Come, be filled with the joy of the resurrection!

Homily: Easter Sunday – Cycle C

Halleluiah, we made it!  After forty days of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, here we are on Easter Sunday.  What a joy it is to be here with all of you: my still new family in Christ.  Like any good engineer, however, I’m never content just to arrive at my destination.  Rather, there’s always a little part of me that wants to look back at where I’ve been and how I arrived here in order to see if I accomplished all that I had set out to accomplish.  I think that it is a valuable thing for us to do on Easter Sunday: kind of like looking over photos from a trip as soon as you get home so that you don’t quickly forget the experiences you had.

To begin, let’s go back to Ash Wednesday, all the way back on March 6^th.  There we heard Christ call us to repent from our sins and to believe in the Gospel and I encouraged you to look hard at what your Lenten fasts would be to ensure that they produced more than just forty days of punishment, but that they would also produce in you a sense of detachment.

Then, on the first Sunday of Lent, we recounted how Christ modeled for us what our forty days of fasting should produce in us.  He spent forty days in the desert, fasting and praying; and the Scriptures tell us that when he emerged from the desert, he was hungry (Duh!).  What Jesus realized during that time of fasting and prayer was that it wasn’t food or other worldly things that he wanted, but rather it was communion with God towards which all of his desires were pointing.  Therefore, when the devil tempted him to change rocks into bread, to worship him so he could have dominion over the kingdoms of the world, and to put God to the test by throwing himself off of the parapet, Jesus could resist him.  His fasting had led him to detachment from any desire for these worldly things.

A couple of weeks later, if you were with us for the celebration of the scrutinies, we heard about the Samaritan woman whom Jesus meets at the well.  Poor woman was just trying to get to the well and get home without running into anybody, but there was Jesus ready to flip her world upside down.  Jesus innocently asks for a cup of water, but when the woman questions him about asking a Samaritan for something, Jesus reveals to her the real reason why he is there: he tells her that if she knew who she was talking to that she would be asking him for water, because the water he would give would never leave her thirsty again.  What Jesus was revealing to her was that what she was really looking for couldn’t be found in husbands or in a well, but that it was sitting there right in front of her: that what she really thirsted for was to know God and that this knowledge alone would satisfy her thirst.

While I could go on picking out other examples from our Scripture readings from these past seven weeks, I won’t.  Hopefully, however, for these last forty days, this has been the work that we have been doing: removing the “old yeast” of malice and wickedness, as Saint Paul describes it today, so that we can celebrate this feast with the “unleavened bread” of sincerity and truth.  Hopefully, by our fasting and almsgiving we’ve been detaching ourselves from the things of this world: things that only provide a temporary satisfaction.  And hopefully through our prayer—which is where we meet God like that woman did at the well—Jesus has been showing us what it is that we are truly thirsting for.  And so, hopefully, you find yourself today like Jesus did when he emerged from the desert and like the woman did when she encountered him at the well: hungry and thirsty for what truly satisfies.

If you’ve done your work well, then you probably feel a sense of freedom from whatever it is that you gave up.  Thus, you won’t be easily tempted to go back to it now that Lent is finished.  If, however, you haven’t done this work so well, then you’re probably looking forward to getting out of this Mass as quickly as you can so that you can indulge again in whatever it was that you sacrificed for the last forty days.  Either way, I can tell you that the hunger that all of us are feeling today—the hunger that we are left with after forty days of fasting—is not a hunger for worldly things (although it may feel that way); rather, it is a hunger for God.

Saint Augustine famously wrote: “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in you.”  I think that he could have just as easily said the same thing if he would have said: “We are always hungry, O Lord, until our hungers are satisfied in you.”  And so, whether you have used this time of Lent well or poorly (or not at all), I can tell you that whatever hunger you feel inside of you today is truly a hunger for God and only communion with him will truly satisfy it.

Now, I’m enough of a realist to realize that some of us here see this and some of us don’t.  Those who see it are here today rejoicing with full hearts and full voice that God has not left us alone to die in our sin, but rather that through the resurrection of his Son he has redeemed us so that our hungers can be satisfied.  Maybe, however, that’s only a few of us.  Perhaps, though, many of us have gotten a glimpse of this during Lent and so come here today with great hope that something new is happening in our lives that can move us towards finding meaning and purpose in all that we do.  Yet I am sure that there are still some of us here who just don’t see it at all.  And you know what?  That’s ok.  Because we are all here today, just like Jesus’ disciples were all together on the first Easter.  And we are all hearing the same news—the joyful, compelling, and confounding news: He is risen!

