A full Saturday

Saturdays tend to be challenging for priests. I woke up worried about something that's unresolved from my parishes. I hate it when that happens.

I heard confessions for a half hour and then walked around the block before returning to my house at 10:45. After that I got organized for a wedding prep session with one couple and witnessed the marriage of another.

After the wedding, I looked at my Sunday homily one last time before going to hear more confessions and celebrating evening mass. After mass someone requested to be anointed and then my day was done.

Four sacraments in eight hours in three different towns. Fairly typical and very satisfying. I love being a priest.

From my phone

I just downloaded an ap for my smartphone that will allow me to post here. The good news is that I no longer will think of something to blog about and then forget it by the time I get to a computer. The bad news is that the filter that naturally happens because of the lag has also disappeared. I'll do my best to not turn my blog into twitter.

The Search

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. Oftentimes, when I think about prayer, I think of the gospel from Ash Wednesday. “When you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.” As an introvert, this appeals to me. In fact, I have even coverted what should be a sun room into a private prayer space in the rectory in Garner. And, even though I think we should all have our favorite place to visit daily for prayer, whether they be an emptry room at home, a favorite outdoor shair, or a daily visit to the Blessed Sacrament, I don’t think that Jesus was saying that this is the ONLY way that Jesus wanted us to pray. The context of this message, which comes from the same gospel we read tonight, Matthew, is that we shouldn’t pray just so that others will see us and admire us for how holy we are. Prayer is a conversation with God, not a way of making ourselves look good to others.

A few years ago, I was camping with my family at Adventureland Campground just outside of Des Moines. At the time, I had a fold-down camper and my parents still had their large, hard-side camper. I went to bed around 10:30 since we were going to be going to Adventureland park the next day. At midnight, a flash of lightning illumined my camper immediately followed by a loud cannon shot of thunder. For a half hour, this lightning storm in the sky made it impossible to sleep but eventually it was silent again so I rolled over and went back to sleep. About an hour later, a heavy rain shower with some light hail moved through that sounded gunfire. But, eventually that stopped and I rolled over and went back to sleep. At three fifteen, I woke up annoyed because someone’s alarm was going off. But, of course, it wasn’t someone’s alarm. It was the tornado sirens. I wanted to roll over and go back to sleep. Thankfully, my dad came and knocked on my door before he ran off to the shelter house. I put on a shirt and some shoes before I opened my camper door to follow dad to the shelter house. I remember being very disoriented and feeling the rain and wind hit my face. I rand toward what I thought was the shelter house only to discover that it was really a locked front office. I had no idea what to do. If I ran to a different building, there was no guarantee that it would be unlocked and the only building I knew would be open, the bathroom, was the opposide direction from the way I had ran. I was afraid that if I ran for it, it would hail or the tornado would come and pick me up like in the Wizard of Oz. Only I had no delusions of ending up in Oz! So, I did the only thinkg I thought I could do. I prayed. I wasn’t locked away in my chapel, though I would have rather been there. I was under a bench in the middle of a fierce storm asking God, through the intercession of the saints, to end this so that I could get back to my camper, change my clothes, get into bed, roll over, and go back to sleep.

Let’s face it, if religion is confined to the purely private recesses of our houses, we are the ones that are going to suffer. We need God just as much in our daily lives as we do in the times set aside for prayer. That old truism that there are no atheists in foxholes reminds us of a truism that our evangelical brothers and sisters often understand better than we do: It’s oftentimes harder to believe in God when life is good than when life is challenging. We may thing that the goal of the ideal spiritual life should be to bring us peace but that’s not authentic Christiand spirituality. St. Paul reminded us of this in the second reading. He said, “We know that all things work for God for those who love God.” Now, this isn’t Paul’s way of saying that it will get better or all good things come to those who wait. Paul is expressing that, in the midst of suffering and persecution, God still brings good things to us as long as we love him. And that’s the journey each of us is called to.

The life of the Christian is not meant to be easy. In the gospel, Jesus uses two images of searching for treasure and a willingness to give up everything to have that treasure in order to convey this message to us. That’s why we need to stay connected to God both in the good times and the bad so that we can draw strength from him when we need it and be attentive to our brothers and sisters who are suffering when we don’t. Prayer needs to be the bedrock of our lives for us to be part of the Kingdom of heaven.

The Eucharist constitutes the church

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. One of the most powerful things that I get to do as a priest is exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. That’s what we do when we set that large metal stand, called the monstrance, on the altar so that people can adore and pray in front of the Host or Blessed Sacrament, for a period of time. I find this to be an extraordinarily powerful time of quiet meditation. Yet, regardless of how profound my experience of Adoration is, there is this little uneasy dance that happens in my heart towards the end of almost every session. I begin to wonder if people are bored. I begin to worry that people are remembering days when their mother or father forced them to come and do this. I begin to worry that people are resolving never to do this again. I begin to think that I should cut it short so that people don’t get more frustrated than what they already are. But, I stick it out for the full amount of time and stand, with all these doubts running through my head, to return the Blessed Sacrament to its place in the tabernacle. I kneel with my back to the people and invite them to open to the back of the hymnal and sing that classic chant, “Tantum egro sacramentum” and I hear voices of people who never crack a hymnal at Sunday mass singing out this song that was first sung before it’s singers knew there was a North America. Then, I approach the monstrance to bless the people and, on their faces, I see looks that bespeak respect and love. Not only do the people not feel the way my heart was trying to say they do, most of the time people wish they could have adoration more often. I even had one woman openly admit that she wished it could be much longer. I’ve never had anyone tell me that they thought mass was too short but, for this woman, she didn’t have enough time to adore the presence of the Lord. I think people see in this form a prayer a memory. And, I don’t mean that people sit around and think about the good old days, I think we are reminded of the respect that we have in our hearts for what we eat and drink each week.

