28 OT B : Give!

Friends

Peace be with you. 

Generally around this time of year, priests give a sacrificial giving homily. I haven’t done one since coming to St. Patrick’s so you’ll have to forgive me if this sounds a little clunky. Some priests, in fact, feel so uncomfortable about talking about money that they ask a lay person to do it. In a previous assignment, the pastor would give the lay presenter talking points but they’d have to make them a part of  their own story. One of the talking points was to talk about a time you received something unexpectedly after giving something. People would universally talk about a time they were down to their last twenty dollars and they saw a poor person and gave it to them only to get paid a hundred dollars by a person who owed them money or to find some forgotten cash in a pocket. My concern was that people may get the wrong message about why it’s important to give. 

Our gospel for today tells a story that has provided a lot of discussion for me throughout the years. The question people ask me is if I think this is the last interaction Jesus had with this rich young man. Some are convinced it is not, that he went away but eventually came back willing to give up all that he had to follow Jesus. It may even be that, the reason that the man’s name is not mentioned but his youthfulness is is because he was known to the community Mark is writing to but that he is older at the time. This is, therefore, seen as a moment of youthful indiscretion. However, I’m not convinced. Maybe I’m just a pessimist but I think the reason the man’s name was not mentioned was because he walked away and is now seen as unmentionable by the community. Imagine being the person who walked up to Jesus and asked what he had to do to inherit eternal life and was told that he was already doing it, just follow the commandments. But, that’s not a good enough answer so you ask if you can do more and, when you were told what you could do in order to do more, it’s too hard so you just give up. You abandon Jesus as he is surrounded by people who HAVE given up everything to follow him. Remember, this is the time when it’s easy to follow Jesus. I don’t get why people would think the man would come back when people are screaming “crucify him, crucify him” and he’s being nailed to a cross.

We stand in the footsteps of those apostles who have given up everything in order to follow Jesus. Some of this has to do with giving our time and talents to help serve the fish fries or sit for an hour in the reservation chapel at adoration or help teach Catechesis of the Good Shepherd or volunteer in some other way. But the parish also has financial needs and I would ask you to prayerfully consider how much you can give. As a parish, we have worked to live within the means we have while we do the improvements to our campus like repairing cracked and broken sidewalks and driveways and adding to our parking lots. We have made sure that when things wear out, we replace them with high quality materials that we can afford. I’m exploring the possibility of putting solar panels on the parish hall anticipating that energy prices will continue to rise and we will benefit from the affordability and reliability of the products that are out there. However, as you have undoubtedly experienced, inflation has affected us in things like garbage bags, toilet tissue and other staples. And we need to continue to work to pay our great staff salaries that are a living wage. So, I ask that you look at your financial situation and consider if you are able to increase your overall tithing. You can give electronically or in person, that’s up to you. Also, please consider talking to the Catholic Foundation to include this parish in your will. If, when you die, you want to contribute to St. Patrick’s parish endowment fund, it will ensure that you leave a legacy that will help this parish pay bills long after you have passed. 

Jesus challenges us to give today. We can’t do so expecting that we’ll receive more money afterwards. What we will receive has to do with being unburdened with the distraction of chasing after more and more money and, instead, being rewarded with the freedom of being able to focus on Christ.

26 OT B: Don’t harm the little one’s faith

Friends

Peace be with you.

