Our encounter starts in the home

          Dear friends, we are wandering like sheep without a shepherd, but the truth is that we have a shepherd in Jesus Christ.  When we put our trust in God's will, we no longer wander, but have direction and we come to a life-transforming encounter with Jesus.  That first part is so important, however!  We have to give our lives over completely to the lordship of Jesus if we want to see his power working in our lives, this especially includes the lives of our families.

          Natural Family Planning (NFP) is an important way in which we place the lives of our families under the lordship of Jesus.  I invite you all to explore its spiritual, emotional, and physical benefits for you and your families.  Start here.

          May God bless us all as we strive to find him through following his will in our lives.

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Homily: 16^th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle B

          Fifty years ago, it was easier to be a religious person.  This is because the culture at large supported religious practice.  In fact, it was something that was expected of people who considered themselves “respectful members” of the community.  Those, for example, who didn’t attend some kind of church service on Sunday were considered with suspicion as if they had some sort of “ulterior motive”.  Since then, however, both the landscape of the Church and of the culture at large have changed dramatically.  The Second Vatican Council ushered in a time of great renewal in the Church, while at the same time the moral fabric of Western Civilization began to unravel.  Because of this, the culture’s tacit support of religious practice began to disappear.  Pastors of every sort of mainline denomination were unprepared, it seems, for this change and so have struggled to adapt to the needs of the two most recent generations.

          For these two most recent generations it is no longer considered a “social status” marker to be directly involved with or connected to a church.  For two generations now, we’ve taught (for better and for worse) that faith is one’s personal choice, alongside choices about career, marriage, and the like.  In a way, we’ve taught the men and women from these generations to be their own shepherds: to guide their own destinies based on whatever they think is best.  What we’re finding now is that we seem to have two generations of people who look like sheep without a shepherd, wandering aimlessly, looking for something to satisfy the deepest longing in their hearts.

          And so in this we can see an echo of the image painted for us by the prophet Jeremiah in the first reading.  There it was the failure of the leaders of the Israelite people to reinforce the religious practice and devotion of the people, but the result was the same: a culture that no longer supported true devotion to God alone—a result of religious leaders who no longer shepherded their people—and so the people began to shepherd themselves: leaving them scattered, like lost sheep.

          This individualistic way of treating the faith is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is missing an important element: an effort to lead people into an encounter with Christ.  In the past, the cultural support of religious practice meant that people came to encounter Christ a little more “implicitly”: that is to say, they got it simply by being exposed to it in high doses through religious practice.  And this was effective, as is evidenced by the many “more mature” members of our community who remain faithful to their religious practice today.  Today, however, this encounter with Christ must be much more explicit: that is to say, it has to be something that happens consciously and willfully in a person’s heart.  When it is, however, the effect is the same: a life-long commitment to following him and practicing that faith in a worshiping community.

          In the Gospel reading today, we see how Jesus has fulfilled God’s promise that he made through the prophet Jeremiah to be a true shepherd of God’s people.  Jesus had been teaching, driving out demons, and healing the sick—and his apostles had been doing the same in his name—and so when they returned great throngs of crowds gathered to hear more from Jesus.  They had encountered him personally and thus nothing could keep them from following him: not even Jesus’ attempt to slip away to a deserted place with his disciples.  That, my friends, is true devotion.  And that is what happens when men and women have an authentic encounter with Christ.

          Of course, there are many ways to lead our brothers and sisters back to an encounter with Christ: through service of others, through companionship in difficult times, through Eucharistic Adoration, and through the witness of a joy-filled life, just to name a few.  Today, however, I want to highlight just one of them.  Saint John Paul II often explained how the family is the place where many people first come to know Jesus.  And so he encouraged all parents to help foster in the home a place where in love is lived: with spouses shepherding, loving, and caring for each other and their children.  In other words, he called for the family home to be the first place where people serve one another, support one another in difficult times, and witness to a joy-filled life of faith so as to be the privileged place of encounter with Jesus.