That is what is at the heart of the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord. We are invited to focus on the Eucharist and its importance in our lives. Our readings focus on the respect that we should have for the Eucharist. The first reading from Deuteronomy reminded our Jewish brothers and sisters, just as surely as it reminds us that the Eucharist is a gift from God. Jesus, in the gospel, takes this message a step further and reminds us that the bread that we eat is his flesh and the wine that we drink is his blood. Just as God gave the Israelites bread in the journey toward the promised land so God gives his pilgrim church bread on our earthly journey.

As Catholics, we believe that the Eucharist is what constitutes the church. Without the Eucharist there would be no church and without the church there would be no Eucharist. The Eucharist connects us to Christ and to each other. It connects us to Christ because, as we heard in the Gospel today, we aren’t just receiving bread and wine. We are receiving Christ himself; his body, blood, soul, and divinity, when we receive the Eucharist. But, by receiving this gift of God, we are made a part of the church. Therefore, it connects us to one another as well. It is the great commandment we have been given to love God and love our neighbor.

Sometimes, in the church, there is a perception of a division between so-called liberals who are more social justice oriented and so-called conservatives who are more prayer oriented. This solemnity really challenges this division. I think of Mother Teresa, for instance, who would spend hours each day praying before the Blessed Sacrament while also spending hours reaching out to the poor in Calcutta. I think of Mary Jo Copeland, who runs a series of homeless shelters in the Twin Cities and prayerfully washes the feet of several of the people who come to her shelters. I think of St. Katherine Drexel who used her own personal fortune, 20 million dollars, to help impoverished African-Americans and American-Indians that society had forgotten. Yet, she would spend hours each day kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

Mass is where we come to encounter the love of God, the God who laid down is body and blood for our sins. But mass also empowers us to live out that encounter in our daily lives, to be the love of God to others. We may do this by starting or serving at a homeless shelter or reaching out to someone that we know is hurting and fixing a meal for the person or organizing a group of people to help him or her. In whatever way, we feel called, let us live out the love that we feel in prayer by helping those in need to know the love God has for them.

Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans

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. Today we gather to celebrate Trinity Sunday. When I was a kid, weekends in summer meant camping. I, in fact, remember camping with such fondness that I have purchased a camper of my own that I use on my day off. Most of the time that we went camping, we would go to Twin Acres Campground, which is located between Colo, Iowa and Nevada, Iowa. My parents, being good and observant Catholics, didn’t believe that vacation was a vacation from church so, of course, we had to get dressed up on Saturday afternoon and head to St. Mary’s Church in Colo for mass. The priest there was very stern. For example, he didn’t want someone using their left hand to receive the Holy Eucharist so he would reach down and adjust their hands if he felt like they were wrong. But, what I remember most about mass in Colo was that they would always sing the same four songs. I'm not sure if they were the only four songs the organist knew or if they were the only four songs the priest allowed. Regardless, one of them was called “Sing Praise to our Creator”. It had three verses, each extolling the three persons of the Holy Trinity. But the chorus was always the same: Oh most Holy Trinity, undivided unity, Holy God, Mighty God, God immortal be adored.


An updated version started appearing in music books a couple of years ago and I do use it for daily mass on occasion. Yet, I don’t just love the song because it reminds me of a simpler time of my life. I also love it because it portrays a teaching about God that, I fear, has been lost in a lot of Catholic teaching, namely the transcendence of God.


Our readings today are all about the transcendence of God. In the first reading, we hear about Moses going up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. You will notice that, despite the fact that God is said to have appeared to Moses, there is no description of him. Moses falls on the ground in worship because, in the mindset of the Old Testament, if one were to see God, you would surely die. So Moses’ act of falling to the ground was just as much about preserving his life as it was about his love for the Lord.


Given this understanding of God, you can understand why the early church had such a difficult time communicating the message of Jesus to the Jews. In some way, the Gospel today is an attempt bridge this gap in understanding by communicating the relationship of Jesus to his heavenly Father. God could have sent his son into the world to condemn the world. We have all fallen prey to the sin of Adam and God could have sent Jesus here to wipe us all out. He almost did it in the flood. He could do it again. But, instead, he sent his son to save us from those sins.


So, given the complete “otherness” of God, given the fact that God is completely transcendent, how can we love God. It’s hard to love and to know the love of something that is totally unknown and unknowable. To me, that is why God revealed himself to us as a trinity of person. This means that the nature of God is relational. There’s diversity among the unity of God. So, even though, as it says elsewhere in the gospel of John, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one, nonetheless, they are three persons of the godhead. Therefore, we come to understand in a fragmentary and imperfect way, a bit of the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit in our own relationships with one another.


This is also why God gave us the church. For most people, salvation is not based solely upon one’s ability to have a personal relationship to Jesus Christ. Such a relationship is important to be sure but it is just as important that we be a part of Church of Christ. We need each other to correct our faults, to lean on in times of suffering, and to stand in solidarity during times of persecution. We need each other to support our faith and challenge that faith when it becomes too simple. And, in these relationships, we experience the love that is God.


O most Holy Trinity, undivided unity. Holy God, Mighty God. God immortal be adored.

Sorry for the silence

I haven't posted my last three homilies because, to be honest, I haven't preached a homily worth posting since then. Three weeks ago, I had a wedding, a funeral, and Sunday masses after a heck of a busy week. My homily was...thin. Two weeks ago, the Ascension, I had another busy week and another wedding but the homily just wouldn't come together. I never did write the thing down because it was just blech. Then, last weekend, I had a further crazy/busy week, the last wedding, and the deacon preached. I'm thinking that things are going to start to slow down now and I'll finally get to spend adequate time in preparation.