And so regardless of where you find yourself today, the Good News is that He is risen and for the next fifty days we will be feasting on the joy of this day, and everyone is welcome to join in this feast from wherever it is that you are at.  This feast is truly the foretaste of heaven: for it is the joy that on this day nearly two-thousand years ago Jesus the Christ of God rose from the dead and conquered sin and death forever, restoring our communion with God and making it so that we can all truly live in harmony and peace.

My brothers and sisters, if you have been waiting for your invitation to join into this feast, then here it is.  Whatever it is that compelled you to be here today, know that God wanted you to be here and that he invites you to experience the richness of this banquet that he has prepared for you—for all of us—from before time began.  He knows that each and every one of us is hungry and he longs to satisfy that hunger.   Therefore, lift up your hearts to experience the satisfaction that only he can give: the union of love that he offers us here in this Eucharist.

Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – April 21^st, 2019

Discovering completeness

          We are very blessed at All Saints to have eight people who will receive new life in the waters of Baptism this Easter and so we began this week with the first of the three scrutinies.  At the Mass in which these are celebrated, we use the readings from Year A; this week that included the Gospel reading of the "Woman at the Well".  It's such a beautiful exchange between the woman and Jesus which, I pray, touched the hearts of our Elect.

Easter is coming close!  Next weekend... Laetare Sunday!

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Homily: 3^rd Sunday of Lent – Cycle C (Scrutinies)

          Advertisers have a pretty simple job.  (Now remember that when I say “simple” I don’t necessarily mean “easy”, I just mean “not complicated”).  When creating an ad, they only have to accomplish two things: 1) they have to awaken a sense within the person that there is something missing from his or her life, something that he or she should not be living without, and 2) they have to prove to the person how their product can fill that void.  Pretty simple, right?

          Probably one of the clearest examples of this is the most recent Snickers candy bar ads.  It reads "Hungry?  Grab a Snickers.”  First, its asking “Aren’t you hungry?”, which, if you haven’t eaten in the last 20 minutes, you will subconsciously answer “Yes, I am.”  Then, it presents their product as the thing that you need to satisfy your hunger: either right now, or as the thing that you will think about the next time that you feel hungry.  What they’ve done in two easy steps is that they’ve awakened in you a sense that you are missing something and they’ve presented their product as the way to fill that void.

          Many ads are more clever and complex than this one—often proposing products that you wouldn’t think would have anything to do with fulfilling that need as being able to fulfill it: like how drinking a certain beverage can gain you friends and good times.  You don’t need a beverage to make friends, but they want you to believe that you do.

          This touches on a weakness of our human nature, I think.  You see, we were meant for eternal things: things that don’t just satisfy us in the here and now, but that satisfy us eternally.  Yet our nature, disfigured by sin, constantly strives to fill in the spaces that can only be fulfilled by eternal things with things of this world.  These very often are material things—cars, houses, clothes, gadgets, etc.—but they can also be non-material things—like relationships, power, and prestige among our peers.

          A case in point: there’s that famous scene from the movie “Jerry Maguire” in which Tom Cruise’s character confronts Renee Zellweger’s character to tell her his true feelings for her; and he says, with all dramatic sincerity, “You complete me.”  Now, this is very touching (and I’m as much a romantic as many of you are), but what he says is patently false.  The truth is that nothing in this world “completes” us, because we were meant for eternal things; and as long as we are living in this finite world we will never find completeness.  Simply stated, we were meant for God and nothing less than God can complete us.  Because our relationships can model for us the type of self-giving intimacy that we will experience when we are unified with God, we can feel as if they truly complete us; but the reality is that they can never fully complete us, because only God has in himself everything that we need to eternally complete us.

          And don’t we see this happening all around us.  People who are longing to feel that completeness and falling victim to every advertisement that says “those hungers that you have in your heart and in your body can be satisfied by this product”, when, if they knew the God who created them and who longs to fulfill all of those hungers within them, they would look past those things, using them for the goodness inherent in them, but not making saviors out of them.  These are the people who eat too much, drink too much, work too much, shop too much, hop from one relationship to another (or one marriage to another), or from one church to another…  They are failing to recognize that there is no satisfying our hungers in this finite world, because what we hunger for are things eternal.

