Podcast
Pastoral Reflections
Hosted by Msgr. Don Fischer · EN
Msgr. Don Fischer shares his weekly reflections on Scripture to help awaken listeners to the indwelling presence of God.
42episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
The Epiphany of the Lord: A 2026
Jan 4Tap to summarizeOriginal Airdate: January 8, 2023Isaiah 60:1-6 | Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6 | Matthew 2:1-12 Oh God, who on this day revealed your Only Begotten Son to the nations by the guidance of a star, grant in your mercy that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen. In the opening prayer, we asked for mercy. Mercy is unmerited love, and we want to know ⎯ we ask to know, by faith, the beauty of the glory of God. God’s glory is described in many ways, but the way I love to talk about it is God’s glory is human beings fully alive, fully alert, fully aware, living in reality, enjoying every single part of life, both that which is wonderful and that which is difficult. So we go to the first reading of Isaiah, and we see something that is a beautiful image of what I’m talking about, of God’s glory. It’s light. It’s enlightenment. You and I are invited into a process of growing and changing, evolving, and that’s happened over the centuries. It happens in each generation, and it continues to bring us to a greater awareness of simply what is, the truth. And from the readings during this Christmas season, we realize that John, the disciple, the one who was most, I think, in tune with who Jesus really was, made it clear that this figure Jesus was not just a person. He was also God but not God just in the sense that we now know what he looks like but God in the sense of his full revelation. So Jesus is seen as the truth. When Jesus enters the world, if you want to know what we need to know about being here, about living in this world, about achieving the goal that we’re here for, you focus on him, and the wonderful thing about him is what he brought to us: a way of seeing. So Isaiah says, “Someday a great light will come, but darkness,” he says, “Covers the earth, and a thick cloud covers peoples.” I love those two images, because it means that darkness was more prevalent than the light. Evil was winning, in a sense. Evil was everywhere. You go to Europe, especially a country like Italy, and you’ll see center after center of a city, not in a valley, not in a flat plane but always up on a hill with a gigantic wall around it. That’s the way they lived for centuries, always aware that there was something outside, dark, that could come and destroy them. And then there’s a thick cloud over the peoples, and to me that’s a perfect statement about unconsciousness, people living in a world that is dark. They believe it’s dark. They struggle to return evil for evil, and it doesn’t go anywhere, but it stays in the darkness. So Isaiah is saying, “Into this dark world, into this confusion will come understanding, insight, wisdom and also hope. A light will shine. You will see it.” And I love the image. When you see it, your heart throbs. It means you’re made for this. This is the thing that I’ve always thought the world should be, a place of goodness, a place of love, a place of mercy, a place of forgiveness, and that’s what God has revealed to you and to me. And it’s up to us to believe it, to trust in it.St. Paul is saying something about this new world, this enlightened world, and one of the things about the world in the past, when it was in darkness, it was always us against them. There was always an enemy out there. There was somebody that was considered the other, and throughout the Jewish tradition, God had always called a special group of people, and that was the only way he could begin to change the whole world, by starting with a small community and getting them to believe, and then it would spread out of that core community of Christians. But what’s so beautiful about this image from Ephesians is that he’s saying there is something so important about this truth that now is revealed by God, and that is God does not have just a simple group of favorite people that he pours his love into and destroys all their enemies. He, in a way, destroys the evil in the world that is connected to separation, isolation. “I’m here. These are my people. Everyone else is my enemy.” So here we see Gentiles, which is like ⎯ we used to use a phrase a lot in our Catholic faith of there’s Catholics and non-Catholics, which I always think is interesting. So Gentiles were non-Jews, all of them, Samaritans, all of them. They were all considered their enemy, impure, being punished by God. All of that is destroyed in this one simple statement that came through Paul that Jesus wanted the world to know deep in our hearts that there is no separation between us and the people around us. We have no enemies unless we create them, and to be enlightened is the key.So when Jesus was born and he brought this new light into the world, there were groups of people that came to honor him and to say things to Mary and Joseph, and the first group was the shepherds, which happened in the manger. And when they came, they had a message for Mary. We don’t know what exactly they said to Mary and Joseph, but they said things that must have affirmed for them what they believed in their heart that was still hard to believe, and that is that this child was not of human origin but divine origin in a human body. And so they had to dwell with these mysteries, and what I think is really interesting about that manifestation, it showed that Jesus would become someday the great shepherd, the Good Shepherd. But then we have the second manifestation of a recognition of who Jesus is, not just another human but someone who’s to bring wisdom and light into the world. We see not just simple shepherds, and there’s something about Christianity that ⎯ a religion that we always say, “Well, simple people have it, but really wise people and smart people and powerful people don’t need religion. It’s just a little burden on the side, and they can do without it.” But here we have these wise, beautiful men coming from the east, and they’re considered to be great rulers, kings, wise people, filled with wisdom. And they have listened to something that is mysterious, the arrangement of the planets, the stars. They were astrologers. It’s so interesting that astrology doesn’t have a very high esteem in Christian circles, but there’s something to it. There’s something to the way the planets move and how it affects people. Check with anybody that works in an emergency room. They’ll tell you, if it’s a full moon, it’s going to be a busy night. But this was different. This was a star, a light. A light had been created to lead them to the light, and the light was Christ. And the thing that is so beautiful about that image is, when they were brought to this child, they prostrated before him. They offered their treasures, and what they were really saying to them is that this child has a destiny that’s worth everything. Everything is nothing compared to him. You give gifts to someone to honor them, and these were all gifts that were both the image of riches and the image of anointing, even one that’s used in anointing the dead. It’s so beautiful when you look at all these stories and wonder why are they there. They’re there, because they all have one little element in this beautiful mystery of seeing who God really is, and through his Son, his person, his presence in the world, he awakens us to the power of light over darkness. Now, I’ve never remembered exactly any time before in the world, when I’ve listened to people talk about darkness, and there are many people that feel the world is filled with darkness, and they come up with all kind of theories. And they think the darkness is caused by this one group of people, and they’re out to destroy the rest of us, and there’s all kinds of conspiracies moving around. But the basic core thing that is creating that in them is a fear, a fear the darkness is winning, and they need to know where it comes from, because then they can go and try to attack it. But what they have to really believe, and this is so basic to Christianity, is that yes, darkness is still there, but darkness has been destroyed. Light wins. Light has won, and those who know that are the ones who are filled with light, enlightenment. And they see the value of darkness, and I think everyone who has been through a dark period in their life, who have lost something very dear to them, who have had some experience with something they don’t really want, if they deal with it, accept it, work with it, they’ll find that the darkness has an incredibly interesting role in our lives, and that is it tends to increase our awareness of light. It makes sense physically. A match that you light in the middle of the day doesn’t make much light. It doesn’t seem like much light, but put it in the darkness in a room filled with no light whatsoever and light a match, and it seems to illuminate the whole room. Darkness is essential to discovering and believing in the light. But there is one thing that I think the darkness can create in you and me that you have to watch out far, and it’s fear, fear and doubt that things are really in the hands of a loving God. And when those things come, fear comes, darkness seems to increase, and we’re left in a place where we have a choice: stay there, have a...
