Saying "yes" to God's voice

Homily: 2^nd Sunday in Lent – Cycle B

          Michigan mega-church pastor Rob Bell has produced a series of videos that take a simple, straight-forward approach to demonstrating how the Gospel applies to everyday life.  In one of the videos that I’ve seen, Mr. Bell speaks about the importance of saying “yes” to something.  In doing so, he emphasizes, we can then come to know what it is that we need to say “no” to in our lives.  He uses Jesus as an example to illustrate his point, stating that because Jesus said “yes” to do the Father’s will, announcing the Good News and redeeming God’s people, he could say “no” to many other things (like when Jesus turned away when he knew the crowd was going to make him their king).

          This is a video (a short film, really) and so of course there is a visual component to his speaking.  In the film, the whole time that he is talking he’s walking, seemingly from one side of a city to another.  At first his surroundings just seem like normal busy streets, but if you’re paying attention you begin to notice that the surroundings are part of the point.  The visual noises are distractions that surround him as he walks.  At a couple of points, a person actually walks in between Mr. Bell and the camera as he’s walking, but he never loses his stride until he arrives at his destination (which happens to be a school where he meets a young boy that we are to assume is his son).  The well-made point of both his words and the visual presentation is to emphasize how knowing to what it is that we have said “yes” keeps us focused (i.e. able to say “no”) in the midst of the world’s distractions.

          Our scriptures today lead us to think about how God’s voice gets into the middle of people’s lives.  In our first reading, Abraham hears God’s voice, who commands him to do something horrific: to take his son Isaac (that is, the son that God had promised to him as the first of the innumerable descendants that Abraham would have) and how Abraham followed what God had asked him to do.  This, of course, was not the first time that Abraham had said “yes” to God.  In fact, it was many years before, when Abraham was still “Abram”, that God first called Abraham and directed him to leave the land of his fathers to travel to a land which he would show him.  That was when Abraham first said his “yes” to God.  In the many years that followed, Abraham maintained that “yes” to God; and so, when God asked Abraham to give his son Isaac back to him, Abraham could say “yes” once again. /// Because he was clear about to what he had said “yes”, Abraham could say “no” to everything else.

          In the Gospel, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John on a hike up to a high place.  Knowing that Jesus often did this to have a quiet place where he could teach or pray, I’m guessing that the three were anticipating a quiet afternoon.  But then, the Transfiguration…  Moses and Elijah…  And, to top it all off, the voice of God booms out from the thick cloud that had descended upon them.  They had already said “yes” to Jesus when they responded to his call to leave their nets and follow him.  Now their “yes” had to go deeper (like Abraham’s had to go deeper).  In commanding these three to “listen to him”, the Father was, in essence, saying, “Obey him completely”.  And how soon would this be tested?  As soon as they started down from the high place: The Gospel says that “…[Jesus] charged them not to relate what they had seen to anyone, except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” /// Because they had seen the full glory of that to which they had said “yes”, Peter, James, and John could then say “no” to everything else.

          And so, the question comes to us: “To whom (or to what) have I said ‘yes’?”  To answer this question, we need to take a look at to whose voice we listen and to whose we don’t.  This is an examination of conscience.  Is it God’s voice to which you listen?  Or is it to one (or more) of the many other voices that fill your day?  The ones, perhaps, who are closest to you and whose opinions and good graces you value highly?  If the voice to which you listen—that is, the voice to which you have said “yes”—isn’t God’s, then Lent is the time to “re-orient your hearing”, so to speak.

          In our second reading, Saint Paul reminds us powerfully that we should be listening—that is, giving our “yes”—to God.  In it, Paul is asking: "Who has done more for us besides God?"  God, who has given up his only son for us (and, in this context, we can add even when he didn't make Abraham do so).  If he has given us that much, Paul continues, how will he not give us everything else we need in this world, which is clearly much less valuable?  Then he asks, "If God has done this for us, then who should we fear in this world?"  For no one has more power than God and He has proven that he is "for" us (that is, “on our side”).  Thus, who (or what) have we to fear?  If it is God who ultimately decides our fate, then we must fear (that is, listen to) him alone.

          Okay, so how do I hear God’s voice and, thus, demonstrate my "yes" to God?  Well, first and foremost, follow his commandments.  Maybe you’re not hearing the voice of God speaking into your ear like Abraham did, but Abraham didn’t have the commandments: we do.  The commandments (and the moral teachings of Holy Mother Church which stem from them) are the voice of God for each of us.  If we are not following those, then we are certainly not giving our full “yes” to God.  Examine your conscience, then, and see if you are following his commandments.  If not, repent.  Seek forgiveness through the sacrament of Reconciliation and resolve to follow them from this point forward.