This past week, while driving in Nebraska, I turned on a podcast about the origins of Angel Studios. In case you don’t know, Angel Studios is a crowd funded television and movie studio that gave us the Chosen, Sound of Freedom, Cabrini, and other morally positive content that the mainstream studios don’t seem to want to produce. I’ve recently joined their streaming service, called the Angel Guild, because I wanted to watch the Story of Possum Trot. I learned from this podcast that the founders are three brothers who developed the Angel App a few years ago, a streaming service that sanitized major Hollywood blockbuster movies of any racy content. They were sued by those same studios for copyright infringement and lost a lot of money because of it. But, in the process, they learned that there was a sizable market of people that wanted movies and television shows that promoted the life of faith and that there were plenty of content creators who were being blocked by the mainstream studios from telling their stories. All of that appealed to me. In the middle of the story, however, they dropped a bomb on me that, frankly, I should have seen coming because the names they choose for their projects always involve the word angel. These brothers are Mormon, or Latter Day Saints as they prefer to be called. At that point in the podcast, I started to question whether I should participate in Angel Studios.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past week reflecting on the Ninth Chapter of Mark’s Gospel. The passage we just heard comes from the end of that Chapter. The beginning tells the story of the Transfiguration, which is why I spent so much time reflecting on this chapter. The spiritual direction program in which I’m starting to participate is called the Institute of the Transfiguration. At the beginning retreat past weekend, which is the reason I was gone by the way, we spent an hour a piece praying over each of the three passages that describe the transfiguration. Then, starting on Monday, I kept praying in my holy hours until I got to this passage at the end of Chapter 9. Something kind of interesting jumped out at me when I got there. You see, as Jesus, Peter, James, and John came down the mountain, they encountered the apostles who weren’t called up the Mount of Transfiguration arguing with some Scribes about a man whose son was possessed by a demon that mimicked symptoms of a seizure. They’re arguing because no one seems able to cure the boy. Jesus heals him and, when his own followers ask why they couldn’t, he replies that this demon could only be exercised with prayer. Now, just a few verses later, the Apostle John tells Jesus that there is some guy driving out demons in His name but he isn’t a follower of Jesus. What is he really asking? A few moments before, Jesus’ followers tried to drive a demon in His name and they couldn’t do it because it had to be driven out in prayer and, now, some dude who isn’t even a follower is driving out demons in Jesus’ name. You’d think Jesus would be as outraged as John obviously is but, instead, he says that they shouldn’t prevent him because you generally don’t talk poorly about someone in whose name you are doing mighty deeds. If he isn’t against them, he must be for them. So I guess it’s okay to be affiliated with three Mormon brothers if they are working with us and not against us, right?

Remember also that, last week, Jesus encouraged his followers that, if they wanted to be great, they had to become the least and he placed a child in front of them and said, ““Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.” This week, he offers the more negative side of this same argument when he says that, if you harm a little child, it would be better to go jump off a cliff with a rock around your neck. Even as important as protecting little children is, the point that Jesus is driving home is more about the age of people’s faith. He’s really talking to the apostles, and therefore to us, and telling us that we’ve got to be the adults who help people with a less developed faith to grow in it, which may involve having to remove aspects of ourselves that get in the way.

Jesus uses body parts as examples but, in today’s world, the question we may want to ask ourselves is does our need to be right or our impatience or our skepticism of the other affect our ability to reach out in charity to the stranger who may just be beginning a life of faith and, if so, how can we cut it out?

23 OT B Jesus goes on sabbatical and still gets graded!

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

I had four internships in my years of seminary, three that took place in parishes in the Archdiocese of Dubuque and one at a hospital in Des Moines. I found them all to be times when I felt like I was being affirmed on my journey to priesthood. Yet, there were also times when I felt like I was being challenged and totally unworthy of being a priest. Most of the time, this happened at the end of my time when I would sit down with the director of seminarians and the internship director to reflect on my growing edges that need to be softened. A particularly hard evaluation took place at one of the parishes in which I didn’t get along well with the pastor and expected a very poor evaluation. Yet, when I opened up the form on which the pastor had written his evaluation, I was kind of shocked to read glowing reviews. He said things like “Dennis preaches well. Dennis sings well. People feel like they can talk to and relate to Dennis well.” He honestly even wrote “Dennis does all things well.” There wasn't a single negative comment on the sheet. I thought to myself, "I'm not perfect! This isn't right. Where's the negative feedback?" I felt cheated. 