Transcribe →Feast of the Holy Family: A 2026
Dec 28Tap to summarizeOriginal Airdate: December 29, 2019Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14 | Colossians 3:12-21 | Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23 Oh God, who pleased to give us the shining example of the holy family, graciously grant that we may imitate them in practicing the virtues of family life in the bonds of charity and so, in the joy of your house, delight one day in eternal rewards. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen. There’s something so fascinating about the Old Testament when it comes to focusing on the birth and life of Jesus, and that is simply that there is over 300 references in the Old Testament to who this Messiah would be, where he’d be born, where he would live, what his name would be. It’s amazing. I even discovered, in getting ready for this homily, that the very term Nazareth comes from a Hebrew word that means branch, and when Jesus ended up, through a series of insights that Joseph received in a dream and they end up living in Nazareth and raising him there, it so fits the image that we started the season of Advent with, where this great tree, the Old Testament, in a sense was cut back. A new branch, a new twig started growing, and the place where this twig grew up is called the branch. Interesting, but in all those images, we see something coming that is radically, radically new. I think of all the things that I think about Christianity is we believe part of it, but we won’t take in the whole message. We won’t grab the whole thing and swallow it and let it come in, because it’s too different. It’s too transforming, changing. It changes everything, and I know, and you know that human beings both long for change, because they want to grow, and they develop. But they’re also terrified of it when it takes away the things that are familiar, things they’ve always done, and sometimes people can make an actual virtue of saying, “I’m never going to change. I’ve always thought this way. I’ll never change it. I’m not susceptible to all these new ideas.” And nothing would be more tragic for a person who is open to the Christian tradition to say, “I don’t want to change,” because the one thing about the Old Testament is it was focused on something quite different than the New Testament. And it was supposed to be different, because people were different. But the reason I chose that song, Deep River, is because the main theme of the Old Testament is God entering into people’s lives and wanting to take them on a journey from slavery to freedom — slavery to freedom, the Promised Land, milk and honey, everything wonderful. Who was the slave in that whole story? What were they enslaved to? Obedience to a law, obedience to external rules, obedience that was designed to help people who were in a situation that I would like to describe as simply very, very young. It’s like you don’t give a child at four or seven or eight or eleven or even sometimes fifteen or sixteen freedom to go and do whatever they think is best. They’re bound to authority. So it’s interesting. On this Feast of the Holy Family, we’re going to be talking about the transition between Old and New Testament in a certain way. At least that’s my theme for this homily, and what I think is so fascinating about the holy family is that it ushered in an entirely new vision of what it was like to live in community — community, the family, the family. It’s impossible, I think, to put the holy family out there as a model of family life. After all, Joseph had married Mary, and according to the Catholic Church, one of its teachings is that they never consummated the marriage, that they had only one son. That’s the tradition in the Catholic Church, and so here is a man who never had sex with his wife, who has one son, and he’s God. You imitate that. How do you do that? Now, there’s something in the holy family that you have to imitate, and what it is is who each of them are, who they are. And they’re not an average mother and an average father and an average child. So how do you understand this family dynamic, this incredibly interesting father who’s willing to give up everything to surrender to a mystery that’s way beyond him and a woman who’s taken a risk and risked her whole reputation, everything, to follow this mysterious messenger, this angel, and this child Jesus who comes along who doesn’t get married. And he’s basically something unique. He’s not just another human. He is 100 percent human, but he also happens to be a human that possesses this unique quality that we are all working toward, and that is the quality of having God inside of him. So we have a God incarnate, a celibate couple. So who are they? Think of them this way. This is a stretch maybe, but think of fatherhood. Who is our Father? God. So this dynamic, this trio, this unity is between a father, his son and his mysterious, feminine, unique figure who I want to call Spirit. It’s the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the part of us, that spiritual part of us that can understand and receive the mystery of something inside of us growing that isn’t us. And that thing that’s growing in us, along with our broken humanity, is the divinity of God. That is the mystery. Each of us become, in a sense, pregnant through this mysterious thing called redemption where God actually enters into us and lives there, and we give birth to him every time we live the way he’s invited us to live. Every time we are who he calls us to be, every time we resonate something out of them, out of ourselves, it’s him. So let’s look at this first reading again. Maybe it’s the first time we’ve looked at it, but it says very much that a Father is the main figure. You must obey the Father. The Father is everything. You tell any child today that their total obligation their entire life is to do exactly what their father says. They’ll look at you to say, “Well, that’s risky, depending on who the father is.” So you can’t take it literally, but what it seems is being said in the Old Testament is your job, in the Old Testament, before you grew up enough to have your own capacity to make decisions based on a wisdom that comes into you through God’s presence in you, you’re going to have to follow authority. So the Old Testament is all about following authority, and we don’t like letting go of it. And the church loves the authority and hates to see us let go of it. Do what your Father says, and you’ll always be all right. And the Holy Spirit, your mother, she loves it when you’re surrendering to the Father, because the Father is truth. So if you can understand — in the image of the holy family, yeah, the truth is there. You need to surrender to it always. You need to be in touch with the feminine side of you that’s open to receive that mysterious truth, and then you’ve got to put it incarnate in the world through this power and presence of God inside of us. That’s the family we’ve got to imitate, but look at the next reading.After we’ve listened to an Old Testament reading that says, “You have a debt, your sins, and one way you can get over the debt that you owe is to do everything you’re told.” Now, that is a very precise, beautiful description of the Old Testament, and we still live there. I’d say — I don't know if I’d say most of us, but certainly most of us have that in our background. That feels comfortable, and it’s the teaching of religion. It’s the teaching of any authoritarian figure in your life. It’s your parents when you’re young. “Do what you’re told.” It’s as simple as that. Into that comes the New Testament reading from Paul. What is he saying about relationships? He doesn’t say obey people. I love this. He says, “The first thing you have to do in relationship is have compassion. Forgive them. Honor them in the sense that they are valuable. Be kind. Be gentle. Be compassionate. Be understanding. Forgive everyone as you have been forgiven.” Isn’t that amazing? Instead of surrender yourself to a higher power, work with that power. When it tells you the truth, that’s wonderful, and when it tells you a lie, you just have nothing but understanding and passion. I understand. I can forgive my parents for teaching me things that were destructive to me, that took me years and years to get over. I can do that. I can forgive a church who has laid guilt and shame upon me forever, and I can still love the qualities of that religion, its ritual, the Eucharistic presence, the community it creates, the forgiveness that it calls us into. I can love, love, love that part of it and still forgive the authoritarian part that just doesn’t want to let go.So then we look at the gospel, and what’s the gospel about? It’s about this message. It’s not just a...
Transcribe →The Fourth Sunday of Advent: C 24-25
Dec 22, 2024Tap to summarizeMicah 5:1-4a | Hebrews 10:5-10 | Luke 1:39-45 Pour forth, we beseech you, oh, Lord, your grace into our hearts that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross be brought to the glory of his resurrection who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen. There’s something about that song. You just listened to it, and it was in, obviously, German. So you didn’t really hear the words, but it’s a song that just the melody itself, the way it works on the person who’s listening, it creates an inner stillness. It creates peace. The first reading that we just listened to, from Micah, is one of those passages, so many of them in the Old Testament, that refer to the coming of a Messiah. From the very beginning, right after what we know as the sin of Adam and Eve, that incredibly interesting and difficult to interpret story, what we’re told is there will come one day someone that will crush the head of the serpent. The serpent is that lie that was given to Adam and Eve, and the lie was, “You are enough. You can do everything on your own. All you need to know is right and wrong, and you’ll be fine. That’s all that God asks. Do what’s right. Don’t do what’s wrong. That’s the whole relationship.” That’s the lie. What we’re told is that there would be a man from a woman. Interesting, most of the time you talk about a man in the Old Testament, you wouldn’t say a man of a woman. You’d say a man of a man, because the women weren’t considered to be as important as the men. So we were sons and daughters of a father. Well, this is the son of a mother, a woman who gives birth to someone, and that someone in this story is peace. And the someone in that first prophecy of a Messiah in the Old Testament, the Book of Genesis, is the son will crush the head of the serpent, but he’ll also be bitten. He’ll crush the head, but he’ll be poisoned. He’ll die. Amazing. From the very beginning in the Old Testament, you were being told that this isn’t the fullness of the message. Someone’s coming. So in the second reading, you hear from the author of Hebrews that it’s clear that, when Jesus came into the world, and the Messiah is Jesus — so the Messiah who comes eventually to reveal the truth makes an astonishing statement about the Old Testament. It was all based in the law, and it was fundamentally based in the law that required that you didn’t sin, and sin was always a kind of curse. So if you sinned, you would be punished, and so in the Old Testament, what we see, the major relationship that we have with God is one struggling to make up for our sins, to find forgiveness and, through some mysterious way, find a way not to sin. So at least when I grew up in the church, and that’s what I felt was the most important thing. Stop sinning, and if you do sin, you have to make up for it. And the making up for it was yes, you went to forgiveness. You went for forgiveness. You went to be forgiveness, but at the same time, it seemed that there was something inside of us that felt there was a debt that was created by our sins. And that’s something human beings feel. I’m responsible for causing this pain, and I should make up for it. And yet what the Old Testament taught us is that that kind of system, based on you keeping a law that you’re not really able to do perfectly, being caught in failure always and then being caught in trying to pay for the failure means you’re always going to be primarily thinking about the future as, “Oh, God, I hope I’m enough not to sin in the future.” And you’re going to be thinking about the past. “Oh, my God, I’ve got to make up for all that.” And so sacrifices, offerings were made, and that was pleasing God. And here is the Messiah coming along and saying, “That whole system never pleased God.” It’s almost to say that your sins are not, in any way, shape or form, the issue with God. God does not turn against us because we are sinners. In fact, the more you understand the mystery of life, you realize that we are given by God, from the beginning, a weakness that leads us into sin, and what is sin? Sin is yes, doing the wrong thing, but it’s mostly not seeing what is true, seeing something that looks like the truth and aiming for that, and then it never produces what it promises. So what we learn in the Old Testament is that just making up for your sins and trying not to sin is not what God wants. It’s not what he’s interested in. Shocking. What that must imply is that there’s something about sin that has its purpose, its meaning, and we’re supposed to be engaged in that. And the engagement in it is somehow to accept that’s part of our human nature, that we fail, and in that failure, there’s something