          Second, fulfill your vocation.  Whatever calling God has given to you (marriage, parenthood, the single life…), learn what it looks like to live this virtuously and then live it.  The Church Fathers tell us that every creature gives great glory to God by simply being fully what it is that God made it to be.  The same goes for us.  If you are a husband or wife, be the best husband or wife you can be.  If you are a parent, be the best parent you can be.  If you are single, be the best servant of others that you can be.  (Each of which are measured by the Christian law of charity, of course.)  If we’re falling short, then, again, we need to repent and resolve to become the best, according to our abilities.  And why these?  Because then you'll be on the same wavelength as God and you will be able to hear other, specific ways in which he wants you to act.

          My friends, Lent is about restoring our "yes" to God and to his voice.  Our Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving ought to have as their goal helping us to restore it.  And this, so that, through obedience, we would receive the blessings promised to Abraham, because of his obedience.  And, still further, so that God's kingdom—which is nothing short than seeing the Glorious Face of Jesus—would be made known among us.  May our Blessed Mother Mary, whose “yes” brought Christ our Savior to us, be for us a model; and may her prayers lead us to this glory that each of our hearts seeks.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – February 24^th & 25^th, 2018

Saying "yes", once and forever

Homily: The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph – Cycle B

          A few years ago, I was invited to a vocations awareness dinner where Archbishop Peter Sartain, was scheduled to speak.  In his talk during that dinner, he spoke of his experience of leaving his home diocese of Memphis to become bishop of the diocese of Little Rock, Arkansas; and then of leaving the diocese of Little Rock for the diocese of Joliet.  He said that, in both cases, he had to hearken back to the day of his ordination as a priest.  He said that he realized that on that day (the day of his ordination) he had said “yes” to God and that this “yes” was open ended.  In other words, he knew that his “yes” was a “yes” for whatever God, through his Church, would call him to do in the future, even if that would move him away from family and his beloved flock.  Thus, although he felt deep sadness to leave his home diocese and then his first diocese as a bishop, he trustingly accepted the call of the Church; for in his heart, he knew that he had already said “yes” to it all on the day of his ordination to the priesthood.

          In our Scriptures today, we encounter another man whose “yes” to God was open-ended, and which took him to places and experiences he never dreamed of.  Abraham (who, initially, was called simply “Abram”) was a man blessed by God and to whom God revealed himself in visions.  God had a plan for Abraham: a plan that would take him far from his native land, with only the vague assurance of prosperity when he arrived.  Abraham placed his faith in God who had revealed himself to him and set out from the land of Ur of the Chaldeans for an unknown land that he was to receive as an inheritance.

          This, of course, not only affected him, but his whole household.  His wife, Sarah, and their entire household (including his livestock) would move with him; and the hardship that they endured throughout the journey was great.  Abraham’s faith was tested—as was his relationship with his wife—but he persevered and settled in the land that God had promised him.

          Having settled in the land that God had promised to him, God promised Abraham prosperity and protection.  Abraham, however, questioned God’s promise: asking “What good will your gifts be if I keep on being childless?”  You see, these ancient peoples had not yet developed the notion of the immortal soul and so they believed that “eternal life” came from having children, in which your name—and, thus, your heritage—lived on.  Abraham didn’t want material prosperity; rather, he wanted eternal life.  Thus, God would make another promise: the promise of descendents more numerous than the stars in the sky. /// It would be many years, however, before God would fulfill this promise and grant to Abraham and his wife Sarah a son.  This was another test of Abraham’s faith: a test that, once again, affected his whole family.

          As difficult as this test might have been, there would still be one final test for Abraham.  After fulfilling his promise to give Abraham an heir, God then calls Abraham to offer his son Isaac back to him as a sacrifice.  At this point, I imagine that Abraham felt like he had had enough; and I imagine that he had to pray long and hard about whether or not he should obey.  In the end, I imagine that he thought back to that first revelation that God had given to him back in his homeland of Ur of the Chaldeans.  I imagine that he looked to that first “yes” that he had given to God and then realized that, to say “no” now, would be to negate all of the blessings that he had received by saying “yes” to everything that had come before.  In other words, he knew that his first “yes” was an open-ended one: a yes not only to God’s first command to leave his land for a land unknown to him, but also to everything that would come after; and so he said “yes” to God once again and brought his son to be offered as a sacrifice to him. /// We, of course, know the rest of this story: that God stopped Abraham from completing the sacrifice and, as the Letter to the Hebrews relates, Abraham “received Isaac back” and with it the promise of a family of innumerable descendants.