          In his Apostolic Exhortation On the Role of the Christian Family in the World, John Paul II said: “It is, in fact, to the families of our times that the Church must bring the unchangeable and ever new Gospel of Jesus Christ, just as it is the families involved in the present conditions of the world that are called to accept and to live the plan of God that pertains to them.”  One of the ways in which the family accepts and lives the plan of God that pertains to them is in how the husband and wife live out the marital covenant that they formed before God.  Couples have a noble vocation to embody God’s love in their marital gestures of life and love, for the good of each other, their families, and the larger society.  The methods of Natural Family Planning respect God’s design for married love, which is why the Church supports its various methods.  The essence of the Church’s teaching is to encourage couples to celebrate and join their love with the creative spirit of God—that is, to embody God’s love—and thus make their home a place of encounter with Jesus Christ: an encounter that transforms lives for good and forms life-long disciples of Jesus, our true shepherd.

          I specifically highlight the Church’s support of the various methods of Natural Family Planning today because this week the United States Bishops are promoting Natural Family Planning Awareness Week and so I want to invite all couples—from those who have been married for many years all the way down to those who are now just planning to get married—to explore NFP as a profound way of making your homes a place of encounter with Jesus and so to begin to gather back to him his sheep who have been wandering as if they have had no shepherd.

          My brothers and sisters, the culture at large has seemingly abandoned religion as one of the core elements that held it together.  By embracing God’s life-giving will for each of our lives, however, we will create a new culture of encounter with Jesus that will turn the tide against the destructive forces that have scattered God’s sheep from his flock.  And we will once again know the joy of communion in him with our lost brothers and sisters: the very communion we celebrate today here in this Holy Mass.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – July 19^th, 2015

The cure for selfishness? How about NFP?

          My first real "hitting" attempt at preaching on a moral issue.  I think that I did pretty well in clearly making my point while also emphasizing the Good News.  I wish I could have said more, because I know that I pretty much caricature-ized everyone who uses contraception, but I felt like God was moving me to speak about this rather frankly.  Hopefully you all will take the week to learn more about NFP and its benefits for promoting strong families and faithful discipleship of our Lord, Jesus!

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Homily: 16^th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle A

          I remember back when I was a kid that during the summer, and after I was old enough to be trusted to cross Theodore Street, which was a busy street close to the house in which I grew up, my mother would send me over to my grandmother’s house to help her with little projects around her house.  Grandma Lucy always had vegetables growing in her gardens and so one of my regular jobs at her house was to weed the gardens.  I was always glad to help out my grandma, but this was one of the more unpleasant jobs for me as a 13 year old.  As many of you know, I’m sure, it is a very tedious job and for a teenage boy it can be very difficult to maintain the concentration necessary to do that job well.

          One of the difficulties that I encountered in the job was making sure that I only pulled out the weeds and not the sprouts of grandma’s vegetable plants.  I often learned the distinction the hard way: when grandma would come out to check on me and find one of her tomato plants uprooted.  Now, I love my grandma Lucy, but she was pretty rough around the edges, so when I screwed up like that, I heard about it from her.  She never gave up on me, though, because she always let me back into her garden to go after those weeds.

          Sometimes, in the years that followed, when I would hear today’s Gospel reading, I would think back to those summer hours spent weeding grandma Lucy’s garden and I would think to myself: “Man, I wish grandma would have paid more attention at Mass; because it sure would have saved me a lot of headaches and heartaches if she would have just let those weeds grow!”  My guess, however, is that she did pay attention and that she knew that Jesus’ parable means slightly different things depending on which level you apply it.

          Taken as it is, Jesus’ parable about the wheat and the weeds applies to a pretty grand scale: the kingdom of heaven.  Applied at that level, the parable speaks very generically and the people he speaks of are “caricatures”, that is, identified by a major characteristic: in this case, whether they are good or wicked.  Now, parables are, essentially, metaphors; and a metaphor does two things: it both highlights certain things and hides others.  For example: to say that “time is money” highlights that time is something valuable and that it can be spent.  What it hides, however, is that time cannot be saved: it just keeps ticking on no matter what we do.  Thus, in the parable of the wheat and the weeds, Jesus highlights that on the earth there will always be wickedness mixed in with the good; but that’s ok, because at the final harvest the good will be separated out from the wicked.  What it hides, however, is that people can change, while wheat can never be anything more than wheat and weeds never anything more than weeds.  Thus, the wicked (that is, the weeds) are not doomed to always be wicked, nor are the good (that is, the wheat) predestined to remain good; for they, too, can fall into wickedness.  And so the scale that Jesus is working in is important for our interpretation.