promised, something good, something that will happen to us. I’ll call it experiencing that which is not what we want and knowing therefore that is not the direction we want to go in. We need sin to grow. We need it. It’s part of the plan. So something is coming. The thing that’s coming is peace, according to the first reading. That’s salvation, being at peace. We have to be at peace with who we are in our relationship with God, and yet it’s always bothered me that he says, “I have destroyed sin,” but then I still struggle with sin all my life I still feel guilty. I still feel at times I’m not good enough. I’m afraid I’ll sin in the future, and I’m not supposed to. But what if sin is not the thing that is the problem? That’s our human nature. So what is our problem? If it’s not our weaknesses, if it’s not our faults, then where should we be looking? The Messiah is the one that comes into the world to show us what we should be looking at, and what is it? Well, first of all, you have to understand that it’s a change, something radically new, something different than we thought. We can say, “Well then, the Old Testament is wrong, and the New Testament is right.” No, no. We have the Old Testament as the example of what we go through on our journey to become whole, to become complete when we learn what is real, what is true, and what is true is that we are not ever expected by God never to make a mistake. That’s not his plan. His plan is that we grow and that we change and become someone. The someone we become is described in a very beautiful way in the gospel, because we have two figures that represent the old and the new. There’s two women, one, say, in her 90s. She found out six months earlier that she was going to have a baby, so she’s in her sixth month, and this baby inside of her, we know who it is. It’s the greatest of the prophets, John the Baptist, and the thing that was so great about him is he announced the new way. He announced the new kingdom, the surprise, the thing we never expected, and so she represents the righteousness that people struggle for, always doing what’s right and then still finding themselves cursed, because Elizabeth always felt she was cursed with not being able to [sic] child. So why was she cursed when she did all the right things? Well, it’s because your parents sinned somewhere back, but she was burdened by the shame of sin. It kept her from bringing new life into the world. It’s called shame. It’s an infection that saps energy and takes away hope. She represents the end of that and the beginning of something new, and then there’s someone 13 years old, a little girl. What do we know about her? Well, we know that she has amazing faith. The one thing the story tells us is Elizabeth looks at her and gives such praise for who she is, and she says, “We’re all blessed because you believe in what God has promised, the Messiah.” Most of us have given up on the Messiah. What we worry about is our sins, trying to make up for them. No, there’s somebody here in our midst who is there to save us, and he’s peace. He’s forgiveness. He’s acceptance. He’s everything we think we have to earn by not sinning, and so the radical statement of the New Testament is sin is not our problem. Human weaknesses are who we are. What is our problem? Whether we believe or not. Believe in what? The truth. What’s the truth? Reality. What’s reality? God announces John the Baptist, makes everybody aware that this person Jesus is the announcement of the most incredible, impossible thing that anyone could ever think is going to happen. God, the God who punishes, who rewards, that God, he wants to live inside of you. He wants to come and be a part of you. He wants to be your partner, but he comes to you as a sinner. He comes to you in your dirtiness, in your darkness. That...
Transcribe →The Third Sunday of Advent: C 24-25
Dec 15, 2024Tap to summarizeZephaniah 3:14-18a | Philippians 4:4-7 | Luke 3:10-18 Oh, God, who see how your people faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s Nativity, enable us, we pray, to attain the joys of so great a salvation to celebrate them always with solemn worship and glad rejoicing. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen. We’re now on our third Sunday of this great season of Advent, a season announcing something that’s coming. We know that what’s coming is a kingdom, the kingdom of God, and we know a couple of things about it. It’s inside of us. It’s not necessarily something we should look for outside. It’s a feeling. It’s a disposition deep within us, and it’s here now. It’s not about something in the future where things are going to get better. No, it’s exactly enough right now. It’s exactly what it needs to be now to produce something, and what it’s producing, according to the set of readings we’ve just listened to is an amazing quality, amazing disposition. It can be summed up in one word — peace. Peace. It may sound like it means no struggle, no tension, everything is just fine and calm, but it doesn’t mean that in terms of the external world we live in. It has something to do with the internal world, the world that is truly us, the world that is forming us, guiding us, supporting us and even harming us at times. But in that inner world, what we’re looking for is a place of calm, a place of well-being that creates not just peace, but the peace brings a kind of joy, a kind of happiness that’s not the gigantic, elated thing where we’re jumping up and down because we just won the lottery or something like that, but it’s about a kind of calm, inner happiness. All is well. All will be well, Julian of Norwich.So how do we get this place, or what is it, or how do we engage in it? It’s clear to me that I often don’t live there, and it’s probably true for you too. We get caught up in worry and anxiety, but this Sunday always, the third Sunday, is dedicated to this gift that we’re promised if we enter into the inner kingdom and we live it as it was intended to be lived. So let’s look at what creates this peace. Where does it come from? What does it take for us to stay in it? Well, the one thing — let’s look at the first Sunday. The first Sunday of Advent was we have to go through changes. Anybody that wants to enter into this inner kingdom has to let go of the outer kingdom, so to speak, the way the world would tell us we should live to be happy, no problems, having everything we want, having more than somebody else, being the best, whatever. If your world is based in those things and you have to die to that, the world feels like it’s completely falling apart. So we were told be careful about what looks like the end, because it may simply be the transformation, the radical transformation you need to go through in order to get to this place called the kingdom. You have to die to everything that’s not the kingdom. Then the next Sunday was about the journey, the path. We have to make this journey of movement towards truth, towards wholeness, towards authenticity, and it’s difficult, and it has deep, deep valleys and high, high peaks and lots of confusing directions and constant obstacles. But something, I’ll call it hope, trust, those virtues keep us moving so that the darkness is not so dark, and the high peak is not as exciting as we thought it would be. Being confused at times is not really as unsettling as we think it is, and daily obstacles, well, we can learn how to deal with those. So now what are we looking at? Where do we find peace?Well, the first thing that I sense in this quest is that we see something in the first reading that is unusual in a way, because I tend to think about how can we show God that we’re thankful for him. How can we be grateful? “Thank you, God, for giving me my life. Thank you, God, for this. Thank you for that.” The word Eucharist means thanks. We gather week after week to give thanks to God for our life. What’s interesting about this first reading, it’s really not about we giving thanks to God, and he’s so happy. It’s he [sic] feeling enormous satisfaction and joy and peace as he looks at who we are, at what he created. He delights in us. He looks at us and absolutely, totally falls in love with what he created, and he’s delighted in it. And he knows it’s imperfect. He knows he made it that way, and so what I sense in this first reading is one of the core, I would say, foundations of our sense of peace is that, as messed up as we are and as filled with failure and doubt as we are, there’s something about us that God just looks at and says, “Wow, look at what I created. It is absolutely beautiful.” And when you see something beautiful, you have three reactions, because we’re made like God, and God has these reactions. I take pleasure in what is beautiful. I want to protect what is beautiful. I want to participate in it. I want to be a part of it. That’s what God sees in us. He wants to be a part of our life. He wants to participate with us in this process. He wants to enter into us, live with us, dwell with us, go on the journey with us with all of its mess and all of its sin. He says, “I want to be right there, please. I really like being with you.” God, how many years of doubt and struggle I’ve had trying to please God by being perfect, and I think, if I’m not, I always thought I’d lose his favor. He smiles at our mistakes, and he’s sad, because they cause us pain and others. But it never ever weakens his love, his affection, his attention.Then Paul talks about how we should be so delighted in this work that God has given to us. If we understand our work and we do the work that God has given us, we live the gospel, we’re going to find great satisfaction. So it’s about finding peace in what you’re doing — what you’re doing. That’s a really interesting image. What is it that we do that brings us peace? What is it that we don’t do or do that causes anxiety and worry? Well, I was struck in the gospel by the words that John the Baptist gives to these people that come up, because he’s been telling them, “This is happening. This new thing is coming. This promise that we’ve always had that this God of ours is going to enter into a new relationship with us, it’s going to be much more intimate than it was in the Old Testament, and we’re going to be given a gift called redemption.” He didn’t use that word, but he meant we would be made new, and we’d be given more insight.The way I like to think about this is that we’re growing with this gigantic thrust into deeper awareness of what is real, growing in a gigantic leap of consciousness. I think it’s fascinating to think about the growth of consciousness of human beings. When God first called Abraham, that was 4,000 years ago, and he dealt with him as God had to deal with people. And he dealt with him in a way that is radically different than the way he fully revealed himself to be in terms of the way he works with us. In the beginning, he was demanding and often irritated by faults and wanted to destroy that which wasn’t good, and then you find he’s not interested in anything that’s like destruction. What he wants is transformation. He wants to renew. He wants to save, save things and bring them into fullness. We’re obviously living now, 4,000 years after that event, in a world where we’re much more receptive to this kind of direction, not being condemned, not being judged, not being threatened with punishment but being invited into something wonderful, into some new life. This new life has a kind of litmus test. I don't know if that’s the right word, but if you want to know whether you’re living in the kingdom, you’ll know it by the amount of peace that you have.Now, we’re not talking about everything being fine. We’re not talking about your financial situation, the relationships in families. We’re not talking about those all being perfect and peaceful. No, we’re talking about a way of seeing the world that you’re living in that goes beyond the tensions that are there, beyond the fears that might be there that are literal. I worry about this person. They may be making a terrible mistake, and I’m hoping they don’t. That kind of anxiety is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something much, much deeper, like somehow knowing in the midst of all of it there’s a core, quiet, still place I go inside of me where I know my God is there, and I’m with him, and he’s delighted at the way things are going, not because they’re going well, because they are. He delights in what he created. He created a world with suffering, with pain, and I’m not saying he delights in pain and suffering, but he delights in what they can create. And they have this mysterious property of being able to create something for us that’s positive.So I look at John the Baptist announcing all this. He’s saying, “Look, this is coming. This is going to be wonderful.” And so there are two groups of people that come up to him and say, “Well, what should we do? You’re talking about a kingdom of peace, a kingdom of joy, a kingdom of life. What do we do? What’s our part? How do we get it?” And his answers are amazingly simple and not what I would have expected. When I think about what it is the church has generally required for holiness, it’s like a life of austerity, a life of separation from the world, the monks that go away to be holy. They give up family, and they give up sex, and they give up connections with pleasure, and they live in a quiet, still place. There’s a real, honest vocation in that, but that’s not the model for our holiness. It’s not. This is n...