In my leadership training course, we talked about how, when you are learning a new skill, you go through a process of losing energy until you've achieved an adequate level of competence. I can see how true that is. In the past three weeks I keep thinking about how Brother Dennis Miller, the Benedictine Monk from Conception Abbey who assists Brother Blaise taking care of the grounds, wouldn't have to worry about budgets, litigation, weddings, and excessive civic parochialism. He'd just pray and work all day. After a couple of minutes of this kind of day dreaming, I remind myself that, if I was supposed to be at Conception Abbey, I'd be at Conception Abbey. For some reason, the Archbishop wants me to be here. If he has this much confidence in me, I should probably stop day dreaming and get to work.

It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ

May the Grace and Peace from our resurrected Lord be with you as we continue through this Easter Season. I’m a little disappointed. I don’t know if you had heard this but I heard that the rapture was supposed to take place today/yesterday at 6:00 pm Eastern Time so I didn’t think I was going to be preaching this weekend. Of course, it’s not too late. It could happen now. (pause) Or now. (Pause) How about now? (Pause) I guess God really is in charge of when and how it will take place. The Bible doesn’t contain a secret code contained in disparate passages that only fundamentalists can read explaining exactly how it will all come to an end. Oftentimes, what the fundamentalists read as things that will take place at the end times are passages describing what life was like living in a world where both Jews and Gentiles hated us and wanted to kill us. And yet, we are still faced with the whole issue that, as we say in the creed each week, we believe that Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead. How should we prepare ourselves to be judged?

Believe it or not, two of our readings deal with the end times. The first one, the gospel, is easy to see. Jesus speaks words of comfort to us to give us an insight into the end times. To me, this is the difference between the Catholic approach and the approach of Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins, writers of the Left Behind books. Jesus tells the disciples that they will know the way to the Father and the Apostle Thomas, still doubting, asks how they know the way if they have never been there. Jesus responds to Thomas that he is The Way. He has to repeat this statement to Philip later who still thinks that Jesus can just give him GPS coordinates to heaven. Jesus is The Way. He isn’t just going to show us the way to the Father. He IS the way to the Father. Our responsibility, then, shouldn’t be to be seeking signs of Jesus’ return or trying to predict when it will take place. We should be trying to get to know and love Jesus so that we can get to know and love the Father.

The other reading that points to the end-times is the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. At this point in church history, the disciples thought that Jesus’ return would happen within their life-times. So, they have combined up most of their property in preparation. But, in order to make sure that everyone is fed in this group that is constantly increasing in size, the Apostles are taking more and more time each day giving out food and less and less time each day for prayer. We can all probably sympathize with this. Remember in High School and College when all you had to do each day was study and work a couple of hours at a job? Some of you never had this experience so bear with me for a moment. If you did have this experience, you probably had your parents to rely on to take care of the bigger problems of bills and repairs around the home. Do you remember that time when you looked around and realized that your life got a lot more complicated? You have to pay all the bills and make sure you’re not late or else you don’t have insurance or lights or gas. It’s so easy in these times of stress to quit doing things like reading books, praying, and studying. The Apostles knew they couldn’t let this happen so they asked the community to appoint deacons to assist them by bringing food to the Greek-speaking widows who felt neglected in the daily distribution. The point was that prayer needed to be a central place in each day for them to survive. It reminds me of a monastery visit I made in which a monk who had an hour of work still to do, put everything away because he knew it was time to pray and, had he finished, he would have missed prayer. He knew he had to spend time with the Way to the Father if he intended on being ready for eternal life.

In the end, as Catholics, we don’t get wrapped up in looking for the rapture or the beast or any of that stuff. We aren’t going to get lost looking in the Bible for clues to the end-times, as though the Bible were a mystery novel and we’ve been sent to solve it. Instead, through the sacraments and our prayer life, we draw closer each day to the one who alone knows how it end because he is the Way that leads to the Father. We take comfort in Jesus’ words: Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God, have faith also in the way.

Stay with us, Lord

My Dear Friends in Christ

May the Grace and Peace of our resurrected Lord Jesus Christ be with you as we continue to celebrate this Easter season. I have a friend who is a priest that I always see at priest gatherings. In a one-on-one situation, he’s a great person to talk to. He keeps the conversation going and always has interesting stories to tell. But, if you get him in a group, I hate talking to him because, as you talk to him, he is constantly scanning the room looking for someone else to talk to. I just want to grab his head, turn it towards me, and say, “Please pay attention to me while we are talking!”

I’m sure most of us would say that, when it comes to God, we want to put all our attention on our relationship with him. And yet, our readings today present us with three situations in which we’d probably prefer God wasn’t there. The first is illustrated in the gospel account of Jesus’ appearance to the disciples on the road to Emmaus. One commentator that I read said that this may have been Cleopas, whose father may have been the brother of St. Joseph, and Mary, his wife, who was present at the crucifixion next to the Blessed Mother and Mary of Magdala. If so, it stands to reason that this husband and wife, one a first cousin of Jesus and the other an eyewitness to his death, would have been very disappointed in the results of Good Friday and very skeptical of the women’s reports of the empty tomb. As they’re walking along, Jesus comes to them and starts talking to them but their eyes are prevented from seeing him. It’s only when he takes bread, blesses it, and hands it to them that the scales fall from their eyes and they are able to see. As one commentator put it, “Jesus miraculous presence is hardly necessary when one has his presence in the Eucharist.” Yet, honestly, how many times to we come to mass, not pay any attention to the prayers, barely listen to the readings or homily, scuttle to the front of the communion line, consume the host, and have no real sense that the Lord was here among us the whole time? Stay with us Lord when our spiritual blindness prevents us from recognizing you in the breaking of the bread.

