’s crucial. He is teaching his followers and probably reaching out to others to convert them. In the midst of this, the scribes and Pharisees bring him a guilty woman. They ask him to be the judge in her case. According to the law, she deserves to be killed because she was caught committing adultery. But, the Roman guards, who are watching from a high watch-tower close by, believe they are the only ones who are allowed to carry out the death sentence. In some way, Jesus can’t answer correctly. If he gives the scribes and Pharisees the order to kill her, he will likely be killed by the Romans for disobedience. If he says to turn her over to them, he would have basically been acknowledging to them that he is not the Messiah as they expect him to be who has come to overthrow human power and they would have killed him for blasphemy then and there.

In a move reminiscent of Solomon, Jesus says that they can kill her but the one of them who has no sin should be the one to cast the first stone. Of course, they all judge themselves as having sinned and walk away leaving her alone. But, this is not a lesson in tolerance. If it were, the story would have ended there with the lesson learned. What happened next is crucial. Jesus turns and asks where they have all gone and she says they all left. He then gives her something that the others didn’t even get: forgiveness. “Go and from now on do not sin anymore.” It’s a lesson in repentance and forgiveness not in merely allowing an adulteress to continue sinning and learning how to put up with her. It’s about getting her to reform her life and seek a life of holiness.

Let’s be honest, each of us could be in the same place as the woman for something that we’ve done. We all have events and actions in our lives that we keep hidden away because we are ashamed of them. We’ve learned to tolerate them because it’s easier to do that then to go and sin no more. It could be something as major as adultery or an addiction to pornography and masturbation or something as small as gossip and telling lies. Whatever it is, we should feel jolted today by Jesus to reconcile ourselves to the church and go and sin no more.