Transcribe →The Second Sunday of Advent: C 24-25
Dec 8, 2024Tap to summarizeBaruch 5:1-9 | Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11 | Luke 3:1-6 Almighty and merciful God, may no earthly undertaking hinder those who set out in haste to meet your Son, but may our learning of heavenly wisdom gain us admittance to his company who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen. The four Sundays of Advent are really one, consistent message. Each Sunday focuses on a part of that message. The message is directed to something that we are about to begin, a new church year, a new liturgical cycle. Each cycle focuses on one of the synoptic gospels. Last cycle we just finished was the gospel of Mark. This will be the gospel of Luke. The first is the gospel of Matthew. Someone once said, if we didn’t have all four of the gospels, we couldn’t possibly have the fullness of the message of Jesus. So even though they seem similar, covering the same events, it underscores the fact that, as one reads an event, as one perceives it, digs into it, imagines it, as one would have imagined the ministry of Jesus and then wanted to record it, certain things would be recorded, depending on your perception. We have four different people’s perspective. So let’s look at these readings and see what they point out, because last week, when we listened to them, we realized that there was something coming, something difficult, some difficulty was coming and that there would be a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, a kind of catastrophic situation where things were falling from the sky, and the earth was trembling, and there was great upheaval. I pointed out that one of the things I believe God was putting before us was the notion that, if we’re going to follow the way of God as revealed by Jesus, we are going to go through radical changes, and when those changes come, they’re going to basically free us, cut us off from the illusions and the half-truths that we’ve been living. And when you’ve been living in one way of seeing and you’re asked to let go of it, it isn’t just, “Oh, how wonderful, a new way of seeing. It’s so much easier, so much better.” No. You have to let go of the old, and if the old has really been a part of the decisions you’ve been making, particularly your unconscious decisions, then it’s almost like a death, like your world is collapsing. The other thing we learned last Sunday is it’s time to pay attention. Don’t go numb. Don’t go unconscious. Pay attention. Pay attention. What I think we’re supposed to be paying attention always is our intention. Our intention is everything. What am I doing? Why am I here? What’s my deepest desire? It’s clear, especially as we listen to the second readings of both these two Sundays — we see that what Paul is saying is, “I’m so delighted that you’re engaged in this work. I’m so happy to see God manifesting himself through you, and I see you loving each other, taking care of each other,” which, surprisingly to me in a way, was so radically different than the way the world lived back then. Then this beautiful image of as you perceive what you’re seeing, as you perceive the message of Jesus, that perception is going to focus your intention in the right direction: empathy, care, forgiveness, and most especially, living out your life as it is written. Living your life as it is written, this brings up a very complicated issue of is our life already written for us. Not in the sense of all decided, because we have a major role in deciding how our life goes, but are there objective principles? Are there objective things that our life in particular has been in formation for years to get ready to give a particular insight, a particular part of the story so that everyone has this challenge of not only seeking to be who God calls us to be but to be uniquely what that is? And that takes a tremendous amount of self-reflection. What is it that I’m here to say? What is my gift? What is my purpose?It’s interesting to me that at the beginning of God’s relationship with his people, he formed a community, the Israelites, calling them to be his people, which underscores to me that the way in which we are asked to live out our life here, our destiny on this planet, is in community with others. When I think about my community or your community, I could say, “Well, we belong to this religion. I do, Roman Catholicism. That’s my community.” I could say I’m an American, or I’m a Texan. Those are my communities, but I don’t think it’s that simple or geographical or based on whatever religion you belong to. I think it’s the family of man that is searching for the truth and longing to see what is real and to live out their part in that process, being a seeker. We come into the world in a particular family, and we are a part of that family. I think it’s fascinating how, when you come into a family, you would think maybe because children have the same experiences that their brothers and sisters have that they’d all be so similar. It’s just the opposite, it seems. Brothers and sisters can be radically different. Where does that difference come from? Well, there’s certainly a primary influence on all of us in our family of origin, but there’s also an influence that we come into the world with, which is about our past, about all the generations that preceded us and about the groups of people we were part of in an intimate way, that we were really working together. My point being we have a nuclear family that we work together with. As we grow older, in adulthood, we find we are choosing a family of friends, acquaintances, people that we are working with, and that’s another group that we’re connected to. Within that group, there’s usually a smaller group that’s our intimate friends. So we have a family that we’re connected to, a community of workers and connections with people that we interact with, and then this group of people that we really call friends. That’s who we work with. That’s the group that is ours, and whether we choose to be aware of this or not, it happens this way, because the way we are connected, the way human beings connect is that they connect in a way that is not just literally time with each other. But when you connect with someone, there is a true, literal flow of resonance and grace and energy between the two of you. I love it when you have a friend that you haven’t talked to in a long time and you pick up the phone to call them — this happened to me not too long ago — and they had picked up the phone at the same exact moment to call me, and neither phone rang. Coincidence? I don’t think so. We work with a group, and what is the work of the group? Well, pay attention. Be alert. Be awake. Be conscious, and then notice some things that are crucial to the whole sense of being full and alive and engaged, principles called the truth. Our responsibility is to lead each other into the truth as Jesus came into the world to lead each and every one of us, as a community, into the truth, what is, reality. And so this work is the work of all of us. We call it sometimes the work of the church. We call it the work of friendship, the work of marriage, the work of parenthood, but it’s guiding each other, reminding each other of things. And that first set of readings that we had last week was saying there’s a promise being made to you by God, and this promise will be fulfilled. I love that image, because it means that this work of growing into the truth is not simply something that we have to come up with all the energy and all the strength that is needed to achieve it. No, there’s a greater strength than we are who knows so much more than we know, who’s light years ahead of us in wisdom, and it’s his relationship with us that, if we pay attention to his intention, it is we will succeed. We will make it. We’re going to make it. This is not a dice throw. No, it’s a slam dunk, unless we simply stand up and absolutely resist it, which is possible, but not for the person who’s seeking it, not for the person who wants it. So we see in this particular second set of readings for the second Sunday, it is something a little different. It seems to be, certainly, about the plan, about the direction we need to go, but it also says that there is this path we’re supposed to be on, this journey. And we should be on it together. We should do it. It’s symbolized by — obviously the first thing that God did with the community that was interconnected was to lead them together on a path, on a journey from what they didn’t know to what they knew, from what was less to what was more, from what was imprisoning them to what was free. That’s our direction, and the thing that we can call all this work is going toward the truth. Now, one of the phrases that stands out from this liturgy is this path that we have. We have to do something about it. John the Baptist, who was the most important figure to engage us in this path, announcing it, not the source or the success of the path but ...