In the second reading, the Apostle Peter exhorts us that, if we call God our Father, which we do each time we pray the Our Father, then we have to accept God as a father. Part of what isn’t communicated as well in today’s society as it would have been even 40 or 50 years ago is that we call God “Father” because he is head of the household. I’m not trying to diminish the role of women, especially on this day, Mother’s Day. But, one of the sad things that has happened to men in modern media is that we often view fathers as total buffoons. From Al Bundy to Homer Simpson to Peter Griffin to Doug Heffernen to Phil Dunfey and the list could go on and on and on, most fathers on television are shells of the real dads I’ve met who love their wives, work hard, and, yes, occasionally discipline their kids when they’re bad. I can’t help but notice that, as our image of fatherhood has been so diminished and distorted, so has our image of God as Father. We don’t like to think of God as being in charge or God as having the master plan. Stay with us, Lord, when we misunderstand you and distort who you are for our own convenience.

And, lastly, there’s the first reading. In this first Papal Address made by our first Pope, Peter courageously speaks to the people he blames for the death of Jesus, his fellow Jews. He addresses them and witnesses to them about how Jesus has appeared to him. In our modern era, religion is considered by many to be a private matter. Part of the reason for this is because we don’t want to seem like a Bible thumpers, right? First of all, most of us (myself included) don’t know enough Bible passages by heart to be a bible thumper but, just as important, we don’t want that image. And, yet, believing in Jesus demands that we speak to others about him, that we let others know about the love God has for them in sending his son to be our savior, especially in this time when there is so much misinformation out there about the church. Stay with us, Lord, when we are with others who need to know you.

We may think that we always want God to be close to us but there are times when we may think it would just as good if he wasn’t. In those times, it’s most important that we echo the prayer of two disciples on the road to Emmaus, “Stay with us, Lord.”

Some Reflections on my first Easter Vigil as a pastor

I've been waiting for the moment when I start to feel like I belong here. Things are starting to seem "normal" here instead of like everything is constantly changing.

This Easter Vigil was very special for me. It was the first time I celebrated it as a pastor. I'd done my best to avoid celebrating it before because I said that the pastor should always be the one to bring people into the church. I was able to sit and listen to all the wonderful Old Testament readings (We did five) and I chanted probably 75% of the prayers (including Eucharistic Prayer I) and I managed to use incense and not spill the coals (unlike Holy Thursday!).

Probably the time that just hit me was when my butt hit the chair after communion for a few moments of reflection/thanksgiving. The choir started singing Regina Coeli Latare and I thought to myself: Rejoice, O Church for he who Mary bore has truly risen. Alleluia.

He is Risen. He is truly risen.

Allow hope to overcome fear

My dear Friends in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in our Risen Savior as we gather here for the Easter Vigil. The case is often made that, as Catholics, we never read the Bible. Well, you can’t say that about this mass. We seem to have covered almost the entire Bible tonight. As I was praying over the readings, I couldn’t hope but notice a theme. God continually drives out fear with hope. We heard in the first reading how he made the earth and gave us a special role in it with a dominion proper to men and women. It’s not until the next chapter with the story of Adam and Eve that fear enters the world through sin. This was the fear that Abraham overcame when he travelled three days into the wilderness to slaughter his son, Isaac. God ultimately spared the Son of Abraham. And because of his obedience to the unfair request of God, Abraham is told that his name will be a blessing to many nations, and it is to anyone who calls themselves Jew, Christian, or Muslim. Yes, God spared the son of Abraham in hope and did not spare his own son to put an end to fear and start a new beginning of hope to all the nations through Jesus.

It was fear that caused the Moses and the Israelites to question whether God would save them from the oncoming Egyptian force. Yet, God had their back by sending his angel to protect them so that the Egyptians could not get close. Then he opened a way through the waters of the Red Sea so that only His people could pass, not the Egyptians. He used the waters of the Red Sea to point to the hopeful waters of Baptism, which drive out the fear of death.

This is what St. Paul was talking about in his letter to the Romans. Baptism is, for us, an entrance into the resurrected life of Jesus. He has died for us and we enter into his death in the waters of Baptism. He died for us so that we may no longer be a slave to sin. To me, the ultimate symbol of hope overcoming fear is in the gospel. There is an earthquake because the Angel of the Lord has moved the rock that blocked the way to the tomb of Jesus. The Angel, who appears in dazzling white, scares the guards so much that they become like dead men. Fear can be paralyzing like that sometimes. Yet, the women who have faith can see through the tumult of an earthquake, the hope that lies behind it. They hear the hopeful words of the Angel that he is risen. They ran fearful but overjoyed to the disciples. The fear is natural but Jesus had to get rid of it so that they could be completely hopeful witnesses so he, likewise, appears to them to drive out any vestige of fear they may have.

At our 13 hours, Fr. Hertges talked about how hope drives out fear. I kept thinking of all the things in this world that so easily deflate the kind of pithy hope that most people have. Internationally, the United States is in a four front war in the Middle East. There have been so many natural disasters; earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, etc. that it’s hard to keep up with it all. Gas prices keep going higher and higher and the economy keeps getting worse and worse and, to be honest, I’m not sure any politician has the selflessness, let alone the intelligence, to be able to deal with it. Our church’s struggle with sexual abuse has diminished our voice on moral matters to the extent that it seems to be ignored by everyone. And, still, there’s hope. In the face of all this tumult, the angel of the Lord looks at each of us and says, “Do not be afraid!” God has conquered sin and death. Jesus is raised from the dead. Alleluia! Alleluia!

We are to be like the women in the gospel today and announce the Good News of Jesus’ resurrection to the whole world. Like the women, we are undoubtedly afraid to do so because we may be spurned, mocked, and ridiculed. Allow Jesus, who comes to us tonight in bread and wine, to open your heart to his call to evangelization. Go tell your brothers and sisters to go to church, here they will see him. Here they will find hope to overcome fear. Here they will die with Christ so as to rise with him.

