Friends
Peace be with you
There’s a funny scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where the family is sitting at the table and all the food is cooked and the patriarch of the family, Clarke W. Griswald, suggests that 80 year old Aunt Bethany should lead them in the saying of grace. Aunt Bethany, who doesn’t have the best hearing, turns to her husband Uncle Lewis looking confused and asks “What dear?” to which her daughter yells “Grace!”. Aunt Bethany responds “Grace, she passed away 30 years ago.” Uncle Lewis then painstakingly gets it through to her that they want her to lead “The blesssing”, to which she leads them in the Pledge of Allegiance. From a Catholic perspective, I always find this especially humorous because of the number of times in the 20 years of I’ve been a priest, someone comes into the confessional, makes the sign of the cross and launches into “Bless us, O Lord, for these” instead of “Bless me Father, for I have sinned.” It happens more often than you’d think. But, the other thing that is more central to the point of the baptism of the Lord is more of a question than it is anything else: what is grace?
In the second reading for Mass today, St. Paul is writing to his friend, St. Titus, and talking about grace. When I was an Associate Pastor at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Ames, a parishioner one time asked me why we don’t talk about grace anymore. Of course, I wanted to quote Aunt Bethany and say, “Grace, she died 30 years ago” but I was afraid the person wouldn’t have a clue as to what I was referring. And, the person had a good point, despite the fact that it’s a pretty important theological principle and, arguably, the distinctive component to the life of the baptized, we generally don’t talk a lot about grace, even in homilies. So, what does Paul mean by grace? In the second reading, St. Paul says that the grace comes from Jesus' incarnation, the fact that God became a human being. But it still doesn’t really help us understand what it is.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says,
1997 Grace is a participation in the life of God. It introduces us into the intimacy of Trinitarian life: by Baptism the Christian participates in the grace of Christ, the Head of his Body. As an "adopted son" he can henceforth call God "Father," in union with the only Son. He receives the life of the Spirit who breathes charity into him and who forms the Church.
Grace brings us into the family of God. It makes us a part of God’s family. We are no longer visitors or mere acquaintances of God, we are now able to be his daughters and sons. And, we hear in this paragraph that baptism is the normal way we begin to participate in the life of God. Yet, as the Catechism will emphasize elsewhere, grace is a free gift of God not something we can merit but, instead, something that causes us to live differently than the rest of the world. St. Paul emphasized three words to describe the changes that grace causes in us: temperance, justice, and devotedness. Let’s look at each of these.
When we hear the word temperance, we may be tempted to think of the anti-alcohol temperance movement in this country most active in the 1920s and 1930s during the prohibition era. However, temperance actually has to do with being self-restrained or self controlled. Whether I choose to buy a book on Amazon that I’ll probably never get around to reading or give that money to the poor is a question of temperance. Whether I use the Lord’s name in vain or use non-vulgar language when I’m frustrated is a question of temperance. Whether I go home at 3:30 to go for a walk on my treadmill or go home and sit on my couch and eat Christmas sweets is a big question of temperance. Temperance is about self love, whether we love ourselves enough to make the personal choices of a person desiring to go to heaven.
Justice is a different thing altogether. It’s about how we treat other people. In any given interaction, am I respecting their rights while also asking them to respect mine? That’s the heart of justice: I have rights and you have rights and figuring out whose rights are right in any given situation is what justice is all about. Sometimes, we prioritize our rights over pretty much everyone and ruin a sense of justice. If every time someone annoys us while we’re driving and we think it’s their fault, we may have to think about if we are being just or not. If we get angry at a server in a restaurant, ask yourself if you’re being just or just expecting that a person handling way too much is overwhelmed and can’t get your darn Coke right now. If your neighbor doesn’t clean her sidewalk and you are genuinely concerned about other people falling, it’s good to give her a call and ask her to clean off their sidewalk but even better to give her a call and ask if she’d mind if you did it. It’s a sidewalk, after all. It’ll take you an extra two minutes and it may mean the world to your neighbors AND it’s a million times better than calling the police.
The last word St. Paul uses is devotedness, which has to do with our relationship to God. Are we taking time to pray each day or are we allowing screen time and other distractions to overwhelm it. When we wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, do we ever just think of a favorite passage of scripture and talk to God about it or do we allow the day’s concerns to overwhelm us? Do we make Mass a priority or does pretty much every other thing take priority over it?
In baptism, we entered into a life of grace making us members of the family of God. In so doing, it set us up to a life of holy relationships with ourselves in temperance, with others in justice, and with God in devotedness. Grace is the free gift of God but it can only work through us if we are open to it. What is one thing you want to ask God to increase the grace in your life so you can be more temperate, more just, or more devoted?
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