Transcribe →The First Sunday of Advent: C 24-25
Dec 1, 2024Tap to summarizeJeremiah 33:14-16| 1 Thessalonians 3:12—4:2| Luke 21:25-28, 34-36 Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming so that gathered at his right hand they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen. Today we begin a new liturgical year. The season is Advent. The word means coming. One of the things I find fascinating, the more I wonder and ponder about this thing called life, what it means to be human, who is God, what is he doing, questions like is he real, what’s he want. It’s really wonderful to take time, to have time to ponder these questions, because it seems to me that most of us live through our lives aware of a lot but not necessarily what is at the heart of everything. We need to get to the heart of everything, and what’s there is the truth — the truth. I like the thought that I am a part of something that’s been going on for millions of years. It sort of makes me feel like I’m an integral part of something big, and it’s true of all of us. We’re all interconnected. We’re all part of a plan of God that’s bringing human beings to a place of fulfillment. And what is that fulfillment? What is God promising for us? I think the most interesting thing that we know about us, in terms of the beginning of the Judeo/Christian tradition in the Old Testament, we’re told that we are made by God, and we are made in his image and in his likeness. That means that potentially we are like God, and when we think of God, we think often of perfection. And we think, “Well, I can’t be perfect. I’m human.” And it doesn’t mean that kind of perfection, but God is perfectly God. God makes no excuses for who he is. He’s not affected by how we think about him. He doesn’t change his plan because we don’t like the plan. No, he’s confident in what he’s doing, and what we need to be, in order to be fully like him, we need to be absolutely, equally confident in what it means to be human as he is in what it means to be a God. We’re not gods, but we’re like him, which means in the kind of coolest way, I think, is that he’s our Father. He’s our parent. We come from him. We often talk about, as we get older, we become our parents. All of that makes sense to me as we look at this beautiful image of what we’re here for, the evolutionary process of becoming more and more conscious of what is true, who we are, why we’re here, and every year we go through the story again. Every year we recap the stories, and we don’t focus on the same ones every year. We change every third year. We have a new set of readings, and one of the things about those readings is every time we go over them, it seems to me — this happens to me; I hope it happens to you — that each time we do, we look at these same stories, often told from a slightly different perspective than the year before, but every time we ponder them, there’s some hidden truth in them that clicks in. And once it clicks in, like it becomes real, it becomes not just something we know but something — not something we’ve heard but something we deeply know. We’re moving toward that fullness of the evolution of becoming who God intends us to be, and so it’s an exciting journey. And I’m delighted to be a part of your journey if you listen, because all I’m doing is sharing with you what is happening to me, and what is happening to me I see happening to the world. It’s very interesting to pay attention to where the world is today, and you can see a deep, deep longing for something. You might simply call it the truth, but what has truth promised? What does God promise us that comes with the truth? It’s a thing called love, and what is love? It’s this thing we’re made for. It’s a part of us that is often asleep, sometimes so damaged that it’s not even present, but it’s the capacity we have for empathy, for compassion, for somehow putting people first, not things, not things we want, not things we think will make us important or feel good about ourselves. No, it’s a kind of instinct that the reason we’re here is to care for one another, and it starts with caring for yourself. What better thing could we do for ourselves than be as radically open as we could be to whatever is real and true, who we are, what we’re here for? Because the promise that God makes in his coming is that he’s starting a new kingdom. It’s a kingdom that is not out there but inside of us. It’s not about the past or the future. It’s about right now. He’s talking about living in a place of consciousness where we’re so conscious of who we are, who God is, what we’re here for. If you look carefully at the evolution of human beings, you’re going to find that the drive began basically with the drive for self-survival, but that drive has evolved from self-survival to something closer to self-actualization, being authentic, being who we really are. That’s the drive, and what keeps us from it is the thing that we know is present in the world. It’s difficult to avoid, and it’s call sin. But another word for sin, which I like much better is a lie, because if you look at the story of the Old Testament, what it is that we see that brought sin into the world is a lie. So you could say sin is missing the goal, missing the mark of where we’re supposed to be because you believe in a lie that, if you follow that lie, you’ll never — the trajectory of that lie will take you far from the target — far from the target.So imagine that we are in this process of continually moving more and more toward this fulfillment of this plan of God, which has something to do with finding truth, which is love, and when we’re living in that place of love, when we do know in some mysterious way that the basic call that we’re here to do is to care for self and others, then something miraculously shifts, because what happens then, if we’re not believing in lies that tell us, “No, what you really want is power. What you really want is prestige. What you really want is comfort in a kind of ‘I refuse to be uncomfortable. I refuse to go through anything painful kind of way.’” That’s not it. No, it’s called peace. The truth leads to a life of love, and when you’re in that life of love, there’s some amazing, comforting sense of well-being that has nothing — nothing to do with what’s going around you, nothing. So how do I put all that together with the readings? I got all that from looking at these readings, and I want to look at them more carefully with you, but the first reading is about a promise. God made a promise to his people. The promise is, “I will take you to a land of milk and honey, and I will free you from everything that enslaves you.” So what is that? Well, there was a literal situation that the Israelites were in, where they literally were slaves to a culture, the Egyptian culture, and so when God promised to take them away from that, he had to take them on a long journey. And what they experienced on the journey was anything but comfort. It was difficult, and they kept losing a sense of what was promised, because they weren’t comfortable, and so they kept resisting. And they were a stiff-necked people, and they often turned back to their old ways and even said, “I’d rather go back to slavery than what we’re going through.” It’s called change. It’s called growth. It’s called evolving. It’s not easy. So when we listen to the second reading, it’s pretty clear that Paul is very much in touch with this process that we’re involved in, and he’s telling people that there’s something that God has given to you, something Jesus exhorted you to do, and it’s to conduct yourselves to please God. And to please God is really tricky, because it seems like to please God might be to follow some external, rigid, moral law or moral system or a bunch of moral practices and somehow work out of your mind and your will where you make yourself into somebody that you think will please God. Well, you can’t make yourself into somebody and please God. You can only allow yourself to become who you are, and that pleases God. He doesn’t want you to be someone you’re not. He doesn’t want you to follow someone else’s image of what it means to be in the world. If you look at spirituality over the centuries, you’ll see how often the exercises of spirituality were not founded in the truth, and they were destructive, especially during the Middle Ages. It was considered that pain is what God wanted us to be in to prove that we loved him, and people inflicted all kinds of pain on themselves. Francis, for one, St. Francis, was very aware at the end of his life, and he said, “I treated my body so badly, so badly.” And at 45, he was blind and had all kinds of health problems, and he was still a young man. But all of tha...