          The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph is also a family whose life was affected by an open-ended “yes” by its members.  Mary was confronted by the archangel Gabriel, who appeared to her and announced God’s incredible plan for her life.  She, however, had made a secret consecration of virginity to God and so could not comprehend how it would be possible for her to conceive the child that the angel was promising to her.  Nevertheless, she trusted in God and said “yes”: a “yes” to which she would have to return over and over again as more revelations would be made to her about who her son would be and the difficulties that he would face (and the difficulties that she would face through him)—revelations such as the one she received from the Temple prophet, Simeon.

          Joseph, too, would have to say “yes” to an angel—the one that appeared to him in a dream.  When he found that his supposedly virgin wife had become pregnant before they had consummated their marriage, he had decided to divorce her, because, as the Scriptures tell us, he was a righteous man and that was what the Mosaic Law demanded.  He, too, however, trusted in God and said “yes”: a “yes” to which he, too, would have to return in the future—such as when he was forced to flee with his family into Egypt to avoid Herod’s persecution.  His and Mary’s “yeses” to God were open-ended.  They could not foresee all that these “yeses” would demand of them, yet they trusted in God and gave them anyway; and for this, they have already received their reward.

          To this day, faithful families in the land of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac—of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—find themselves in similarly difficult situations.  Christians throughout the Middle East, and especially today in Syria and Iraq, are being severely persecuted by highly-organized religious extremists and they are being forced to face their “yes” that they had given to God: the “yes” to put their faith in God’s complete revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came to save us from our sin and to win for us eternal life.  They are being forced to acknowledge that their “yeses” were open-ended ones: for they could not foresee that the endurance of such persecution would be demanded of them.

          Believe it or not, we are not far from this experience, either.  Although we in this country are not subject to the violent persecutions that Christians are facing in the Middle East, we are, nonetheless, suffering from a persecution no less hostile.  Instead of confronting us with the threat of death—thus forcing us to renew our “yes” to God or to abandon it all together—we are being bombarded by a cacophony of confusion, in which our modern culture seeks to twist truths so that there are no longer absolutes and then push forward secular values which must be accepted.  Refusal results in persecution: not for being Christian, per se, but rather for being “intolerant” and “bigoted”.  It has so many of us confused that we’re not sure what we’ve said “yes” to, anymore.  This confusion has disrupted our families and has even caused division within them.

          Therefore, my brothers and sisters, this feast today is calling us back to our first “yes”: the “yes” that we proclaimed at our baptism (or at our confirmation, if we were only infants at our baptism).  The “yes” to trust in God through his Son, Jesus.  The “yes” to have faith in his Church, the Body of Christ, who we are, and who, guided by the Holy Spirit, cannot err to provide for us clarity in the midst of confusion.  Like Abraham and his family, Sarah and Isaac, and like the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and like Archbishop Sartain and the persecuted Christians in Syria and Iraq, we must remember that our “yes” was never to an idea, but to a person—Jesus, our Savior—and to his promise that, in spite of whatever difficulties we might face, we will not die, but rather will have eternal life—that is, happiness—forever with him in heaven.  God is calling us today to put our faith in his promises: the promises that are fulfilled even here in this Eucharist as we offer Emmanuel, God with us, back to him on this altar.  Come, then, let us receive the fulfillment of these promises, so that, strengthened by them, we may go forth to bring the light of this truth to a dark world, so desperately in need of it.

          And let us pray that the Holy Family may guide our families through this night and into the light of the fulfillment of God’s promises; and thus go forward in faith: for our God, who alone has the power to save us, is trustworthy.  He has promised and he will do it.  Amen.  Alleluia!

Given at Saint Anne’s Parish: Monterrey, IN & Saint Ann’s Parish: Kewanna, IN

December 30^th, 2017

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN

December 31^st, 2017

Saying "yes" to our King

          Happy end of the Year of Faith!!!  I pray that it has been a fruitful year for you in which you came to a deeper knowledge of the faith and, thus, a more profound encounter with Jesus Christ, our Lord.  If it hasn't been all you had hoped it would be, don't worry!  This has been just the beginning.  In the months and years to come we'll be celebrating the anniversaries of the promulgation (or release) of various documents from the Second Vatican Council, which will give you a chance to read them as a means of deepening your faith.  Besides, our Good God is never far from us and so he is always ready to meet us and lead us into a deeper encounter with him in faith.  With Christ as our King, what have we to worry about?!?!

P.S. Next Sunday is "Liturgical New Year's Day" (the First Sunday of Advent).  Are you planning any celebrations for the New Year?