          This is the story of the Samaritan woman at the well in today’s Gospel reading.  It is the story of a person who has been seeking completeness in relationships so desperately that she has entered into marriage five times.  Not finding the completeness that she was looking for, she has given up on marriage, it seems, and has resigned to living with another man outside of marriage, so she could at least be provided for.  Her encounter with Jesus will awaken within her the realization that she is still longing for something more and how it is that she can find fulfillment.

          Jesus, like a good ad executive, grabs her attention by doing something unexpected: he asks her to give him a drink.  She was shocked because the social mores did not permit Jews and Samaritans to share utensils.  Now that Jesus has her attention, however, he awakens in her a sense of what it is that she’s been missing.  He says, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”  At first she was skeptical: “How can this man, who doesn’t even have a bucket, give me flowing water?”  Jesus then promises something even more curious: “whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst”.  Whoa.  This is bigger than just a constant supply of water.  This is eliminating thirst altogether!  And the woman takes the bait: hook, line, and sinker.  “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”  Jesus awakened in her a sense of what she really wanted and offered her something that would satisfy that need, even if she didn’t understand how he could do it.

          Jesus didn’t stop there, however.  Rather, he went right on to awaken her to her deeper need.  He tells her to call her husband and, when she claims not to have a husband, Jesus shocks her again and reveals that he knows her as well as she knows herself.  Recognizing now that Jesus is more than just some random Jewish man, but that he is a prophet, she engages him in religious questions, ultimately prompting her to reveal that she was living in expectation of the coming of the Messiah—something that, whether or not she recognized it, was her deepest longing.  Jesus responds by revealing that he is the Messiah, the one that she (along with all the Jews) had been waiting for.

          Overwhelmed by this sudden taste of completeness, she runs off to tell everyone in town.  Having tasted true completeness, she was no longer concerned about the judgments of the townspeople—their approval or disapproval was no longer an issue; rather, her only concern was to share this good news.  In doing so, she brings others to know him (and, thus, to taste completeness), too.  Many of the townspeople came to Jesus because of the testimony of the woman; and they listened to him and they came to know for themselves the same completeness that the woman had experienced: the completeness that can only be realized by entering into relationship with the eternal.

          Eight of our brothers and sisters have had their sense of incompleteness awakened and have recognized that this incompleteness can only be satisfied by entering into a relationship with the eternal through baptism.  Last weekend, they were “elected”—that is, “chosen”—to receive this grace by our Bishop because they have shown an understanding that it is Jesus alone who can fulfill their incompleteness and they have shown a willingness to follow him.  Today (and in the following two weeks) we will “scrutinize” them: inviting them in concrete ways to leave off sin and to follow Christ.  And this is a call that we all receive as we participate in these scrutinies with them: that is, to renew our commitment to turn away from sin—in whatever form it has crept into our lives—and to follow Christ, who is our eternal completeness, with our whole hearts once again.

          Strengthened by our participation in this Eucharist, may we then go forth to proclaim with conviction to all those who are not with us that we have found everything that we have been longing for here, when we encountered Jesus Christ in his Church, and so invite them here to experience the same.  Then and only then, my brothers and sisters, will we begin to realize the fullness of the completeness that awaits us when we are all united with Christ in the eternal life of heaven.  May God strengthen us in our efforts to complete this good and holy work.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – February 28^th, 2016

Our hearts are hungry, O Lord...

What a joy to celebrate my first Easter as a priest! It has truly been a beautiful experience so far.  I pray that all of you will know the joy of the Resurrected Christ this day and that his love will be with you to heal you, strengthen you, and give you peace.  Christ is risen!  Alleluia!!!

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Homily: Easter Sunday – Cycle C

Well, we made it!  After forty days of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, here we are on Easter Sunday.  What a joy it is to be here with all of you: my still new family in Christ.  Like any good engineer, however, I’m never content just to arrive at my destination.  Rather, there’s always a little part of me that wants to look back at where I’ve been and how I arrived here in order to see if I accomplished all that I had set out to accomplish.  I think that it is a valuable thing for us to do on Easter Sunday: kind of like looking over photos from a trip as soon as you get home so that you don’t quickly forget the experiences you had.

To begin, let’s go back to Ash Wednesday, all the way back on February 13th.  There we heard Christ call us to repent from our sins and to believe in the Gospel and I encouraged you to look hard at what your Lenten fasts would be to ensure that they produced more than just forty days of punishment, but that they would also produce in you a sense of detachment.

