Too Good to be True!

 

28^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle A

Isaiah 25:6-10a

Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20

Matthew 22:1-14

 

Many are invited but few are chosen. Actually, all are invited but few choose to attend. Why do people reject God and his gifts? It doesn’t make sense to me.

I think the most common reason why people claim to not believe in God is the existence of evil and suffering in the world. How can the good and loving God that we proclaim allow such pain, suffering and evil in the world? If God is as we say, then wouldn’t we have heaven on earth? Why does he punish us and often so indiscriminately?  It’s easy to understand their point of view, especially if the pain and suffering they have experienced in their lives has eclipsed the good. It is easy to be overwhelmed by that. But I also think it’s often an intellectually lazy argument, an easy way out that absolves them of any responsibility to try to understand or change their lives.

Ironically, for many Christians who do profess a belief in God the question really is, how can I believe in a God that loves me so much? It seems too good to be true. Many of us have been raised with a spirituality of fear versus one of love. We have been taught to focus on our sinfulness and unworthiness and not on the gift of God’s mercy. The Salesian brothers forced me to read that awful sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edwards, which literally put the fear of God in me.

One of the things Saint Faustina said Jesus revealed to her is what hurts him the most is our lack of trust in his Mercy. We don’t experience that sort of trust and mercy from those around us, and we rarely give it ourselves, so it’s hard to understand and accept it from a God we cannot see and touch and feel.

I don’t deserve that type of God. I am a sinner in the hands of an angry God.

Isaiah says the Lord will supply the banquet for all peoples. It’s not just the atheists and agnostics who have rejected the banquet; it is the good church going folks as well. The banquet being offered can be understood on two levels. The first is the banquet of life itself, all the good gifts everyone has been offered by God, starting with life itself. The second is the Eucharistic banquet, the life that all people are also called to but even fewer accept.

So many of us are so busy with life that we don’t experience life and how wonderful it is. We look so inward that we are blind to the beauty around us. We are so concerned with success and obtaining stuff that we overlook the joy that life can bring, especially life without those things. Or we are so overwhelmed by the hurt in life that it’s hard to see the good. And we so often fail to share the banquet with those we feel are not chosen as we are. If people have never experienced the banquet, it’s up to us to show them our experience of it. When was the last time we went to the highways and byways and invited the marginalized into our lives?

I don’t think many Catholics reject the Eucharistic banquet outright, they just don’t think about it deeply or often. They ignore it or don’t see it as a priority. Other things are more important. Life gets in the way. It’s a powder day, so I won’t go to Mass today. Anyway, isn’t God everywhere? The mountain is my church. Or the kids have practice or a game, and it’s such a hassle to get everyone up and ready on Sunday. Or it doesn’t really matter if I go or not. God understands. I’d rather sleep in. People expect heaven on earth, but they reject the heavenly banquet we can experience each and every day in the Mass. As Jesus told the Samaritan woman, “If you only knew the gift of God and who asks you for a drink, you would ask him and he would give you living water.”

The saddest ones are those who don’t feel worthy to attend either the banquet of life or the banquet of the Eucharist. They think they don’t deserve good things. They have not earned them. Those are the ones who need it the most. Those who are hungry need the banquet. Those who are starving even moreso. Salvation is offered to everyone. The good gifts of the Lord are for all people, not just those who think they deserve it. God is more accepting of sinners and the humble than of the ungrateful, because sinners at least can accept his mercy while the ungrateful do not even acknowledge they need it.

It’s even worse for those who have been told they don’t deserve it. But you do deserve it just because he has given it to you. You are worthy because he has made you worthy. He has made you worthy of all the good things in life so that you can also be purified by the pain and suffering life can bring. He didn’t create pain and suffering, our sinfulness did. He understands our pain. He lived it. His suffering gave meaning to our suffering, and his death destroyed death itself. He wants to heal you.

He wants you to share in his peace and joy. He has prepared the banquet for his son, and he has invited you to it. No, he is desperate for you to come. He has created you to come. His invitation began the moment he first thought of you, and it will continue until you finally accept it.