          Speaking at the level of the kingdom of heaven, the interpretation means exactly what we’ve said: that always there will be the wicked mixed in with the good and that the good will be preserved from the fire at the final harvest.  Brought down to the individual, however, the interpretation will have to change a bit.  At this level, Jesus would certainly speak of rooting out the weeds as soon as they appear, because, as we heard last week, the good seed that falls among thorns is quickly choked and produces no fruit.  In other words, there is no room for both wheat and weeds in the individual heart of a person.

          We can also apply an interpretation of this parable to the level of small groups, such as a family.  There we’ll find a mixture of the grand, kingdom-of-heaven scale interpretation with the small, individual scale interpretation.  Here we see that wickedness can, indeed, be sown among the good seeds of the members of a family.  Yet, as on the individual level, it is important to root out wickedness at the first sign of its growth, for wickedness sown in the midst of the family can destroy the entire family altogether.

          One of the most destructive weeds that can be sown in the midst of a family is selfishness.  In a family—more so even than on the level of a neighborhood or a town—the individual members are dependent on one another.  When selfishness takes root in a family it begins to separate members one from another as each seeks to satisfy his or her own wants and desires often at the expense of the others, thus stripping the family of the good fruit it could produce.  Dare I say that one of the most sinister seeds of selfishness in a family is the use of artificial means of contraception?  Sinister, because it appears to be something benign, that is, completely harmless, while it quietly destroys the rich harvest a family might produce.

          Contraception is the seed of selfishness in a family because it cuts God out of the parents’ relationship.  In effect, it says “God, you can’t be trusted to direct this part of our lives, so we are going to decide for ourselves when we’ll have children.”  For many, what it also says is “We want to have sex without consequences, that is, without responsibility”, which is nothing more than saying “Sex is about satisfying my desires; it has nothing to do with my family (that is, unless I want it to).”  That sounds pretty selfish, doesn’t it?  When that kind of selfishness grows up in a family, it’s like poison that ruins the whole harvest.

          “But Father, we can’t afford to have an unlimited amount of children.”  Yes, I know.  And God knows that, too.  That’s why he designed our bodies—particularly the female body—with a discernible fertility cycle that can be cooperated with to space out pregnancies: in other words, a natural way to prevent a pregnancy when it’s not feasible to support another child that nonetheless acknowledges God’s control over life instead of selfishly taking control for one’s self.  The various methods for discerning and utilizing this cycle are called “Natural Family Planning” (or NFP, for short) and they are like a natural herbicide that destroys selfishness at its roots and fertilizes the individual members of the family so that together they produce a rich harvest.

          NFP forces couples to be attentive to one another so as to “listen” to the female body’s natural signals indicating when it is fertile for conceiving a child.  Thus, in order to space pregnancies, couples have to periodically abstain from sex during these fertile periods, causing them to restrain their passions (and, thus, their selfishness) and to find other ways to express their intimate love for each other, which teaches them greater self-giving and often causes them to grow more intimate with one another.  Now, is there anybody here that doesn’t want more intimacy—that is, deep, meaningful connections with others, especially their spouses—in their lives?

          This week the Church is sponsoring “NFP Awareness Week” and so I invite all couples, young and not-so-young, married and engaged to be married, and anyone who thinks they might be married in the future, to explore the benefits of NFP for their family.  (You can start by reading the “extra page” of our bulletin this week.  Additional resources can be found on the US Bishop’s website: www.usccb.org.)  Talk to your friends about it.  Find someone who is using NFP and ask them what it has done for them personally and for their family.  Pray about it and ask God for the courage to trust him and his plan for you and your family.  Most of all, try it.  Test its claims for benefits and let it test you.  Perhaps you’ll find some weeds within you that you didn’t realize were there.  NFP may help you to root them out.

          My brothers and sisters, spilling seed lifelessly is like sowing weeds of selfishness among the wheat of your family.  With NFP, however, one lays down a strong defense against those weeds; for he or she acknowledges that God is in control; and that that is a good thing!  With NFP trust in God and trust in his power to overcome evil, even as it grows up around us, grows and we flourish.  Thus, at the final harvest, we will be gathered together among the wheat and welcomed into the barn that is eternal happiness—that is, the satisfaction of all of our desires—in heaven.  Strengthened by this Eucharist, let us take courage to choose this life of happiness today.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – July 20^th, 2014