That was kind-of my reaction to today's gospel. We're used to criticism being heaved at Jesus from all sides. He gets criticism from the Pharisees, Sadducees, disciples, and crowds. It's very rare that people say, "He does all things well." What’s surprising is where he is when he gets these rave reviews. The area called the Decapolis incorporates, as the Greek name suggests, ten towns. Think “deca” as in decade, ten years, or decathlon, ten sporting events. And the last part, polis, is the Greek word for town, which is why Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Annapolis end with it. The fact that the word derives from Greek tells you that these probably aren’t predominately Jewish towns in nature. Jesus grew up in Nazareth, which, from archaeology, we know had a large synagogue capable of fitting almost the whole town in it, so it was predominantly Jewish. When Jesus preached in that synagogue, he couldn’t heal anyone because of the hardness of their heart and they got so upset at him because of that, that they almost threw him off a cliff to kill him. Yet, now that he’s on a kind of sabbatical in this diverse town with Jews and Gentiles alike, he finds such tremendous faith that, right from the start, he heals a deaf man. Now this man will be able to hear him preach. He even tries to tell the people who are present for the healing not to speak about him but it says, the more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it. They say,  “He does all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” This is the evaluation he gets from strangers while his friends and family try to kill him. 

At a recent conference, they talked about negative self-talk. That’s that inner monologue we have that says we’re not good enough. Garth Brooks described it as “a tape of my failures playing inside my head”, which I think is really good description. Negative self talk says we can’t do something even before we try usually because we tried before and failed. Negative self-talk says our heart is bad because we make mistakes. Negative self-talk says that person doesn't like me because I’m not likable or lovable. Negative self-talk hears about original sin and says we can never be free of it, that we can never walk as free children of God. Negative self-talk says God may care for people in general but He doesn’t care about me in particular. Negative self talk sees only the bad things that happen and says we deserve them. Negative self talk is a self-defeating prophecy. It’s a false sense of humility that, ultimately, stifles the spirit inviting us to throw into the deep or go places to spread the gospel because we aren’t worthy. But you are worthy, not because of how talented you are or because you do all things well but entirely because Jesus does all things well and wants to open your ears to hear his word and your mouth to proclaim his praise to the ends of the world. 

How does negative self talk stop you from seeing Jesus do all things well for you and proclaiming that to the world?

22 OT B Finding what was here all along

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

The other day, after showing a video in the Fireplace Room on the first floor of the rectory, I picked up my Roku streaming device and started walking it back up to my apartment to put it away. Before I hit the first step to go upstairs, I thought to myself that I needed to grab the remote control for it. So I retraced my steps back to the TV but it wasn’t there. I had gone into the kitchenette to put away my plate so I must have put it there. But It wasn’t there. I walked to the place where I was sitting for the video to see if it was sitting on the table but it wasn’t there. I started to get frazzled wondering how you misplace something in such a small space, a feeling I have often by the way, and then looked down at my hands and realized I had been carrying the remote control the whole time. 

This past week, we celebrated the Memorial of one of the most influential theologians in church history: St. Augustine. One of his most quoted sayings comes from a book called The Confessions. It says…

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! 

You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you…”

St. Augustine was admitting that, in his search for God, he was a bit like me looking for that remote control that was in my hand. God was nearer to him than he could have ever imagined but he was looking everywhere else for him. Moses, in talking to the Israelites in the first reading, says that the whole point of the law is to remind the people how near God is to them, how close to them that they are to Him. Their neighbors will see how they prosper because they know what God wants. It’s like the people of the Old Testament will be the best baseball or football team because their coach worked directly with them and showed them how best to live a holy life. That’s the role of the law, to show the people how to live such a just life that they begin to live a life like God would live if he were incarnate. Which is what makes it so uncomfortable when he did become incarnate and, instead of worrying about living the way God wants them to live, they have taken a law that was intended for a specific group of people in a specific situation and applied it to everyone in every situation. The priests were meant to wash their hands before they served in the temple and that somehow became a demand for everyone to wash their hands before they eat anything. The point obviously isn’t that you shouldn’t wash your hands before you eat, which is a good hygienic thing to do, but that a rule broadened by their ancestors to apply to everyone is being treated as just as important as God’s laws. But God’s laws show how close God is to His people and how much He cares for them. 