Reflections on the Good Friday Service

Before Lent began, I met with the Forest City Ministerial Association to talk about the things ministerial associations normally talk about; pray together, work on a communal charitable effort, and get to know each other so we don't demonize each other. I found out that we do an ecumenical Good Friday service and they asked for a speaker. No one spoke up...one of the worst things that can happen to a "helper" personality like mine. I volunteered and then completely forgot that I had volunteered until I was reminded LAST WEEK! Yikes! Thankfully, the other minister they had paired with me had put great thought into it and had an entire service in mine. He even brought his own musicians along.

I wore my cassock and sat nervously next to the only other minister wearing a clergy collar. We sang hymns and heard John 19:1-30 and then I stepped forward to preach. Now, in the past three days, I've had two absolute train wrecks happen. First, in the middle of the chrism mass, I had to leave because over being overheated. Then, at the end of Holy Thursday mass, I spilled a coal from the censor and nearly started myself and the church on fire. So, I wondered what was next.

Nothing was next. I preached. No one was hurt. I had great compliments. And the people said, "Amen."

...Hell trembles in fear.

Dearly Beloved in Christ

Grace and Peace to you in God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit as we come together from our various Christian Communities to remember the events Good Friday. I’d like to begin my reflection today by quoting an ancient reflection typically read on Holy Saturday. I think it’s just as applicable today as it is tomorrow.

“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 He has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh, and hell trembles with fear.”

The Gospel of John’s account of the death of our Lord offers some incredibly beautiful insights for us to reflect upon in this Good Friday celebration. Despite the fact that Pilate believes he is in control, it becomes clear that he is not. The question that comes to mind as he is trying to decide how to treat Jesus is who is in charge? Is it God? Is It Caesar? Is it the devil? At different points throughout John 19, it seems like any one of these three are in fact in charge. When Pilate indicates that he is willing to release Jesus, the Jewish leaders proclaim fidelity to Caesar. Indeed, it seems that Pilate most fears that, by releasing Jesus, he may be releasing a competitor for his bosses’ job. Jesus focuses him back where he belongs and reminds him, “You would have no power over me at all if it had not been given you from above; that is why the man who handed me over to you has the greater guilt.” In some ways, Jesus is expunging Pilate of the guilt of passing sentence by saying that there is one who has committed a worse sin by handing him over to be crucified. Who is Jesus condemning here? Who handed him over? Judas merely handed him over to the Jews, who have not authority to crucify. He had no idea what his actions did. Plus, he has already gone to his death and is at the mercy of the Father. Some have suggested that this a reference to the High Priest, Caiaphas. I’d like to suggest that there is something deeper happening here.

In trying to decide what to do with Jesus’ clothes, there is one garment that is left undivided. This was done, as John the Evangelist said, to fulfill sacred scripture, Psalm 22, “Many dogs surround me; a pack of evildoers closes in on me. So wasted are my hands and feet that I can count all my bones. They stare at me and gloat; they divide my garments among them; for my clothing they cast lots.” Yet, John the Evangelist sees in this action a symbolism for the need for Christians to be united. That’s why it is so fitting that we would gather together on Good Friday to remember the death of Our Lord and to pray for greater unity among all Christians, that we may be one as Father, Son, and Spirit are One. From now on, Jesus will seek to make sure that there is greater unity among the people all the way until he breathes his last. From the cross, he makes sure that his elderly mother is cared for by his apostle, John.

At the end, he breathes a phrase that could sound, in most Bibles, like utter frustration, “It is finished.” Jesus has suffered enough. He is ready to stop fulfilling prophecy, to stop fighting, and give up his Spirit. It sounds like a cancer patient who has fought bravely against the illness giving into the inevitable. Jesus can do no more so it’s time to stop fighting.

If we were to believe that, we couldn’t be more wrong. Jesus isn’t, in frustration, throwing up his hands. He is saying that everything is in place now, everything is complete, everything has been fulfilled. In this statement, we finally get an answer as to who is really in charge and who is really the one who handed him over. The devil, in hell, thought he had pulled off the perfect coup, as he had done in the garden. Just as he had convinced Adam and Eve to commit the first sin, to clothe themselves with garments of shame, and to be thrown out the garden, so he now thinks that he has clothed the king of Glory in the shame of death on the cross, with the mocking clothes of a King on his body. Yet, now all is set for the conquering of death in the resurrection, the folly of the garden overcome by the glorious death of the cross. It is finished, it is fulfilled…and hell trembles in fear.

We await the resurrection of the body

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. In a past assignment, I was asked to go and officiate at a graveside service for someone whose funeral mass has been in Denver, Colorado. It was one of those situations where the person died in Colorado but wanted to be buried back here in Iowa but the priest (for obvious reasons) didn’t want to tag along for the burial. I arrived at the rural cemetery on a typical Iowa summer day. It was somewhere between 95 and a hundred million degrees outside. And the farmer that had the field adjoining the cemetery decided it would be the perfect day to fertilize his crops so the fresh smell of hog manure greeted us as we stepped out of our vehicles. I decided then and there to be brief. There was only a few family members present along with the urn that contained the cremains of their father. I did all the burial prayers, “Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust…” but felt relief when it was all over and I could finally leave. As I opened the door to my truck, one of the daughters of the man who had passed away came up to me with two small boxes approximately the size of ring boxes. She asked if I would bless them. I asked what they were and they said the crematorium provided small “take home” portions of the cremains for each child but put the majority in the urn. I couldn’t believe it. The church is very clear about cremains. We don’t have a problem with them as long as they are kept intact and buried in one spot. Yet, the hot smell of hog manure was so overwhelming that all I wanted to do was get away as quickly as possible. So, instead of doing what I should have done and told them to put them in the grave, I said a blessing, got into my truck, and inhaled for the first time in fifteen minutes.