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Homily: Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe – Cycle C

          Michigan mega-church pastor Rob Bell has produced a series of videos that take a simple, straight-forward approach to demonstrating how the Gospel applies to everyday life.  In one of the videos that I’ve seen, Mr. Bell speaks about the importance of saying “yes” to something.  In doing so, he emphasizes, we can then come to know what it is that we need to say “no” to in our lives.  He uses Jesus as an example to illustrate his point, stating that because Jesus said “yes” to do the Father’s will, announcing the Good News and redeeming God’s people, he could say “no” to many other things (like when Jesus turned away when he knew the crowd was going to carry him away to make him their ruler).

          This is a video (a short film, really) and so of course there is a visual component to his speaking.  In the film, the whole time that he is talking he’s walking, seemingly from one side of a city to another.  At first his surroundings just seem like normal busy streets, but if you’re paying attention you begin to notice that the surroundings are part of the point.  The visual noises are distractions that surround him as he walks.  At a couple of points, a person actually walks in between Mr. Bell and the camera as he’s walking, but he never loses his stride until he arrives at his destination (which happens to be a school where he meets a young girl that we are to assume is his daughter).  The well-made point of both his words and the visual presentation is to emphasize how knowing what it is that we have said “yes” to keeps us focused (i.e. able to say “no”) in the midst of the world’s distractions.

          In the Gospel today, we jump right into the middle of Luke’s account of the crucifixion.  In it Jesus is being taunted by bystanders while he is in the midst of his greatest suffering.  The Jewish authorities, the Roman soldiers, and even one of the criminals crucified with him all pressure him to prove he’s the Messiah—the divinely appointed King of the Jews—by using divine power to save himself from the crucifixion.  I can only imagine what Jesus felt.  He knew that he was the king, but reviling him these men were calling him a phony, a poseur, because the real king would save himself from this disgrace.

          Jesus also knew that he had the power to save himself.  Recall what happened when, in the synagogue at Nazareth, the townspeople tried to throw Jesus over the brow of the hill on which the town was built for what he had said, but that Jesus “passed through the midst of them” and escaped.  But Jesus didn’t do that this time, did he?  And why?  Well, because he knew that he had already said “yes” to do the Father’s will, which was to be sacrificed for the redemption of all mankind.  And because of this, he could say “no” to the distractions surrounding him: the temptations to use his divine power to save himself from this incredible suffering.

          Yet, there was one voice that refused to revile Jesus: the voice of the other criminal crucified with him. He, it seems could see something… let’s say… incongruent about Jesus’ crucifixion.  This criminal could see that Jesus was innocent of any capital crime and hadn’t really been any threat to the power of the Roman occupiers, and so perhaps he thought Jesus really was who he said he was: a king who has yet to come into his kingdom.  And so, in his own suffering and nearness to death, this criminal makes an incredible act of faith in Jesus—he decides to say “yes” to Jesus by acknowledging him as King—and for that “yes” he received his eternal reward.

          And so the question, of course, comes back to us.  Have we said “yes” to Jesus?  In many ways, this is what the Year of Faith, which ends today, has been all about.  It’s been about re-discovering and renewing our faith—our yes—in Jesus.  And whether or not we spent this year well, today we are called to acknowledge the kingship of Jesus—that he truly does rule over us—and to renew (or, perhaps, to speak for the first time) our “yes” to follow Jesus, so that a new flourishing of faith can blossom as we begin a new liturgical year.

          You know, as Catholics, we don’t do the whole “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior” thing, but the idea of it is what we are constantly being called to.  In baptism, we receive the grace of salvation: the grace won for us by Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Yet, at some point in our lives, we all have to say “yes” to Jesus and to acknowledge him as Lord and ruler of our lives.  In other words, we have to let Jesus be our king.

          But this is dangerous, is it not?  I mean, if we say “yes” to Jesus, then we’ll have to say “no” to so many other things, won’t we?  So how, then, can we say “yes” to him?  I mean, where can we find the courage to allow him to be Lord and ruler of our lives?  This courage, my brothers and sisters, comes only through an encounter with him.  And where do we encounter him?  In prayer (especially before the Blessed Sacrament here in the Church) and in communal worship (especially here in the Eucharist), in the Scriptures (especially when we meditate on them and allow them to speak to us and to our lives), and in our suffering (i.e. when we are able, in our suffering, to turn, like the “good thief” in today’s Gospel, and see Jesus, crucified there with us).

          My brothers and sisters, when we encounter Jesus we can see the hopelessness of our striving in contrast with the hope contained in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, and in this light we can find the courage to say “yes” to him (and, thus, “no” to so much else).  In this Eucharistic encounter with Jesus, let us not fear to say “yes” to him and acknowledge him as our King; and let us not fear all that we’ll have to say “no” to because of this: because paradise—that is, eternal happiness—awaits us.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – November 23^rd & 24^th, 2013