Transcribe →The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ: B 23-24
Nov 24, 2024Tap to summarizeDaniel 7:13-14 | Revelation 1:5-8 | John 18:33b-37 Almighty, everliving God, whose will is to restore all things in your beloved Son, the King of the Universe, grant, we pray, that the whole creation, set free from slavery, may render your majestic service and ceaselessly proclaim your praise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. It’s clear that this God that we believe in, the God that created us is a God who has an intense longing for you and for me to find fullness. He created us in a way, I think, to fulfill a longing of being loved and loving someone like him. Remember Adam and Eve. When God created Adam, he found that he wasn’t enough by himself. He needed a partner. He needed Eve. When God created the universe, it seems that he got to a point where he felt like, “I wanted to create, along with everything else, all the beauty, the majesty of the creation of the universe and the world and the animal world and insect world, all of that —” But he wanted someone in there to be like him, and then he did something to distinguish them from everyone else. He gave them free will. You can make choices. “I will not force you to do anything. You can do all that I ask you to do, or you can do absolutely the antithesis of what I ask you to do. It’s up to you.” He didn’t give that to any other aspect of his creation. So what does that say to you and me about who we are? We are absolutely a unique gift, given by God who created us and this gift carries an enormous responsibility. You often think that it would be easier — at least I often think it would be easier if he didn’t give us free will, and we could just do what we’re here to do. And like the animal world, we would just exist, but what we wouldn’t have then is — without free will, we wouldn’t have the creativity that we are able to have. To be able to choose is more than making a right decision of whether something is right or wrong, but free will has everything to do with being able to come up with something that no one ever thought of before. And think of the creative energy that has been manifested in the world in mostly recent times. We see human beings being able to do the most amazing feats, whether it’s solving the problems of a pandemic in lightning speed, coming up with a vaccine that nobody ever thought could ever be designed and produced in such a short period, whether it’s the success we’ve had with technology or space travel or whatever you look at. There is just an amazing capacity in human beings to be more than we ever thought we could be. It’s just kind of a wonderful way of imagining human nature, all this potential in seed form inside all of us, and one of the things that we need with a free will, like we’ve been given, is we need direction. We need somebody to guide us and direct us in the way that we should go, because we have so many questions. Where did I come from? What’s this world about? Why am I here? What really matters to me? And it would be, I think, cruel of a God that would say, “All right, I give you this capacity to ask all these questions, but I’m not going to give you the answers.” Well, he does want to give us the answers, but not like other answers have been given by other leaders, meaning sometimes we have leaders in our life — sometimes it’s a parent; sometimes it’s a religious leader; sometimes it’s a boss; sometimes it’s a whoever — that could care less about what we think or what we feel — the impact of what they’re saying to us. But they will tell us, “This is what you have to do.” And I would call that control. And there’s nothing in human nature that responds very positively to control, because it somehow feels wrong, because it denies one most important aspect that God created in each of us, and that’s the freedom to make our own decisions, to create our own world, all of that. And so how does God then fulfill his responsibility to take care of us? Not by controlling us, not by telling us what to do. The only real commandments that God gave us are ten very simple rules, and when you look at them, they make total sense to our human nature. Human beings have always needed a power greater than themselves. So to say that we need to believe in a God, we need to spend time with him, we need to use his power in the way that he intended it to, that makes total sense, or that there are things that we need to do in relationship to each other. We should honor the promises we make. We should honor the people that give us life. We shouldn’t steal. We shouldn’t kill. We shouldn’t lie. We should not envy and want things that other people have to the point of being dissatisfied with ourselves. All of that makes total sense. So those rules to me never feel like they’re controlling us. It’s just they’re awakening us to who we are. But let’s face it. Living in the world today, more than any other time, we have voices all around us that try to tell us what is real, what is true, and the thing that’s so unique about this Feast of Christ, the King is that we are celebrating the fact that we do have a King, someone who has power over us who could do anything he wants, in a sense, because he created the whole world. But what he does and who he is, is so radically different than we see so many rulers that are in the world today and have always been in the world, where they become tyrannical and completely disregard one’s individual human freedom. Then we have a God that believes and trusts in our human nature that he created, that deep inside of us we have a capacity to make the best possible decision about any situation that comes up. We have that in us in a seed form, but what he does, what he promises to do, as our King and our leader, is given to us in the gospel when he is standing before Pilate and there is this question: “So you’re a King?” Jesus said, “Yeah, I am a King. You say I’m a King. I am a King, but my kingdom is different from your kingdom. My kingdom is a kingdom of truth, not power over people but truth. What I came into the world to do was to awaken people to who God the Father truly is.” He is a God who has a gift for every one of us, and the gift is he will speak to them, share with them the essence of who he is. He is truth. He is reality. He is the source of everything that is. It’s all — all of this is a reflection of who God is, and you and I are reflections of him. But the thing that is so unique about us, that I love so much, is that he has asked us to be co-creators, co-partners with him in the world as it unfolds in the work that he has as a teacher, as one who shares the truth with everyone. He said, “I want you to be the recipient of my truth, but I also want you to be the one who brings truth to other people.” So we have this flow of — I call it the flow of life. It’s the flow of the truth. If we live in a kingdom of truth, and truth is the thing that is the most core ingredient in everything we do, that’s going to bring us to the place that we, as our very nature has created us to be, that we’re going to find a life of fullness. The fullness of our life is not the way we often think it is. We think fullness might be being the strongest, the most powerful, the most in control, the most effective in controlling other people. All those images that we have sometimes about what it means to be powerful, I guess, needs to be tempered with this voice inside of us, this divine voice that comes in and says, “I want to talk to you. I want to share who I am and who you are with you, and I want to give you the wisdom that you need to make your own decisions.” Isn’t that interesting? In the kingdom of God, God does not want to make our decisions for us. That’s what a lot of leaders do. “You all think this way. You all believe this way.” No, no. He wants you and me to make a decision based on the truth that he shares with us, and what that truth that comes into us through whatever means God is going to use — sometimes it comes through another person; sometimes it comes through an angel. We have these beings all around us that are speaking to us, giving us advice, giving us direction, opening our eyes to see things. We also have a community of saints, all these dead people, so-called dead people, that are around us, and one of the things I’ve learned is how wonderful it is to trust in the voice of those that you’ve known who have died. We’ve always been taught to pray to the great saints that we know are in heaven, and there was always this fear of turning to somebody who wasn’t in heaven and asking them to guide us because they’re involved in another world that is, let’s say, in purgatory, or they’re in hell or whatever. Think about it. We were always told to just pray to the great saints that were canonized, but it doesn’t make any sense to me that we wouldn’t pray to my mother, my father, my brothers, my sister that died. Anyone in my life that has died, I would want them to be the one giving me insight, and they want to, and they do. Everyone’s had experiences with the dead that are so real, whether it’s in a dream or in a vision or whatever. They want to talk to us, and all these images that I’m using of talking to someone is the image of the truth — the truth, the tru...
Transcribe →The 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24
Nov 17, 2024Tap to summarizeDaniel 12:1-3 | Hebrews 10:11-14, 18 | Mark 13:24-32 Grant us, we pray, O Lord, our God, the constant gladness of being devoted to you, for it is full and lasting happiness to serve with constancy the author of all that is good. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. It’s so interesting to me how that piece of music, that was written for this show, has a way of enabling me to put together the thoughts that I have after listening to the different readings and hopefully have something life-giving to share with you. There are two major themes in this set of readings that strike me. One is the image of a promise in the first reading and something about understanding in the gospel, understanding the promise. From the time that God created human beings, he established a relationship with them. It’s clear, from the story of Adam and Eve, that God did not create human beings aWe’ve come to the end of ordinary time, and next Sunday, we will celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. So in a sense, this is the last chance I have to summarize, if I think I can do that, summarize the thoughts of this amazing story of what God wants us to understand and what he wants us to see. And a funny thing, or not funny so much, but the interesting thing to me is the way the end of each year comes. It’s always a cataclysmic event that’s like everything is going to be exposed and broken open, and the sky is falling, and the earth is opening up and devouring those who didn’t really produce very much to please God and all of these end of the world kind of images. And that’s very, very dangerous, because this is not about the end of the world. It’s about the end of a way of seeing God. The New Testament is so radical, so much a departure from the Old Testament that, when one opens one’s heart to it, when one’s opened one’s imagination, what is going to happen is there’s this falling apart of a whole system that we’ve created around us, and that system is fundamentally a binary system of right and wrong, good and evil, saved and unsaved, dividing the world into two parts. And it’s interesting that the Old Testament is designed and was always designed — well, all of God’s revelations are perfectly timed for where human nature is, and you have to go back 4,000 years ago to get a sense of what the people were like when Abraham was asked by God to call a people together. It was the Bronze Age, and that Bronze Age was the time when the alphabet, or I should say written language was finally put together so people could write stories and not just have them as oral traditions. I think the wheel was even discovered during that time, or at least came into use very much. So human beings 4,000 years ago, when this God began to reveal to himself who he is. They were pretty simple people, much like children, compared to the consciousness that we have today. So it makes total sense that the thing that he would do is create a world in which there would be a kind of simple message that fit their brains, their understanding at the time, and when we’re younger, we understand things in a very simple, binary way. When you’re two-years-old, you understand that your parents are going to tell you yes or no about what you do, good or bad. “Good little boy. You ate your food.” “Bad little boy.” Well, you’re not supposed to say bad little boy to children, but anyway, you might say, “You’re starting on chewing on something that’s going to make you sick. Bad, bad, bad. Don’t do that.” So it’s very much a part of the world in which we are evolving and growing in a relationship with a God who was hidden for so many centuries. There were always gods around, and they were always mean kind of characters that demanded a lot of attention, and I would say not very compassionate. So what I think we have to understand very vividly is that, when Jesus comes into the world and describes a world that is based in not binary, black and white, right and wrong but in some kind of incredibly mysterious world that is filled with not so much justice — and that’s one way to talk about binary world. It’s right, or it’s wrong. You go to jail, or you’re acquitted or whatever. No, it’s this new world of mercy. Mercy, what is that, mercy? Well, the interesting thing about mercy to me is that it has this quality about it that is so nurturing and so life-giving, and so when I’m thinking about what it is that is so shattering to the world, when Jesus is finally fully revealing who he is, we have that image in the first reading