As I look back on that experience, I have to admit to my own confusion surrounding the church’s teaching on burial. Why should we believe we need to buried in one spot? I think of the number of people who have died in airplane and helicopter accidents in which no bodies were recoverable. Or the people who have lost a limb throughout their life that aren’t buried with the limb. Or, what about all the saints whose bodies are put into altars throughout the world. Why would the body of a saint, who we’re sure will one day be resurrected, be allowed to be scattered around several churches, perhaps even in several different continents if being buried in one spot was so important?

The Greek Philosopher Plato who believed that we are made up of body and soul, the body being evil and the soul being good. Christians take our understanding of the body from the Jews. The Jews believed that the human being is made up of a body and a soul and that one without the other is not a real existence. A souless body is dead. A bodiless soul is an evil spirit seeking to take possession of a body. When body and soul are matched up by God then he puts his spirit which holds them together.

Our readings today talk a lot about this dynamic. Focusing on the gospel, we hear about the death of this man Lazarus. Jesus is confronted by his friends Martha and Mary that had he been there, their brother would still be alive. They are, understandably, struggling with the reality of the loss of a loved one so you can’t be too hard on them. The trouble is that, despite the fact that they should know him better than most people, they only seem to have faith in Jesus the healer. He needs them to have faith in himself as the resurrection. So, in order to show that he was the resurrection, he brought their brother back to life.

Part of the reason the church asks that we not scatter our ashes all over the place is to show respect for the body. Some people believe that, after death, we become pure spirit and live in heaven as such. But, each time that we gather together for church we profess in the Creed that we believe in the resurrection of the body. We aren’t just referring to Jesus’ bodily resurrection. We’re talking about the resurrection of our own bodies. We are given a body and a soul from God. Both are gifts given to us to be used with care and respect. As we prepare for the great victory over sin and death that is the cross, let us remember that we hope to raised body and soul in Spirit.

The weekend and why my homily will take a while...

This weekend started off good enough. The weather was going to be warm with chances of rain in the evenings, which was really good considering how horribly my last week had gone. It was just a very busy week with way too many 13 and 14 hour days. I got to Friday and realized that, if I didn’t do something stupid, I may actually have an entire evening free. I got caught up on some emails and telephone calls and I tried to focus on the readings for Sunday Mass. Nothing was coming to me. I couldn’t find a message my people needed to hear. I went to bed confident that it would come.

On Saturday, I slept in a little. I’d had some short nights the previous week and thought it would be good to try and catch up. I prayed, had confession, and did some laundry. After confessions were over, I returned to my homily and prayed over the readings some more. Still, nothing was coming to me. For four hours I prayed and for four hours nothing would come to me. I went to the my files and pulled out a homily from six years ago that I wasn’t satisfied with but that had to do. In the middle of preaching at my first mass, the homily came to me. It was like I was hearing them for the first time with clarity. I went to my other rectory and wrote down what I wanted to say and even managed to get to bed early.

On Sunday, I woke up and preached the new homily at the two morning masses, went to an Eagle Scout ceremony, had two communal reconciliations and then collapsed back in my other rectory. I read a little of the Pope’s new book (Jesus of Nazareth 2) and went to sleep. All in all, a good, full day.

I remember being in Ames in my last assignment and thanking God that these incredibly busy days were few and far between. I tend to remember the days when I would be able to spend time with students or days I would take some time to go work in my garden around the little church in Gilbert. It takes days like this to remind me of those other days; days when I would sleep poorly thinking about all the appointments I had for the next day or days when I had to go home to let off some steam after a particular trying staff meeting. I’m glad I don’t think about those days all the time. 

The woman at the well

I preached this weekend about how the woman at the well was hurting because of her married life and how Jesus came to her and forgave her. I talked about how Jesus, as the stream of living water, was articulating a theology of baptism, which is a sacrament of entrance into the church and forgiveness of sins. I also talked about how being baptized demands that we tell others about the forgiveness of sins offered to us in baptism. We all know people who are hurting, people who need to feel the loving forgiveness of Jesus and, as baptized people, we must be like the woman at the well and lead them to the source of living water.

Unfortunately, because of two funerals, an extra mass for a retreat, and preparation for 13 hours, my homily remained as an outline and not the full text.

Could we start again, please?

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 as we delve deeper into this Lenten season. One of my favorite plot schemes in modern television and movies happens when a character is faced with a future version of himself coming back to give him guidance. This plot scheme is a staple of the Science Fiction industry, of which, I hate to admit, I am an addict. I like the plot scheme because it makes me wonder when I would return to my former self to intervene. Think about it from your own life. Is there something you’ve done that you would like to go back and witness or something you did you wish you could go back and change. I could go back and stop myself from being hit by that car when I was a kid or go back and watch my priesthood ordination. I think the hardest thing to do would be to pick the point that I would want to go back to.

In today’s gospel, Jesus chooses right now to reveal something to his disciples. We’re at seventeen out of twenty eight chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, a long time away from the crucifixion, and Jesus reveals to his disciples a glimpse of himself as Messiah. The glimpse is eerily similar to an incident involving Moses in the Old Testament. In chapter thirty four of Exodus, Moses and two of his associates go up a mountain and leave the rest of the Israelites at the foot of the mountain. While there, Moses’ face shines white while reflecting the glory of God and the law is revealed to him. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus face was, likewise, changed along with his clothes. The biggest difference is that, whereas Moses was reflecting the glory of God, Jesus was the glory of God. His face shines and his clothes shine as well. He is the light, not the reflection of that light. And, to underscore this difference, Moses and Elijah stand beside him to represent the Law and the Prophets. Jesus is showing that he has been the light guiding the Jewish people to salvation all along.

