New Year's Resolutions

          I did not preach the homily this past weekend, so in lieu of a homily I thought I'd share an idea I had regarding New Year's resolutions.  New Year's Day is the great "self-help" holiday, in which we are full of hope that the new year brings and some healthy (and often a lot of unhealthy) self-contempt.  The problem is that we often focus way to much on the externals: losing weight, exercising, learning a new skill, etc.  If you're a Christian, however, I'd charge you to think more spiritually.  Here are three resolutions that will bolster your spiritual life in 2020 (or create one, if you've been lacking it!):

1. Grow in piety: Piety is a devoted fulfillment of one's duty.  The pious person prays daily, frequents the sacraments, studies the Bible, and does other spiritual reading.  These pious practices are like core exercises: they're sometimes boring, but they make your whole body stronger.  Resolve to grow in piety by doing these things:
1. Pray more/better.  Check out this video from Ascension Presents for a plan to do this.  https://youtu.be/1UPIvsvWcUc
2. Go to Mass and Confession.  Mass every Lord's Day (Sunday) and Holy Day of Obligation (there are 5... look them up!).
3. Study the Bible/Read.  Spend time every day doing this!  Start with 10 minutes a day and grow from there.  If your parish has a Formed.org subscription, there are plenty of study/reading resources there.  If not, ask your parish priest for some resources.
2. Be a better evangelizer: Evangelization is not much more than communicating the good news that Jesus is our Savior and in him we have hope of eternal happiness.  We can do this though our words (spoken and written) and our actions (self-sacrificing acts of charity, both small and big).  Using words is often a challenge for folks, so here's three simple steps to prepare yourself to be an evangelizer:
1. Spend some time thinking about your own faith story.  How did you come to know God and Christ Jesus as your Savior?  What impact has that made on your life?  What is the hope that you live with because of this?
2. Write this story down and think about how you would share it.  Most people don't talk about their faith because they've never really verbalized it.  By writing it down, you give words to your story, making it easier to share when the opportunity arises.
3. Share it!  Now that you know how to verbalize the Good News (because you've verbalized how it has been good news for you), you are ready to share it with those around you.  Do not be afraid!
3. Help relieve suffering wherever you can: The Kingdom of God is a return to the Garden of Eden when all of creation dwelt in harmony.  Sin destroyed that harmony and suffering is the result.  But now that Jesus has conquered sin, we can begin to re-establish that harmony around us by helping to relieve suffering and by always striving to make a positive impact on those around us.  Here are some ways to do that:
1. Practice random acts of kindness.
2. Engage in regular service to those in need.
3. Perform the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

          These are three very broad resolutions, but they are resolutions that can be repeated year after year and never exhaust their fruitfulness.  Don't expect perfection for yourself, but do expect growth.  Write down some weekly goals for each of these resolutions and spend some time writing down how you did each week.  You'll begin to see your growth, even amidst setbacks.  Still further, your relationship with God will grow, and there's nothing more valuable than that.

          Remember that I'm walking this journey with you!  Let us encourage and support one another as we strive for the heights of happiness in this world in anticipation of the incomparable happiness we'll know in heaven.  May God bless you all in this year of grace, 2020!  Verso l'alto!

Your "yes" also means "no".

Homily: 34^th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle C

Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

          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.

          It’s a simple fact that when we say “yes” to something, it automatically says “no” to a lot of other things.  Many of these things are known to us at the time: the other options from which we chose the thing to which we said “yes”.  Sadly enough, there are whole reality shows based on this premise.  Has anyone out there watched the show “Say ‘yes’ to the dress”?  This is the whole premise to the show: saying “yes” to one and, therefore, “no” to many others.

          Still more, however, saying “yes” to something also means that we’ve said “no” to a lot of things that we haven’t yet encountered.  For example, saying “yes” to get married means that I’ve said “no” to many things: namely, to having romantic relationships with other people besides my spouse and to the relative freedom of having lived on my own.  It could also mean, however, that, perhaps without your conscious acknowledgement, you’ve already said “no” to the job promotion that would relocate you to another city because your family couldn’t move from where you are.

          Catholic author and speaker Matthew Kelly reminds us that to turn towards something is at the same time to turn away from something.  He reminds us of this because he acknowledges that too many people ignore this basic reality.  In other words, many people think that they can say “yes” to one thing without really saying “no” to the others.  But this is a lie, he says: a lie that will eventually leave us feeling lost and dissatisfied.  Again, in the midst of all of the taunting and reviling, Jesus remembered that to which he had said “yes” and, thus, could say “no” to using his power to save him from the cross.  Similarly, all those who were reviling Jesus had said “yes” to a type of Messiah that was different from the one that Jesus presented to them.  Thus, they had to say “no” to anyone purporting to be the Messiah who didn’t fit the type for which they were looking.

          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 Mercy, which ends today, has been all about.  It’s been about re-discovering and renewing our “yes” to Jesus by saying “yes” to serving him by serving the bodily and spiritual needs of those around us.  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 something to which we are constantly being called.  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?  By saying “yes” to Jesus, then we’ll have to say “no” to so many other things.  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), 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 to which we’ll have to say “no” because of this: because, although it may cause us to suffer for a time in this world, paradise—that is, eternal happiness—awaits those who persevere in their “yes” to God.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – November 20^th, 2016

God notices the smallest

          Although it may not seem like it on the surface, today's readings give us an invitation to put God's care for us into perspective and to let ourselves get lost in wonder at his graciousness to us.  None of us is so small that God doesn't care for us!  If we would only strive to see him, he will not fail to notice us!

