God with us in our thirst

Homily: 3^rd Sunday of Lent – Cycle A

          In the summer of 2009 I was in Guatemala studying Spanish and immersing myself in Hispanic culture.  There were students from many walks of life studying Spanish alongside me at the school.  A couple of students were, literally, a couple: a husband and wife pair named Kris and DiDi.  Kris worked for Lipscomb University in Tennessee as a teacher in Engineering Technology and every year, he would arrange a trip for his students to Central America so that they could apply their studies to a practical problem: in this case, capturing fresh water from mountain springs and transporting it to villages so that the people would have clean water with which to drink and cook.

          Kris and DiDi were not on one of these trips that summer, but were studying Spanish to make it easier for Kris to make these trips in the future.  Nonetheless, Kris was taking the opportunity to explore potential project sites for the future.  I expressed an interest in visiting one of these sites with them and they were gracious enough to invite me along on one of their trips.  This particular trip was to the northcentral part of Guatemala, near the city of Coban.

          While there, our local guide, Gabriel, explained some of the challenges in securing project sites.  He said that there were a couple of potential springs that were on a property that we weren’t able to access.  We would have to pass through certain pieces of property and the owners wouldn’t give us permission to do so.  He said that there were often fights between the owners and the surrounding villagers as the owner would often cut-off access to the road by locking a gate and would hire an armed guard to keep people out.  I remember clearly how Gabriel remarked that, when faced with such adversity, people’s ugliest side tended to show.

          But it’s true, isn’t it?  That when we are most stressed (and what is more stressful than worrying about whether you will have food, shelter, or clean water to drink?) we tend to get very defensive and we begin to treat those around us more like our enemies than our neighbors.  All of our good upbringing can sometimes go out the window, it seems, when adversity sets in and our basic needs are threatened.

          This fact was on display in today’s first reading.  In spite of all that God had done for the Israelites—in spite of all of the powerful signs he had worked while they were slaves in Egypt and when he led them out of Egypt—as soon as they run out of a certain necessity on their way to the land in which God promised to settle them, they begin to grumble against God.  No, the powerful miracles that God worked did not solidify in them an unbreakable trust in God.  Rather, when faced with adversity, instead of trusting in God’s care and making acts of faith that God would provide for them in their need, they gave into their fear and began to verbally attack Moses, accusing him of leading them out into the desert to die.
          Moses, on his part, gives in to fear, as well.  Instead of assuring the people that God would provide and then turning and asking God for a sign, Moses immediately turns and cries out to God to be saved from their violent threats against him.  God, of course, provided a miraculous flow of water to satisfy their worldly thirst, but the damage had been done.  So much so that they named the place, not for the miraculous flow of water, but for the doubting and testing of God that took place there.  The Scriptures even record the question that was on their lips in this time of adversity: “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”  Adversity, it seems, caused them to forget even the most powerful works of God and in their fear, they turned against him.

          A few millennia later, we can look back and ask, “After all that God had done for them, how could they fall into fear like that?”  The reality is, however, that we often do the same.  Even though we enjoy so many advantages in our lives—advantages for which, perhaps, we regularly take time to give thanks to God—when adversity hits, we suddenly forget how God has provided for us and we assume, rather, that he has abandoned us.  Perhaps we lose our job (or maybe our house… or maybe both), or a relationship disintegrates, or a tragedy takes the life of one of our loved ones, or maybe even a combination of these things… All of these things threaten our most basic necessities and so cause us to experience great anxiety and stress.  And instead of turning to God and making acts of faith that the one who has always provided for us will continue to provide for us, we rather turn against God: perhaps even asking ourselves “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”  Adversity, it seems, causes us, too, to forget even the most powerful works of God.

          In our Gospel reading, however, God gives us a definitive answer to our question in adversity.  The Samaritan woman comes to the well.  Why?  Because she’s thirsty of course.  There, at an obscure time of the day when she didn’t think that she’d encounter anyone, she meets our Lord and he makes a simple request: “Give me a drink.”  Over the centuries many a scholar and many a preacher has taken these words of the Lord and interpreted them to mean that our Lord was really expressing his thirst for her salvation; and this is a beautiful interpretation that I wouldn’t dare deny to be true.  But today I want us to hear these words in the context of accompaniment—as an answer, that is, to our question in adversity: “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”  In this exchange with the Samaritan woman, our Lord reveals himself as the Christ; but he first reveals himself to her as one who thirsts with her.  In this way, when he reveals himself as the Christ, he then also reveals himself as Emmanuel—that is, God with us: thus, definitively answering the question “Is the Lord in our midst or not?” with “Yes.  Here I am.”  As we heard, from this revelation, the woman no longer sought to fill her jar, but rather left it to go tell all of her fellow townspeople this incredibly good news.