Each year that we read this reading, I think to myself; wouldn’t this be more suitable during Easter? Lent is supposed to be a sad time, a time of mortification. Shouldn’t our readings focus us on sad things? The closest thing to something sad you can experience in the Transfiguration is how impetuous Peter behaves. Rather than simply take in what is happening, Peter feels like he has to interject something. “Let us make tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” In some ways, Peter acts like the guy who tries to steal the spotlight from an otherwise incredible evening. And yet, Peter is actually getting the point of the exercise. One of the Jewish Holidays that Jesus and the Apostles participated in was called Succoth. It was a holiday reminding the Jewish people that God met Moses in a tent and that he called them to live in tents for forty days and forty nights while on their way to the Promised Land. Peter’s suggestion, then, fits in perfectly. He recognizes that Jesus, as Messiah, should be in a tent similar to the tent of meeting. Peter didn’t realize that this vision he, James, and John were sharing simply wasn’t going to last long enough for any such construction. Instead, as at Jesus baptism, we have the image of the trinity as the voice of God overshadows the son through the Sprit-filled cloud which declares Jesus as the Son.

We are now two and a half weeks into Lent. For me, this is the time when my spiritual practices begin to waver. I may have slipped up and had a burger on a Friday by accident or forgot to allow enough time to get my entire holy hour in or I look over at unmade rice bowl still sitting where I threw it after Ash Wednesday mass. I tend to feel tempted to give up. I think that’s why we have this image of the Transfiguration in the middle of Lent. Sure it’s happy. But there’s nothing that says Lent has to be a miserable time of suffering. Lent should be a time of renewal, a time to shed the things that weigh us down in our journey toward God. Perhaps the best thing that we can do is do what Jesus and his inner circle did: Go away to a deserted place and open ourselves to the presence of God to allow our hearts to be transfigured so that we can renew our Lenten commitment.

Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving

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 begin the Lenten Fast. We begin today by focusing on fasting. Our readings tell us what value fasting has for us. The first reading talked about it in the context of the reconciling nature of fasting. The Prophet Joel says, “Even now, says the LORD, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning; Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the LORD, your God.” Jesus speaks of fasting as something that we should do in secret. We are to wash our face and anoint our head. Fasting is one of the central penitential practices of the Catholic Church, certainly something that is closely associated with our tradition.

Once I was visiting with a deacon candidate who said that he was pondering how much sense the church year makes. He said that, in winter, we tend to add a few pounds and we need a time in the church year to diet to lose those pounds, and that is what Lent is all about. I told him that he might want to rethink that analysis. The reason we fast during Lent is not to lose weight so we’ll look good in a swimsuit. That’s the reason we diet. Dieting is not the same thing as fasting. One goes on a diet in order to have a healthier, better looking body. One fasts in order to have a healthier, better looking spirit. We fast to remind ourselves that the one thing that we cannot do without, the one thing that would stop our existence is the absence of God. We can fast from facebook, from the computer in general, from swearing, from alcohol, and even from something that we know we need like food. But we cannot make it a single day without God.

One of the things Fr. Hertges and I have learned at our leadership training course, however, is you can’t just fast from something without replacing it. Otherwise, you just sit around and think about what you’re trying to fast from. The church offers two ideas that can fill our time in the wake of fasting; prayer and almsgiving. We can use the time we gain from fasting to spend more time in prayer or, if we do enough prayer, to spend time doing some charitable act for someone else.

Ultimately, Lent is meant to offer a change of heart. That’s why Jesus encourages us to keep these acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving to ourselves. They aren’t meant to be used to impress people. They’re meant to live out the message of St. Paul from the second reading, “Working together, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. For he says: In an acceptable time I heard you, and on the day of salvation I helped you. Behold, now is a very acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”

What are your priorities?

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. Last Tuesday, I had the opportunity to meet with the ministerial association of Britt. During part of that time, we talked about how we handled Last Sunday’s ice storm. We all hate to cancel church on Sunday and, believe it or not, none of us cancelled them in Britt. Unfortunately, Fr. Hertges and I felt we had to cancel the late masses in Garner and Forest City because the weather had just got to the point where no one should have been out. One of the pastors commented that he had a much smaller congregation than normal and was surprised to see that some of the people who felt it was far too treacherous to go to church on Sunday were willing to travel all the way over to Mason City the next day to the West Hancock girl’s basketball game. He said that the weather was worse on Monday, having snowed all day on top of the ice that we got on Sunday.

In today’s gospel, Jesus exhorts us to not worry about our life. He asks us why we worry so much about the clothes we wear or the food we eat. In some ways, it’s hard for us to truly appreciate what Jesus is saying considering how available food and clothes are for us nowadays. We have refrigerators and freezers to store food and grocery stores to readily supply us with food. It would have been a bit different in a completely agrarian society where you would be expected to grow your own food and store enough to last through the winter. And we have department stores where we can go to buy clothes. Imagine if you would have had to shear the sheep to make wool which eventually would become clothing for you. I imagine that a lot of time each day would have gone towards figuring out how much food you can eat today and have for tomorrow and whether pieces of clothing needed to be patched or thrown away and replaced. Paying attention to clothes and food would have been the mark of adulthood, in some way. And Jesus is trying to get across to his listeners that one shouldn’t be so preoccupied by taking care of the basic necessities of life that we forget the one who supplies those necessities in the first place. He says, “…seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be given you besides. Do not worry about tomorrow, tomorrow with take care of itself.”

What are the activities that you wake up and think about first in the day? If you’re in debt, it might be how you’re going to get out. If you’re sick, it might be how you’re going to be healthy. It could be that game on Facebook that you play. It might be making sure that you set your DVR correctly to record your favorite television show. Whatever it is that keeps you awake at night with worry or makes you wake up in the middle of the night, let us once again listen to the words of Jesus, “Can any of you by worrying add a single minute to your life-span?”

We are just a short week and a half away from Lent; the time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. As Catholics, we are trained to ask each other what we are giving up. This year, our readings challenge us to take to hear the real reason for the season. As we look at those things that add worries and stress to our lives, is there some way that we can fast from the worry and stress and replace it with prayer and charitable acts? How can we stop worrying so much about food, clothes, and money and use that energy to draw closer to God?