Thankfully, Jesus simplified this relationship so that it’s not based on obedience to the law but on the grace of being called his brother and sister through baptism. That’s why St. James, in the second reading for Mass today, says that “(The Father) willed to give us birth by the word of truth that we may be a kind firstfruits of his creatures.” We share a unique relationship with the Father through Jesus, the first fruit of all creation, by being reborn in baptism. God is so close to us that he is inside of us. Personally, this is hard for me to understand because why would God want to hang out with a guy who is so often unaware that he is here. I get annoyed if I go visit a friend and they ignore me. I eventually find a reason to leave. Why would God want to keep hanging out with this guy who is so often oblivious or even offensive to him to be around? Yet He does. 

Moses, in the first reading, reminded his people and us of how important it is to listen. I talk too much to God. He’s here with me always. I just need to listen t Him better. Don’t we all? Don’t we all need to stop looking for that remote control in our hand and just listen to Him who is closer to us than we are to ourselves? Isn’t that the whole point of adoration?

21 Ot B: f they can't accept that he came down, how are they going to believe when he goes up

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

In college, some friends asked me if I would remain a Christian if they found the body of Jesus. I hadn’t thought about it but I told them I would. After all, they’re constantly doing archaeology in the Holy Land. There’s a chance they’ll find a tomb or a burial box purported to be the burial box of Jesus, right? I remember going to my spiritual director, Fr. Doug Wathier, and telling him about his conversation and kind of being proud that, even if they found the remains of Jesus, I would stay a Christian. I remember asking him if it would affect his faith and being shocked that he was quite adamant that it would. He said that, if Jesus hadn’t been raised bodily, there’s no reason for us to believe. Further, if Jesus still died after the resurrection and wasn’t taken up body and soul into heaven, then it wasn’t really a resurrection but merely a resuscitation. People are resuscitated every day using CPR and defibrillators. There’s nothing really miraculous about getting the heart to start pumping blood again. Even people who seem to be dead but who are more in a comatose state who awake after days or weeks because of ventilators and other modern medicine isn’t an example of a miracle in the same way that Jesus, who really died and never died again, is.

As we conclude the Bread of Life Discourse from John chapter six, we hear that the people who came to Jesus because he gave them free bread and fish start to walk away from him when he explains that the bread they ate wasn’t just simply food, but was food from heaven and that, unless they eat the Eucharist, they cannot have hope for eternal life. The reaction that the crowd has is, once again, to question the reality of eternal life. Who can accept that they have to eat the Eucharist to have eternal life, they ask. Jesus’ response is, basically, if you’re not going to believe that he became incarnate, how are you going to believe that he resurrected? Think about it like this, these people could see his flesh and touch his body. The incarnation of Jesus wasn’t an issue for them. I think that’s partly why the flesh is of no avail for them, because he’s right there. It’s a challenge for us but not for them. If they can’t believe that the bread they are eating, the true food they are eating, is his flesh when they can see that he has flesh and blood, then how are they or anyone else going to believe in the resurrection when no one will see him any longer? For some of them it’s just a step too far so they walk away. Actually, not just some of them but the text says that many of them walked away and returned to their former lives. For the first time in the Gospel of John, Jesus refers to the twelve apostles at this point, and asks if they’re going to abandon him too. In a typical way, it is Simon Peter who makes the strong statement of faith, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” 

In every generation, there’s a tendency to water down the gospel, to make Christian teachings more in line with society or more palatable with other religions or religious movements. And, while sometimes we can use connections to other religions as a bridge to true the religion, like St. Paul did at the Areopagus in the Acts of the Apostles or Pope Francis was trying to do with the Pachamama statue a few years ago, we have to be careful not to water down the faith in the process. Joshua, in the first reading, made it clear to the people of the Old Testament that we have to choose to follow the one true God and not the false gods of our neighbors, especially the false gods that we or others create to make the gospel more palatable to a skeptical generation. Jesus was willing to let people walk away in freedom back to their old lives. 

