Deja vu and the Eucharist

Homily: 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle B

If you’ve ever had the experience of déjà vu, you’ll know that it can be somewhat unsettling.  For those who may not have experienced it, the phenomenon known as “déjà vu” is when one has an experience of believing that he or she has seen something that is currently happening as having already happened in the past.  In fact, the words “déjà vu” translate literally from French into “already seen.”  For the most part, it can be a confusing experience because it often occurs when there is no rational reason to believe that the event had occurred already in the past.  I know that I’ve had quite a few occurrences of it in my life and each time I’ve walked away from the experience with more questions than answers.

Interestingly enough, for some the attempt to invoke an experience similar to déjà vu is part of their regular routine.  The Jewish religion, for example, ritually attempts to re-create the events of the past so that it would be as if those events were occurring again for the first time in their midst.  The Jewish Passover feast is a perfect example of this.  It is a “ritual remembering” of the original Passover meal, recreating and in a way re-presenting the events of that night when God slew the first born of the Egyptians and led them out of slavery towards freedom.  In other words, it is a way for them to remember God’s saving acts in the past so as to acknowledge that God’s same saving help continues to be with them today.  This type of remembering—of “making present again” God’s saving acts—is called anamnesis.

You know, I don’t think that we’d have to look too hard to see that we do this kind of remembering all of the time.  Couples—married or otherwise—will often return to the place of their first date on their anniversary to remember what it was like to fall in love and to enkindle those feelings anew.  Families will gather around pictures and slide shows of holidays or vacations together to remember the joy that they shared so as to strengthen their bonds as a family.  Even individuals (perhaps, however, only the introverted ones) will return to that private spot in the park or the woods where they found comfort or peace so as to find it again.  And all this to remember—to try and “make present again”—the good moments that we’ve experienced in our lives.

    In the reading from the Book of Exodus that we heard today, we find the ancient Israelites only a short time into their journey out of slavery in Egypt towards the land of freedom into which God had promised to lead them.  Nonetheless, they seem to have forgotten both the powerful miracles that God had done that freed them from slavery and the oppressive hardships that they endured as we find them grumbling against God and Moses: the suffering of traveling through the desert appearing to them to be worse than what they had endured in Egypt.  In order to remind them of his mighty works—and, thus, his care for them—God provides them with miraculous food from heaven: birds that flock into the camp at night and bread that appears from the morning frost over the ground in the morning.  These daily miracles will occur until they enter the promised land as a reminder of that exhilarating moment when God led them out of slavery and into freedom.

In the Gospel reading, we see the people who had eaten from the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fish seek out Jesus and ask him for more signs.  Jesus uses this opportunity to teach them that his miraculous works were not only meant to feed them in their hunger, but also to remind them of their utter dependence on God.  Jesus, in a sense, commends the people for remembering how God provided bread in the desert for their ancestors, but then clarifies for them that it was not Moses who provided the bread for them, but rather God the Father—who is his Father: and who is the same Father who has provided the “food that endures for eternal life”, his Son Jesus the Christ.  In the multiplication of the loaves and the fish, and in this teaching, Jesus is showing the people that he, in his very person, is “making present again” God’s saving work.

     Hopefully, it won’t be too much of a stretch then when I tell you that the Eucharist that we celebrate here is also, in part, anamnesis.  As all of you know, I’m sure, (and if you don’t know, you’re going to learn right now) the Mass is celebrated in two distinct parts: the Liturgy of the Word, when we hear readings from Holy Scripture that remind us of the sacred events of salvation history and recall the teachings of Jesus and how they apply to us today, and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, when we celebrate the holy meal in which Christ’s body and blood is made present to us and we offer them to God as the one perfect and enduring sacrifice that atones for our sins.  In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we read that…

Christian liturgy not only recalls the events that saved us but actualizes them, makes them present.  The Paschal mystery of Christ is celebrated, not repeated.  It is the celebrations that are repeated, and in each celebration there is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that makes the unique mystery present. (1104)

And so, this remembering through re-enacting the events of nearly 2000 years ago makes present for us again Christ’s enduring act of our salvation so as to assure us that God’s saving work continues to be present to us today.

Many of the ancient Jews missed out on Jesus their Savior because they couldn’t imagine that God would make bread come down from heaven again.  They forgot anamnesis and only remembered the manna as something that had happened in the past and was finished.  We do the same thing if we come here and think that this celebration is only an empty ritual memorializing events of the past that have no impact on what is happening today.  But if we come here acknowledging that we, too, are pilgrims wandering through a desert, we will find that God’s Word is not some dead ink on a piece of paper, but a living word, ready to meet us here and to give us guidance.  And if we come here crying out as the ancient Israelites did, “Would that we had died... in Egypt!” then we will find that bread has again come down from heaven onto this altar to strengthen us for our continued journey.

My brothers and sisters, our experience in the mass ought to give us a feeling of déjà vu.  In other words, we ought to feel as if what we experience here today is something that we’ve already experienced before.  When we do, then we will have truly entered into the mystery of what takes place in this liturgy: the blurring of the lines between time and eternity.  May God, who always remains close to us, help us with his grace so that we can truly see the mystery we celebrate and thus be lead to the praise worthy of him, the offering of our selves united to his Son’s eternal sacrifice here on this altar.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – August 4^th & 5^th, 2018

Remember... just let go

Happy First Sunday of Lent!  I hope that everybody's Lent has gotten off to a good start.  This last week felt weird to me, but probably because of all the chaos (in my mind) of getting ready for Ash Wednesday and the start of this holy season.

Saturday night, I was able to participate in the Destination Jesus retreat (our diocesan youth retreat) and finally was able to hear some of the incredible ways that God works on the hearts of these young people during this retreat as I heard confessions.  We need to pray for and support our youth!  What a great blessing to be a small part of that experience.