about this work that has to be done for human beings to be freed from sins and that sins are the great downfall of human beings. Let me go back to the opening prayer is what I really wanted to say, because that opening prayer is so beautiful when it says, “I am so, so delighted, and it’s so fulfilling for me to work for someone who is so good, so good.” And as a priest, you perhaps as a parent, as a person who struggles with ideas in their head that are sometimes unacceptable, we fall into the trap of the binary world that is in the way that God is imagined by us where he is judgmental and angry and condemning when we aren’t really fulfilling what we’re supposed to do. And when you think about that, that is the way the Old Testament is written. In the book of Deuteronomy, which we looked at last week, there’s that image of God being the God who said, “I want you to love me with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your soul, and then I want you to go into a new land.” In the next chapter he says, “And this new land is owned by another tribe, and you’re going to get rid of them, and you’re going to get all the things, which they built,” which doesn’t really sound fair. “And you kick all those people out.” And then God goes on to say, “And if you don’t, if they don’t leave, then kill them. Destroy them, because if you leave them and they stay in that particular place, then they are going to infiltrate into your way of seeing me, and they’re going to rob you of who I’m really trying to tell you I am. And so if you do that, I’ll kill you.” And to us that sounds so awful, but to the people at the time, that was what gods did. And so the God of Israel, the God that is, had to reveal himself like the other gods in order to get our attention so that he can slowly, slowly, over 2,000 years, get them ready, from the time of Abraham to the time of Jesus, to get them ready to understand who he really is. And he’s the God of mercy. He’s the God that says, “If somebody strikes you on one side of your cheek, then turn and offer him the other. If they come in and rob you and take things away, then run after them and say, ‘You didn’t get this also.’” It’s such a radical change. That’s why the images in this final times of the church years always is about the sky is falling, and everything is falling apart. And what it is, is that binary system is being destroyed, and you take away a binary world from people who are living in it — these are the things you have to do; these are the things you should never do — and you cloud that with, “Well, sometimes that’s wrong.” Well, but what about the intention? What about the person engaged in this struggle? What about human conscience? These are things that a binary world goes nuts over. In fact, you can look at an extremely conservative religious person, and they have this almost — you get the feeling sometimes, when you talk to them, they’re almost happy when they can say, “Those people are all going to be condemned. They’re all going to burn in hell, and we’re not. We’re going to be saved, and we’re the loved ones. God loves us, because we do everything right.” And you know how God feels about righteousness, how Jesus talked about it in the New Testament. He basically said, “That’s not what I’m looking for. I’m not looking for somebody that has developed and grown into some kind of perfect person and doing everything.” Think of the rich man. When he came to Jesus and said, “Look, I’ve done everything. I have followed every single rule and every single law.” And he must have been so confident and so full of himself, and what I love about Jesus’ response to that was he just said, “God love you. I love you. I know that you think you’re really doing the best thing possible, but you’re so far from the kingdom, because basically the issue is not in making yourself into someone who is perfect but is being freed of all those external ideals that don’t really have anything to do with the heart that is receptive and open to a presence of God that wants to live inside of you and, through you, offer life, goodness to those who are in the darkest places.” We are here in this world to do this work of ministering to those who are not achieving greatness and fullness. Isn’t it funny how you look at the whole focus of the ministry of Jesus went to the people who were in most need of what? Understanding, compassion, mercy, and you look back at the time that Jesus walked the earth.And you look at the way the Old Testament had formed them, and it was so incredibly off-center for what Jesus wants people to see. If you were a believing Jew and you were following all the rules and laws and you saw so...
Transcribe →The 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24
Nov 10, 2024Tap to summarize1 Kings 17:10-16 | Hebrews 9:24-28 | Mark 12:38-44 or 12:41-44 Almighty and merciful God, graciously keep from us all adversity so that unhindered in mind and body alike we may pursue in freedom of heart the things that are yours. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen. So often I go back to the Old Testament, to the book of Genesis and the story of creation and look carefully into that relationship that God had with Adam and Eve, and it’s fascinating what you learn from that. You see something so fascinating, human beings, nature in conflict with the generosity and the love of a God who created us and wanted to do everything he could to care for us and give us all that we longed for. And one of the things that I learn from that story is, in one of the stories of creation, when God created a man, after he created the man, he realized something. It’s not good for a man to be alone. I just want to start with that theme. It’s not good for us to be alone, and it’s interesting. When I think about the image of communion, union with other people, I can’t imagine my life without relationships. I can’t imagine what it’s like to not have someone to listen to me when I’m trying to figure something out that they can see and show me what I’m missing. I can’t imagine what it’s like not to have the feeling of giving somebody something that they didn’t have before. It makes you just feel so good, and so it’s so clear that there is this flow of life that goes between us. And it’s so fascinating that we’re living through something so unique these days with the pandemic, and we’ve been separated from so many normal ways in which we communicate with others. It’s had interesting impacts on all of us. One of the things, I think for sure, we might feel a little crazier than we normally feel, part of the lack of balance, but the other thing is that there’s just something — something so natural about leaning on someone. And yet there’s a part of you and a part of me that often feels that we should be autonomous, able to handle things on our own, to be strong, to be self-sufficient.Listen to that first part of the story in the gospel when Jesus is talking about the things that people really don’t find attractive, even though the people that are engaged in them think are terribly attractive, and that is, when somebody has a sense that they have a position of power, some control over life, they have money or talent or whatever it is, good looks, and they act as if they have this sense of being without need. They are the source of everything they need, and they want people to acknowledge it and give homage to it and pay attention to it and thank them for it. And yet it’s so clear that that’s not really part of our human nature, the core of our human nature. The core of our human nature is designed to be in relationship with other sources of strength and power and to use that strength and power within us to be able to do something for other people. That’s what it means to be born into the likeness of God, and Genesis tells us that’s true, that human beings are the only creatures that God created that are like him. And that doesn’t mean we just look more like him than other people. No, our nature, the fullness of our nature — animals have a wonderful nature. They can have a nature that’s committed and faithful and, in a way, life-giving to other animals, but there’s nothing quite as complete or full as human nature, because it has the potential to evolve and grow into something so like a god that the model we have for this is the Savior, Jesus, who achieved the ultimate goal of what it means to be a human being. And that was to have this relationship with God that is so intimate and so close that we call him God, we say he’s God. Jesus is a human 100 percent and a God 100 percent. I love repeating that over and over again. I think I said it last Sunday, and it’s simply because it reminds me so much that whatever is at the heart of this relationship with God goes beyond the mind, the binary world of it’s either this or that. No, it can be both. Quantum physics teaches us that. Things can be both matter and spirit at the same time. Well, how does that work? I don't know, but it works. So what I’m trying to get to is a very simple truth, is that we are never comfortable being not enough, and yet our nature tells us we are not enough. And when that nature tells us that, there’s something truthful in it that we need to embrace and take in, and so we look in the scriptures for images that give us some sense of who we’re becoming, what we’re engaged in. And you see these two women, one in the gospel, one in the first reading, widows. Widows had no resources of their own. They were dependent upon the goodness and kindness of other people, and in the first reading, we know that story well. I believe that you do. It’s the story of this widow who was alone and needy, and Elijah comes and favors her and even promises her that she’ll have a son. And she has the son, and she relies upon Elijah. And then Elijah comes back to her and asks her for something, and she doesn’t have anything to give. She’s absolutely empty. “I have no food to give you. I was just going to take the little that I have, the little that I am, and I was going to basically surrender to the fact that I don’t have enough, and I would just die. I would just cease to exist.” We don’t cease to exist sometimes when we don’t think we’re enough. We just cease to produce anything life giving. We lose energy. We lose self-worth. We lose a sense of we have something to accomplish, to do, and we can do it. We can do it. We can do it. That’s the thing we want to say over and over again, and yet the truth is, unless you can embrace the fact that you’re not enough and that we, the we, can’t do it, not as individuals doing their own thing. But the failure of faith is when we say we, God and I, can’t do it. Then we’re in trouble, because we don’t have the faith we’re supposed to have. And it’s so interesting that, if you look at the gospel, in the Old Testament and New Testament together, you look at salvation history. You see over and over again people who have an experience of being called to do something really extraordinary, really wonderful. The prophets had that. Jesus had that as a man. So many times a prophet had that in the sense of wanting very much to convince people of something that they couldn’t see, and they often used the power of God to convince people that what they were saying was true. And miracles were performed by these men, these prophets, but the stories of prophets are fascinating, because even the prophet Elijah, who was very, very much aware of God working through him, at times he lost trust in God. And the one that I love the most is Jonah, who when God said, “All right, I will empower you to go to this town, called Nineveh, and you will warn them that something terrible is going to happen. I’m going to give you this gift of conviction. Your voice is going to be filled with such authority and power. You’re going to walk through this city. You’re going to tell them, ‘You have got to change, or God will destroy you,’ and they’ll listen to you. And that’s because I’m in you, working through you, and you and I together are so effective.” And he did it, and he didn’t like the answer. He didn’t like the response. Imagine, he was filled with God’s strength to accomplish something, but he himself didn’t want to see it happen, because he had a different attitude than God did and wanted people to be destroyed when they didn’t do what God wanted them to do. And so he walks away, and he doesn’t want to serve God anymore. Isn’t that fascinating, this difficulty we have with dealing with our weaknesses and our powers? And that’s what I really want to talk about for a minute. How do you balance the two? Look at Jesus, how he saved the world. How did he make up for all the sins of the world? Some people think that God was such a vengeful God that he needed some major sacrifice to be made. Somebody would have to suffer so intensely, because God suffered every time we sinned. So he created his Son, and his Son had to offer his life as a sacrifice to make up for all human beings’ sins. That just doesn’t make sense to me, and it’s not good theology. No, when God entered into the world in the person of Jesus, he wanted to teach us what he wants from each of us, and this God/man Jesus is the model of what it means to be fully human, God dwelling in us, working through us, enabling us to accomplish the goal we’re here for. And the way he did that in Jesus is he had Jesus to a point in his ministry where he knew that he was in trouble, that there was something not functioning very well. He could feel that his miracles had probably caused more of a stir than he really wanted in terms of angering those who were in authority, because they didn’t have any way to discredit him when he was raising people from the dead, giving sight to the blind. What are you going to do with somebody like that? Say they’re crazy? Well, how do you talk about craziness when they’re so darn effective? And so Jesus must...