The beginning of our second reading told us that we need to be subordinate to one another out of reverence to Christ before going on to talk about the type of subordination particular to married life. In a previous homily, I talked about how the word subordinate would be better translated as submissive, or under the mission. We all need to be under Christ’s mission, which demands an informed faith. There’s a reason the remains of Jesus have never been found. It’s because they’re not here. The only place you will find the body of Christ is in our tabernacles because it is our food for the journey, his real presence in this bread from heaven. If we can’t believe Jesus has come down in the true bread we eat, how are we going to follow him to heaven?

20 OT B: God’s wisdom is more knowledgeable than the world portrays it

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

One of the more notorious biases the world has against Christians is that we are stupid…or at least not as curious or demanding of proof as they are. Think about Ned Flanders from the Simpsons or the way the guys from Monty Python portray belief in their sketches and in the movie The Life of Brian or the way the new atheists like Neil Degrasse Tyson or Christopher Hitchens will bend over backwards to use science in a way that seems to disprove the never notion of God, as though belief in science is diametrically opposed to belief in God. I hear it on college campuses, sadly more on our historically Catholic campusesthan on state campuses, that the church is an outmoded institution imposing rules and laws that are long disproved on largely ignorant individuals because faith is out of step with more modern, secular, intelligent people. I’ll sometimes even hear people say that they can’t wait until religion is a thing of the past because people will outgrow the need for it as more questions are answered that disprove the need for religious, hocus pocus answers. And, while I take consolation that these tend to be attitudes of people who have good lives and that these same attitudes stand like the Great and Wonderful Oz unveiled for the sham that he is whenever the person encounters any kind of struggle in life such as illness or age, it doesn’t mean that the depiction of Christianity as blind followers is accurate, let alone that it will be the fallback place these folks come to when they need help. 

The challenge with faith is when it becomes too intellectual, too abstract, too much of the leap of faith as the philosopher Soren Kierkegard called it. It makes perfect sense to me that Soren Kierkegard is the gate between philosophers who generally believed in the existence of God and existentialist philosophers who generally didn’t. If faith is like the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where you have to take a step into what appears to be a bottomless pit onto the hidden walkway below, I can understand why more people don’t believe.

Faith is more relational than a leap of faith, specifically having a relationship with Jesus Christ who is the intermediary between God and human beings. Mary, who is often called Sedes Sapientia or Seat of Wisdom, can help us in this because she knows her son better than anyone else so she can pray for and with us to get to know her Son but Jesus wants to reveal himself to us. He does it most preeminently in the Eucharist. That’s why this parish has such a strong tradition of adoring the Blessed Sacrament and why Fr. Ivan, Fr. Greg, and I have consistently encouraged people to take time at least once a week to spend an hour with the Lord in our chapel. When Fr. Ivan started this, he was almost alone in this town in terms of weekly adoration and now I believe every Catholic church in town sets aside at least some time every week to adore the Lord. In adoration, we can take the time to reflect upon what happens at Mass, upon Jesus taking simple bread and wine and fulfilling his promise in John’s bread of life discourse “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” You see, God didn’t just leave us a pit to fall into as proof that we believe. He left us food to keep nourishing our faith and to keep us in relationship with him. He also made us into his body, the Church, so that we can be in relationship with others and see the presence of Christ in them. But that means we have to be living a Christ-like life so that others can see him in our life too, which is a challenge. We have the sacrament of reconciliation for when we make mistakes but we need to be working to live a Christ-like life and not just trying to constantly clean up the mess when we don’t. 

Part of the way we do this is by learning about God from other Christians, especially Christians who are deeply prayerful individuals. There are many profoundly intellectual people who are also deeply prayerful like St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Bishop Robert Barron, St. John Paul II, or Sister Bethany Madonna of the Sisters of life. These people remind us that faith needn’t be a leap for the foolish but accepting an invitation to get to know God in his transcendent simplicity. How do we keep seeking to get to know the God who knows us so well?