This coming week, I'm heading back "home" to Saint Meinrad for their 'baby-priest' workshop.  Basically, it's an opportunity to review how the first months of priesthood have gone and to get coaching for how to recognize problems now and head them off before they become problems for us in the future.  For me, it will be a welcome opportunity to return to the Hill and catch up with some of my classmates and other friends from the seminary.  I hope that it will also be a good opportunity to take some of these ideas that have been floating around in my head and plan for making them happen.  Stay tuned!

Enjoy the homily.  It's sunny out and I'm going for a walk outside :)

Peace.

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Homily: 1st Sunday of Lent – Cycle C

Back almost ten years ago now, when I was in the throes of my ‘reversion’ to the Catholic faith, I remember feeling very guilty.  For the first time in my life, I recognized that religion wasn’t just something that you ‘do’, but that it was about a relationship… that it was about the relationship between God and his creation: most especially, with us.  I felt guilty because I recognized that I had been ignoring that relationship.
As a result, during those first months I threw myself into prayer, fervently asking God what it was that he wanted me to do with my life.  When those prayers eventually led to the consideration of a vocation to the priesthood, I found myself at an impasse.  I had never considered the priesthood and so I didn’t know what to think about it.  “But,” I thought, “this is so radically different from anything that I’ve considered before; so, if I did it, I’m sure that I would be doing what God wanted and not what I wanted.”  I clearly remember making this prayer: “God, I’ve been living my life my own way for twenty-five years, why shouldn’t I do this for you?”
Soon, however, I learned that feeling like you owe God something is a poor reason to enter the seminary.  Thus, I put the discernment away for a while.  A few years later, when I was blindsided by the notion that I wasn’t yet doing what God wanted me to do with my life, I once again threw myself into prayer.  This time, however, I felt more fearful of damaging the relationship that I had built than guilty for having ignored it.  And so I turned to fasting in an attempt to disinterest myself from anything that could distract me from knowing God’s will.  Eventually, I heard again the call to the priesthood and this time I was sure that it was love, not guilt that motivated me, so I responded and entered the seminary.
I continued many of my habits of fasting after entering the seminary.  What I found there, however, was that my fasting was becoming a barrier: first to my relationships with my fellow seminarians, and eventually to my relationship with God.  Right fasting is the kind that turns our focus away from ourselves and back towards God and others.  I had become focused on myself and my need to maintain these fasts; and so to turn my focus back towards God and others, I actually had to learn how to “fast from fasting.”  I needed to remember the relationship, and not just the relation.  In order to do so, I needed to detach myself from trying to control it through fasting.
Remembrance and detachment are two themes that we find in our Scripture readings today.  In our first reading from the book of Deuteronomy, Moses is instructing the people about making the annual offering of the first fruits of the harvest to God.  What we hear is not the details about the offering itself (for example, how much is to be offered and when), but rather we hear what the Israelites are instructed to say after they’ve made their offering.  It is a statement meant to remind them of why they have brought their offering to the altar.
First, it’s a remembrance of where they came from.  Jacob was a small tribe of only seventy-odd persons when they went down to Egypt.  Yet God made them grow and prosper during that time.  Second, it is a remembrance of how God heard their calls for help when Pharaoh oppressed them with slavery, delivering them from Egypt with mighty signs and wonders.  Third, it is a remembrance of how God led them through the desert and into the fruitful land in which they live, the first fruits from which they have come to offer him.  In other words, it’s a remembrance that it was God who was in control the whole time and that he took care of them, and so their offering is one of thanksgiving for his grace and mercy that continues to care for them today.
In the Gospel, Jesus’ forty days in the desert produces in him a deep sense of detachment.  In the greatest understatement of all time, the Gospel tells us that, after forty days of not eating, Jesus emerged from the desert and that “he was hungry.”  Duh!  Actually, what the author might have been emphasizing was that he was “weak with hunger.”  The devil seeing this probably thought to himself, “Now is my chance!” and so he tempts him.  Jesus, having detached himself not only from his desires for food and drink, but also from his instincts for survival, and having placed all his trust for survival in his Father, was not fazed by the devil’s temptations.  Jesus knew that his Father was in control, because he had just experienced it for forty days; thus, he could not be moved to betray him now, even though he was physically weak from lack of nourishment.  His fasting produced detachment and thus solidified his relationship with his Father, who cared for him.
“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  This, my brothers and sisters, is our task during Lent: to remember our right relationship with God and with others.  We do this primarily through the three Lenten disciplines of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving.  Fasting, I would argue, is primary: for when we fast, we remind ourselves of the punishment due to us because of our sins and thus acknowledge that God is God and we are not.  Fasting also has the effect of detaching ourselves from our disordered desires for the things of this world: desires that place a barrier between us and God, as well as those around us.  A natural result of this detachment is that we are more available for prayer and have more resources to share with others who are in need, thus facilitating our prayer and almsgiving.  Finally, fasting helps us to remember to place our trust in the fact that God is in control and that he cares for us and so will provide to us whatever it is that we truly need.
And so, my brothers and sisters, on this first Sunday of Lent, let’s take a look at what we are doing this Lent in order to see where our disciplines are pointing us and let’s ask ourselves these questions: Are our disciplines motivated by guilt and the hope that God will pleased with them and so not ask too much of us?  Or are our disciplines about conversion: that is, about letting go of our control and turning back to God, remembering that his care alone is enough for us?
If you find yourself (as I often do) more in the first group than in the second group, don’t worry.  We still have about 36 days left to work it all out (which is plenty of time!).  And what a good work that it is.  I promise you that if you do it well, on Easter Sunday you will have forgotten that you are hungry, because you will have remembered God’s love and mercy as you celebrate his glory.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – February, 17th, 2013