Transcribe →The 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24
Nov 3, 2024Tap to summarizeDeuteronomy 6:2-6 | Hebrews 7:23-28 | Mark 12:28b-34 Almighty and merciful God, by whose gift your faithful offer you rigxht and praiseworthy service, grant, we pray, that we may hasten without stumbling to receive the things you have promised. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen. It’s so interesting to me how that piece of music, that was written for this show, has a way of enabling me to put together the thoughts that I have after listening to the different readings and hopefully have something life-giving to share with you. There are two major themes in this set of readings that strike me. One is the image of a promise in the first reading and something about understanding in the gospel, understanding the promise. From the time that God created human beings, he established a relationship with them. It’s clear, from the story of Adam and Eve, that God did not create human beings and then set them off on their own but rather started by having an intimate relationship with them. They lived together in a garden. Adam and Eve were naked as they walked around, completely comfortable with who they were, yet he had something he was asking from them. And the thing I think is interesting about the things that God asks from us, because in some ways it sounds like he’s always asking us to do something we don’t really want to do, and if we do what we don’t want to do for him, it shows we love him much more than we love ourselves, but it’s much more complex than that. No, because the one thing from the very beginning, if you know the heart of God, is it’s fully revealed from the very beginning to the time when the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles. You’re going to find that this God, this wonderful God, has one intention, and that is we become who we’re intended to be, not slaves to a law or rules but engaged in a relationship with him where we understand who he is and what his role is in our life and what he’s asking us to participate in with him in this world. So it’s important to go back to the beginning then, in a sense, and see that, when God began his relationship with us, the first thing he asked us to do is to be careful with our judgments, the judgment of right and wrong. There’s something so clear about this early story of God’s relationship with human beings that human beings were at a certain period in their own evolution, and the thing they really understood, much like a child understands, they understood right and wrong. Do this; that’s right. Don’t do that; that’s wrong. It’s called a binary world where everything is divided. Even if you look at the creation story, God divided the world up into two parts. There was darkness, and then there was light. There was earth, and then there was sky. There was water and earth. It’s an easy, simple way to understand this mysterious thing we call life on this planet with God engaged in a relationship with us. And so in that early, early test that Adam and Eve were put through, one of the things they were exposing to themselves, as God always puts us in situations where he doesn’t have to teach us about ourselves. We discover, sometimes with pleasure, because we see we’re stronger than we thought, or we see we’re weaker than we thought, whatever. But basically, he’s always revealing to us, through the events of our lives, who we are and who he is, and what Adam and Eve realize is that they had this over-simplified notion of what was right and wrong. What they gave in to was something that seems so natural to human beings. They gave in to what was best for them, even though it wasn’t what God wanted, meaning it wasn’t the journey that God was asking them to go on with him. They chose to be like God from the very beginning. That was the temptation. The devil simply said, though he isn’t the devil — I think it was human nature — said, “All right, I’ve got two choices: obey God and do what he says, or don’t do what he says. And the promise of not doing what he says is that we will be autonomous, strong. We will be like him.” And that attraction to being as good as you can possibly be and to be pleasing even to God, to present yourself as perfect, you know what that feels like. We all have that. We’re given the option of following a rule that you didn’t quite understand why you weren’t supposed to follow it or becoming great. Yeah, I think we’d all choose, “I’d like to be great. I would even like God to see me as the greatest I can be so he’ll love me,” because that’s what we all ultimately want, to be loved by God, by others. So interesting. So you take that beginning of the relationship, and it sets a tone, that God said, “All right, this is not the way you’re going to please me, by becoming perfect. You’re going to please me by a very different process.” And that’s what the promise is, and the one thing I would say he likes more than anything else, if you want to say, “What is it that would please God more than anything else that I would do for him,” pay attention to him and let him in your life and let him work with you, in you, for you. He wants intimacy, and when Adam and Eve chose to perform for God instead of allow God to enter into them and help them to grow and change, they wanted to become already what God and only God can help us become, then they had to leave the garden. They had to go and figure this out, and so when Adam and Eve left the garden, it wasn’t because they were so much punished by God, but they chose to live on their own. And so God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom and love, said, “Okay, humans. We’ve set the stage for this entire salvation history story, and you’re going to go off, and you’re going to be autonomous. And you’re going to work for me, you think, by doing everything you’re supposed to do and doing it as well as you can and getting a reward.” And in a way, you see, as the evolution of the story of salvation continues, we see then God eventually calling the people together and saying, “Look, I want a relationship, not with just one of you but with you as a community.” So Abraham called the people together and said, “I want you to be my people.” It’s so interesting, that whole notion of God’s favorite people. It seems to fly in the face of the fullness of who he is, that he loves everything and everyone he’s created, sinners, saints. In the beginning, he revealed himself as one who wanted a certain group of people to be attached to him in some close, intimate way, and there were many, many gods at that time. So the God of Israel, the God who is, had a hard time convincing these people of who he was, and he is the only God. And so the whole story begins with that intention of God to create an intimate relationship with human beings, and so he decided he would do it by being on their side when it came to dealing with the one thing, at the time, 4,000 years ago, that everybody lived in total fear of, and that was enemies. Enemies, if you had an enemy, that was — everybody, I guess, had them. People were attacking each other. When one community would grow and develop and another community would see them and see they had more than they had, they’d come and pillage their place and take everything and drive them out. It was a rough world, a tough world, and so if God could be the source of their strength to overcome enemies, that would be a very attractive thing for any human being to believe in that particular God. And so that’s how God began to reveal himself. “I’m the God that will conquer your enemies, and I want you to love me for it. I want you to be my people. I want you to forget about all the other gods that you’ve known and all the other gods that people will try to seduce you into believing in. I want a relationship that’s exclusive with you. You’ll be my exclusive group, and I’ll be your exclusive God.” Interesting. And that kind of created a very interesting community, because when you listen to the promises that God makes in this first reading, he’s saying, “I want you to fall in love with me because of what I do for you, and I do conquer your enemies.” So love is the key to this. “Love me, love me, love me,” but the love that God is talking about there is just a mere shadow of what it ultimately will become in the New Testament, because that love is more allegiance. And listen to the way God describes his relationship with human beings, nothing like is revealed in Jesus, but you go to the next chapter in Deuteronomy. What you’re going to hear is God talking about the Israelites’ enemies, and he’s saying, “Now, when you go into their places, their cities that they’ve already built, and they have streets and buildings and cisterns. Go in there, and drive them all out. And if you don’t, you can’t get them to leave, then destroy them. Murder them, and then be sure they’re all gone when you take over their city. And when you’ve taken it over, if you leave them there and they start infiltrating and robbing you of your commitment to me and drawing you to other gods, then I’ll kill you.” It’s not a very warm, loving God. It’s a God of justice. So when he says, “I want you to love me with all your heart and all your mind,” I think it’s when he’s saying, “I want you to trust me, and don’t ever doubt me.” ...
Transcribe →