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Homily: 31^st Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle C

          My brothers and sisters, today our readings invite us, I think, to consider the eternal nature of God.  Now, because we are creatures who exist in time, it’s hard for us to consider what a timeless existence might look like, but that is exactly what God is and so for us to be able to know him, we must at least strive to comprehend it.  To try and put this into perspective for us, I’ll share with you what I consider the best description of eternity that I’ve heard so far.

          Imagine that you are standing on a beach in front of an ocean.  Then imagine that you pick up one grain of sand and start walking.  Your task is to carry that grain of sand from the beach to the top of Mount Everest and when you get there, to leave that grain of sand at its peak.  Then your task is to return to that beach, pick up another grain of sand, and place it, along with the other, at the peak of Mount Everest.  You task, in fact is to do that with every grain of sand on earth: from every beach, every ocean bed, and every sand box in the world; one by one from wherever you find it to the top of Mount Everest.  Now imagine that every step that you take takes ten thousand years to make.  And so here you are, taking every grain of sand on the earth and moving it, ten thousand years each step, to the top of Mount Everest.  And when you’re finished—billions of years later—eternity will have just begun.

          In our first reading today from the Book of Wisdom, we read that “Before the LORD the whole universe is a grain from a balance or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth.”  In other words, just as billions of years are as but one moment in eternity, so is the whole universe—vast and incomprehensible in size—but as an insignificant amount of weight in a balance or an unnoticeable drop of moisture on the earth.  Yet, it goes on to say, nothing that happens in this universe—no grain falling from a balance or drop of dew falling to the earth—goes unnoticed by God.  Still more, it says that God not only notices every little thing, but that he also looks upon all of it with mercy, which reveals to us something important about God and our relationship to him.

          Sometimes, I think, we can separate God who created the universe from God who rules it.  When we do this, God who created the universe looked upon everything and saw that it was “very good”, but God who rules it does so like some beleaguered manager trying to make something positive out of a mess and who would rather scrap it all and start over than try to fix it.  Fortunately for us, this latter description of God is a distortion of the truth; because God who created the universe (and all that is in it) out of love is also God who rules the universe (and all that is in it) in love.  And since God is Love, then mercy must be the rule with which God rules.

          Man (i.e. the human person), by God’s special design and providence, was the only creature that God had made for himself.  All of the rest of creation was made to serve man, but man was made for no one else but God to be the one creature destined for an intimate, personal relationship with him.  So strong is God’s desire for this in creating man that, even when man sinned, God did not abandon man to death, but rather he set into motion the plan to redeem him so that man might once again achieve his destiny.  As the words from the Book of Wisdom remind us: “But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook people’s sins that they may repent.  For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made…”

          To show us this most perfectly, God sent his Only Son, Jesus, to reveal to us that he indeed had not forgotten us among the vastness of the universe; and in our Gospel reading today, we see a bit of a microcosm of this reality being played out.

          In the Gospel reading, Jesus has come to Jericho, a town deep in a valley between the river Jordan and Jerusalem.  It was kind of a seedy town where crime was rampant and so most travelers just passed through, hoping to make it through without getting robbed.  Nonetheless, Jesus, the Son of God, comes to this town, the lowest place within the Promised Land: which is nothing less than an image of God’s lowering himself to come among us.  Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector (which, by the way, also made him the chief of those despised by the people) and he was very short.  He wanted to get a glimpse of Jesus, but he couldn’t because he felt lost among the crowd.  And so he climbed a tree just hoping to see this Jesus that everyone was talking about.  How surprised he must have been, then, when Jesus noticed him, called him by name, and then invited himself to his house for dinner!

          Zacchaeus felt small and insignificant in the midst of the mass of creation that surrounded him.  Yet, when he made an effort just to see Jesus—Emmanuel, God who is with us—Jesus not only noticed him, but he called out to him and wanted to be known personally by him.

          Then the people accuse Zacchaeus before the LORD, saying that “[Jesus] has gone to stay at the house of a sinner.”  What an image of judgment day this is, isn’t it?  Zacchaeus stands before the Son of God and is accused of his sins.  Confident in God’s mercy, however, he stands before him and says, in effect, “I stand ready to receive your just judgment.  To demonstrate this, I promise before anything else, to give half my possessions to the poor; and if you should find that I have extorted anything from anyone, I promise I shall repay that one four times over.”  And for this act of faith in the one who judges justly, Zacchaeus receives salvation from the one who alone could give it.

          My brothers and sisters, this is the core of the Christian message!  That we, who are seemingly small and insignificant in respect to the vast universe, are nonetheless looked upon with mercy and love by our creator who made us for himself; so much so that he became one of us by sending us his Son to save us and to show us the way back to himself.  And if we are rebuked a little—that is, if we suffer some in this world—it is not because the God who rules the universe is some mean-spirited, vengeful God who wants to punish us, but rather, as the author of the Book of Wisdom states, it is “to remind us of our sins so that we may abandon our wickedness and believe in him”, Jesus, our Lord, who alone can save us!

          And so, my brothers and sisters, let us not be fooled into believing the lie that the all-powerful God, the God who created us and all of the universe, wants nothing to do with us, but lies in wait to punish us for our sins.  Rather, let us, like Zacchaeus, rush to be seen by him, trusting that God’s justice is always tempered by mercy for those who hide nothing from him: for the God of all the universe—the God of eternity—will not fail to notice us; and salvation, the salvation won for us through Jesus, will today be ours.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – November 2^nd & 3^rd, 2013