19 OT B: Jesus’ takes us to his Father

 Friends

Peace be with you. 

If I were to walk up to you and say to you “I am the Big Mac of Burger King”, what would be your reaction be to me? Or if I were to say, I am sort of the Labron James of football, what would you say? Just put up with one more; what would be your reaction be to me if I were to say I’m sort of the Sears Tower of St. Louis? Would you question overall if I’m feeling okay or would you question when I worked at Burger King, or do I have the talent to play football, or have I ever been to St. Louis? The reason I’m asking this is because, as we continue to move through the Bread of Life Discourse from the sixth chapter of John’s gospel, there is this really interesting question that I kind of find baffling. It’s coming from this group of Jews who received from the feeding of the five thousand. Last week, they falsely attributed the miraculous gift of manna from the Old Testament to being a gift from Moses instead of what it was, a gift from God. So Jesus set that straight. Jesus identified himself as that manna from heaven, which is where our passage begins this week. The part that confuses me is, when Jesus said to this group of his fellow Jews, that he was the bread from heaven, they didn’t ask how he was bread. Instead, they couldn’t believe that he came down from heaven. So they’re fine that he identified himself as bread? I guess it’s possible that this was just their first point. Like, if I said, “I’m the Sears Tower of St. Louis”, you may say, first of all, the Sears Tower is in Chicago not St. Louis. But I’d hope you’d want to know what in the heck I meant identifying myself as the Sears Tower. I’d hope there’d be a follow up question. 

I feel like they’re really saying that Jesus can’t be from heaven because they don’t like the idea of someone coming to earth from there. I’m sure part of this has to do with the emphasis on God’s transcendence that our Jewish brothers and sisters emphasize to this day. The Jewish people recognize better than anyone else that we are not God and God is not us: that he is completely different. This means that we can’t control God or manipulate God as though we are in charge. But I can’t help but think that they also had a problem with a carpenter’s son believing that he came down from heaven. If God was going to become incarnate in their minds, it wouldn’t be through Joseph and Mary. My guess is that they would expect a messiah to either appear out of nowhere without a father or mother or to at least be born to one of the high priestly families. But certainly no messiah is coming from a family with calluses on their hands. 

That’s the amazing thing about God. If God didn’t want us on this earth, he doesn’t need to kill us in the desert, as it appears the prophet Elijah wants in the first reading. If God wants us gone, you know what he has to do? Stop wanting us. That’s all it takes. If God stops wanting us for a second, we don’t exist. You exist because God wants you to exist. I exist because God willed me into existence. God knows everything about us. He wants us to get to know everything about him. How does he do that? Is it by leaving an instruction manual? Sort of, but we made the Bible under his inspiration. He mostly does this by inviting us into a relationship with himself.

He invites us to get to know him in a sacramental relationship. What does that mean? To preserve the transcendence of God, the “otherness of God”, he gives us things like bread, oil, water, wine, and people to bridge the gap between him and us. As we know, the Eucharist looks and tastes like bread and wine and, if we are Catholic and in a state of grace, we are allowed to consume it but we know that it’s really his body, blood, soul and divinity. It’s the bread that came down from heaven that is meant to be a connection between the transcendent God and we fallible humans. It’s a sacrament because it’s intimately connected to Jesus who, himself, transcended heaven and earth by being fully God and fully human.

I can understand why this group of Jews was confused that Jesus said he was from heaven but you’d think they’d be just as baffled at the idea that he called himself bread. Maybe they could understand something our generation can’t: that God himself came to his people in the manna in the desert. What makes it hard for our generation to see the God who wills us into being, willing himself into our life by becoming the Bread of Life in the Eucharist? Imagine how that could change if more people spent an hour every day, or at least every week, adoring the Lord in adoration…