Then, on the first Sunday of Lent, we recounted how Christ modeled for us what our forty days of fasting should produce in us.  He spent forty days in the desert, fasting and praying; and the Scriptures tell us that when he emerged from the desert, he was hungry (Duh!).  What Jesus realized during that time of fasting and prayer was that it wasn’t food or other worldly things that he wanted, but rather it was communion with God that all of his desires were pointing him towards.  Therefore, when the devil tempted him to change rocks into bread, to worship him so he could have dominion over the kingdoms of the world, and to put God to the test by throwing himself off of the parapet, Jesus could resist him.  His fasting had led him to detachment from any desire for these worldly things.

A couple of weeks later, we heard about the Samaritan woman whom Jesus meets at the well.  Poor woman was just trying to get to the well and get home without running into anybody, but there was Jesus ready to flip her world upside down.  Jesus innocently asks for a cup of water, but when the woman questions him about asking a Samaritan for something, Jesus reveals to her the real reason why he is there: he tells her that if she knew who she was talking to that she would be asking him for water, because the water he would give would never leave her thirsty again.  What Jesus was revealing to her was that what she was really looking for couldn’t be found in husbands or in a well, but that it was sitting there right in front of her: that what she really thirsted for was to know God and that this knowledge alone would satisfy her thirst.

While I could go on picking out other examples from our Scripture readings from these past seven weeks, I won’t.  Hopefully, however, for these last forty days, this has been the work that we have been doing: removing the old yeast of malice and wickedness, as Saint Paul describes it today, so that we can celebrate this feast with the “unleavened bread” of sincerity and truth.  Hopefully, by our fasting and almsgiving we’ve been detaching ourselves from the things of this world: things that only provide a temporary satisfaction.  And hopefully through our prayer—which is where we meet God like that woman did at the well—Jesus has been showing us what it is that we are truly thirsting for.  And so, hopefully, you find yourself today like Jesus did when he emerged from the desert and like the woman did when she encountered him at the well: hungry and thirsty for what truly satisfies.

If you’ve done your work well, then you probably feel a sense of freedom from whatever it is that you gave up.  Thus, you won’t be easily tempted to go back to it now that Lent is finished.  If, however, you haven’t done this work so well, then you’re probably looking forward to getting out of this Mass as quickly as you can so that you can indulge again in whatever it was that you sacrificed for the last forty days.  Either way, I can tell you that the hunger that all of us are feeling today—the hunger that we are left with after forty days of fasting—is not a hunger for worldly things (although it may feel that way); rather, it is a hunger for God.
Saint Augustine once famously said: “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in you.”  I think that he could have just as easily said the same thing if he would have said: “We are always hungry, O Lord, until our hungers are satisfied in you.”  And so, whether you have used this time of Lent well or poorly (or not at all), I can tell you that whatever hunger you feel inside of you today is truly a hunger for God and only communion with him will truly satisfy it.

Now, I’m enough of a realist to realize that some of us here see this and some of us don’t.  Those who see it are here today rejoicing with full hearts and full voice that God has not left us alone to die in our sin, but rather that through the resurrection of his Son he has redeemed us so that our hungers can be satisfied.  Maybe, however, that’s only a few of us.  Perhaps, though, many of us have gotten a glimpse of this during Lent and so come here today with great hope that something new is happening in our lives that can move us towards finding meaning and purpose in all that we do.  Yet I am sure that there are still some of us here who just don’t see it at all.  And you know what?  That’s ok.  Because we are all here today, just like Jesus’ disciples were all together on the first Easter.  And we are all hearing the same news—the joyful, compelling, and confounding news: He is risen!

And so regardless of where you find yourself today, the Good News is that He is risen and for the next fifty days we will be feasting on the joy of this day, and everyone is welcome to join in this feast from wherever it is that you are at.  This feast is truly the foretaste of heaven: for it is the joy that on this day nearly two-thousand years ago Jesus the Christ of God rose from the dead and conquered sin and death forever, restoring our communion with God and making it so that we can all truly live in harmony and peace.

My brothers and sisters, if you have been waiting for your invitation to join into this feast, then here it is.  Whatever it is that compelled you to be here today, know that God wanted you to be here and that he invites you to come and experience the richness of this banquet that he has prepared for you—for all of us—from before time began.  He knows that each and every one of us is hungry and he longs to satisfy that hunger.   Therefore come.  Come and experience the satisfaction that only he can give: the union of love that he offers us here in this Eucharist.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – March 31st, 2013

The Solemnity of the Resurrection of the Lord