          In our own lives, how often do we overlook our Lord in our midst because, instead of looking for him in our adversity with us, we are trying to find him outside of it?  We’ve stumbled and fallen into a deep well and the whole time we are looking up and crying out “Lord, why aren’t you here to help me?”, when often all we need to do is look to our right or our left to see that he is right there at the bottom of the well with us.  We think that, because we fell in the well that he was not with us and we forget that he has always revealed himself to be Emmanuel—God with us.  We think, “He couldn’t possibly be here in this mess with me”, completely forgetting that this is exactly what he decided to do when he became one of us, in the flesh.

          My brothers and sisters, God does not stand far off from us while we are suffering adversity.  No, he is with us in our adversity and, perhaps, much to our chagrin, he is not always with us to take the adversity away!  Rather, he is with us to remind us that none of us have been abandoned by him, even when, by all appearances and according to worldly standards, it appears to be so.  This is because faith was never meant to be a force field to shield us from adversity, but rather an inner strength to trust that God—the all-powerful God who, in one word, could wipe the whole universe from existence—has come to us, is in our midst, and remains with us, and that, therefore, we have nothing to fear: not even the complete loss of our most basic necessities.

          Back in 2009, among the many things that struck me about the adversity with which the people in those small villages lived, I remember noticing that in every house into which I walked, there was a little altar to God: a reminder that, in their adversity, the Lord was in their midst.  By our presence and, I expect, by the work that Kris would eventually accomplish in their villages, I pray that they also knew that God’s merciful love was leading them through it.

          My brothers and sisters, as we continue this Lenten journey towards Easter, let us remember that, in so many ways, our Lord Jesus is truly in our midst—not only thirsting with us, but also longing to slake our thirst with the living waters that flow from his heart—so that, turning away from sin, we may be renewed and ready to rejoice whole-heartedly when Easter comes: a joy that we taste even now here in this Holy Eucharist.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – March 19^th, 2017

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

Seven Last Words of Christ: "I Thirst."

Happy and blessed Easter to all!

Below is a reflection that I recently wrote for Good Friday on one of the seven last "words" (phrases, really) of Christ and I thought that I would share.

A couple of weeks ago, I had an opportunity to visit my family in Illinois to celebrate my sister’s birthday, a rare treat for me since entering the seminary. Although it wasn’t an official three-day weekend, it worked out that my classes for Monday were cancelled, which allowed me an extra day before returning to the seminary. Prompted by the amount of work I had waiting for me at the seminary, but moved by an interior conviction that felt strangely outside of myself, I decided to leave on Sunday instead. Throughout the six-hour drive back to southern Indiana, I sat with an aching in my heart, a longing for that denied opportunity to spend more time with my family. I had every reason, it seemed, to stay at home and enjoy them for another day. As the miles rolled away I came to see that it was God that had asked me to leave, and in doing so to feel a great longing for more. As I prayed the rosary while driving, I began to see the connection between my longing for my family and Christ’s longing on the Cross when he said, “I thirst.” It was then that I could connect this very tangible sense of longing for my family to the longing that my soul feels for God, and I began to understand what the Psalmist means when he says, “As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God” (Ps 42:2)

In Lent we purposely make a hole in our lives – we leave an urge unfulfilled. In other words, we thirst. We allow ourselves a tiny bit of suffering not to punish ourselves, but rather to awaken in us an awareness of the spiritual thirst that is constantly raging in our souls.

When we cover up our physical thirsts by satisfying them, we cover up our inner emptiness, and pursuing worldly satisfaction becomes our never-ending concern. When we subject ourselves to fasts for the sole purpose of penance, it seems senseless because it doesn’t point to the spiritual thirst that arrests each of our souls. However, if we allow our fasting and abstinences to point to the longing that our souls have for God, then we learn to tolerate, what spiritual writer Henri Nouwen calls, the sweet pain of that longing because our inner emptiness becomes filled with promise.

Jesus, in His physical agony on the Cross, did not long to satisfy his physical thirst, even though it was immeasurable. Rather, the thirst that he proclaimed from the Cross was a spiritual one. His thirst was that in and through his agony humanity might be made new, and that his prayer that we may all be made one might be fulfilled.

Today we have a great opportunity to come to a deeper understanding of this thirst of Christ. As we sit with our physical thirsts throughout the day, let us allow them to draw us to recognize the deep groaning inside each of us that echoes the words of the Psalmist when he says, “My being thirsts for God, the living God” (Ps 42:3), for it is when we acknowledge our inner emptiness that we also find the promise that fills it. Then we will be able to say with the Psalmist, “Why are you cast down my soul? Why do you groan within me? Wait for God, whom I shall praise again, my savior and my God” (Ps 42:12).

Given at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Church – Carmel, Indiana
Good Friday, April 2, 2010