Loving enemies

My Dear brothers and sisters in Christ

May the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit come upon you and remain with you forever. In last week’s gospel, Jesus continued his Sermon on the Mount with a series of statements that take the law and ratchet it up a step. He says repeatedly, “You have heard that it was said…but I say to you.” In last week’s gospel, Jesus gave four examples of how his disciples weren’t going to live by the bare minimum of the law but, instead, live moral lives that surpassed it. He continues today with the last two examples that he offers both on how we are to love. To summarize, he says first: don’t take revenge on those who harm you, instead remain unaffected by them and go the extra mile for someone in need. And, second, don’t just love those who will love you back. Instead, make a special effort to love those who won’t love you back. I find both of these injunctions incredibly difficult. When someone harms me either with words or actions, my first reaction is to fight back. I really have to calm myself down and ignore that first impulse. I imagine we all do. It’s not natural, for instance, when someone slaps your right cheek to not recoil or put up your hand and, instead, cock your head in the other direction and get ready to be slapped on the other cheek. It’s not easy to be sure to show the same kindness to someone who hates you that you would to someone who loves you.

Yet, there’s a side to these two passages that bug the heck out of me. For instance, I wouldn’t in a million years say to a wife whose husband abuses her or her children that she just needs to turn and offer him her other cheek. Nor would I say to a High School-aged guy whose classmates were bullying him that he should love them and let them do horrible things to him. In both those cases, my blood starts to boil at just the thought of the person feeling trapped and abused and I feel like I must intervene. Would Jesus condemn me for telling a wife whose husband is abusing her that she deserves better and should go somewhere safe? Would he take away my priesthood for telling bullied teenager that it’s okay to report those who are bullying him, that, in fact he’s being stronger by doing that than by keeping quiet?
Part of what Jesus is trying to get across in the gospel today is that, even though we are entitled to do so, we shouldn’t get wrapped up in seeking retribution. If someone slapped you in his day, you had the right to demand a certain amount of money as recompense for the grievance. And if someone was considered an enemy, it was expected that you would exclude them from celebrations and wouldn’t do anything nice to them. In both cases, Jesus is trying to get us to see how destructive it is to get wrapped up in that tit-for-tat litigiousness. Holding a grudge just gets in the way of being perfect like God is perfect. Ultimately, God could remember everything that we have ever done that deserves punishment but, through Christ, he has set us free from those punishments so that we can walk in the freedom of his Children. Don’t get wrapped up in punishing those who hurt you unless you yourself want to be punished by those you have hurt.

Laws are meant to define the minimum. Loving God demands total sublimation of the will

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 beautiful Sabbath day. When I still in grade school, my older brothers had a Lenten tradition that I would occasionally get to participate in. Some of you may have had a similar tradition. During Lent, my mom was a little more stringent than the church and would make us fast, not only from meat, but also from eating between meals. The church only mandates that we do that on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Nonetheless, my brothers would wait until 11:37 pm then and call Dominoes Pizza to order a pizza that would be delivered to our house a little after midnight. They were definitely fulfilling the law, just barely. Like the kid who’s asked to take his laundry to his room who puts in on the floor right inside his bedroom door or the kid that’s asked to pick up her toys who simply pushes them all to the corner of the room, we just did enough to make sure that we didn’t get into trouble.

When Christianity was being formed, there was a debate within the church as to the role the Old Testament law would play. If you simply read St. Paul, you could get the impression that we should view the Old Testament as a museum, something that used to be important that is no longer. Yet, to balance this out, we have today’s rather lengthy gospel. Jesus begins by saying that the law hasn’t passed away. In fact, Jesus hasn’t come to abolish the law but to bring a perfection to it by fulfilling it. He then shows what that fulfillment looks like by using a total of six examples, of which we hear four. First, don’t just avoid killing people. Avoid becoming angry with your neighbor and do what you can to reconcile with him. Secondly, don’t just avoid committing adultery. Don’t look with lust at someone, especially someone who isn’t your boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse. Thirdly, don’t divorce despite the fact that Moses allowed for it. Lastly, don’t just avoid swearing false oaths. Don’t swear oaths at all. Instead, just live your life in such a way that you fulfill the agreements that you make so that you don’t need to make oaths. Each of these examples takes a law that was already on the books and ratchets up the expectations. It definitely challenges the people who think that Jesus wasn’t about rules or laws but only cared that we be nice to one another. Jesus wasn’t a hippie pacifist. He expected that his followers obey the law and that they do so to a degree that others in the world didn’t.

Nonetheless, as I said before, there is a tension in scripture that is very much still present in the church today. Paul says that the law is unimportant, Jesus says that he is the fulfillment of the law and that his followers will follow every letter and then some. The way we feel the tension is, often, in certain hot-button moral issues. For example with the issue of homosexuality; Church leadership says that scripture and tradition are clear that homosexual actions are not allowed even if the person is to be treated with dignity. Some theologians and many gay rights activists say to us, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” The church advocates maintaining the law as it is and gets criticized for being mired in the law, which was abolished by Jesus Christ. Really? Did they read today’s Gospel? Or, as another example, a few years ago, the church put out a statement clarifying that artificial nutrition and hydration, the use of feeding tubes and IV’s, should not be considered extraordinary measures when it comes to end of life issues. In other words, if someone would be able to live given the presence of food and water, even if the quality of their life might not be what we consider worthwhile, the person should continue to be fed and receive water. There were some who said we were invading people’s private choices and imposing an unfair moral mandate for something that should be left to a person’s conscience.

The law was meant to define minimums for us; the least that we have to do to be okay in the eyes of God. Both Paul and Jesus agree that the problem with the law is that we shouldn’t define our lives by asking: What’s the least I have to do to get into heaven. We should be constantly seeking to grow deeper in holiness. God asks that we lead our lives in radical conformity to his will.