God has given us himself. What more can he give? He wants us to have eternal life with him in heaven, and he wants us to have heaven on Earth. He has made us little less than gods, higher than the angels. Why would we reject that? Is it that we truly do not understand? If we truly understood, would we still accept it?

In the end I think it all comes down to trust. We treat God like we treat each other. It's so hard for us to accept gifts and trust from others here on Earth, how much more is it difficult to trust the gifts and promises of God?

So many work so hard to create the banquet themselves when the gift is already being offered to them. But we need to prepare ourselves for it. We need to always strive to put our best foot forward. We need to show up with our best selves. That’s what the wedding garment symbolizes. God invites all to the banquet, but we need to be ready to accept it. We need to be sure that our hearts and souls are open to the gift, that we are reconciled to the giver as much as we can be, and that we commit ourselves to constant repentance and improvement with true humility. Most of all, we must trust in the mercy of God.

It is too good to be true. God is too good to be true. But then, so are you.

 

Satan!

 

22^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle A

Jeremiah 20:7-9

Romans 12:1-2

Matthew 16:21-27

 

Poor Peter.

At first glance, Jesus hits Peter really hard today. Satan? Really? Jesus had just finished giving Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and now he’s likening him to the devil? But then, Jesus typically was a bit stern in correcting Peter.   

Peter didn’t say anything wrong. Of course he didn’t want the person he loved to suffer. He reacted exactly as anyone would at the time. Peter made the statement that “you are the Christ, the Son of the living God”, but Jesus never asked Peter what that meant to him. What did he expect him to say?

What were Peter’s expectations of the Christ? What did it mean that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God? Why was it necessary that he suffer and die? The disciples always had a hard time understanding and accepting that type of Messiah. That’s not who they were taught to expect. Everyone expected the Messiah to be more a military and political leader, a king that would restore Israel to glory. What was all this talk about suffering and dying?

Still, the Spirit led Peter to be the first to make the declaration, but he was only halfway there. I think we also are only part of the way there. We cannot fully understand this week’s gospel without first understanding last week’s, because it revolves around the same question, “Who do you say that I am?”

We all know the definitions, we just have a hard time figuring out what they mean, especially what they mean for us as children of God. I was at a gathering of parishioners last Sunday night, and the main topic of discussion was the gospel and especially Fr. Dass’ homily that day. Father had made a great connection between Jesus’ identity and our own, that we first have to know God before we can really know ourselves. Who you say God is is linked to whom you say you are.

But when we started talking about who we say Jesus is today, everyone went to the textbook definitions they’d been taught. The Messiah, the savior, the redeemer, the Son of God. Jesus’ titles. Sort of like Peter had done when asked the same question. Yet when asked to go deeper and define what those names and roles actually mean to them personally, few could articulate it. Who do You say that I am and what does that mean for You? Just as we usually tie our identities to what we do, it’s often easier to understand what Jesus does than to understand who He is.

Is Jesus an idea for you or is he a person? You can build on the foundation of an idea, but you cannot have a relationship with one. You cannot have a relationship with an identity, but with a person. You can only love a person. Jesus doesn’t see you as an idea, he sees and loves you as a person.

Have you always wondered why Jesus kept telling his disciples to not tell anyone that he was the Christ. Not only was their own image incomplete, until it was complete if they just declared Jesus to be the Messiah they would be misleading the people. They would be fueling their incorrect and incomplete expectations of who the Messiah would be. They would actually be encouraging the people to try to make Jesus King, the king of Israel, not the Kingdom of God. They were thinking as men think, not as God does, and that could lead to disaster.

Things haven’t changed much. We also have certain expectations of the messiah. The messiah we seek today doesn’t ask much of us, does he, because we really don’t want that kind of messiah. Today, it seems that the messiah we seek is someone who will be there when we need him but doesn’t challenge us very much. We are taught from an early age that Jesus loves us, but we rarely consider what kind of love that is. We pray to him for the things we need when we need them, but the rest of the time he’s just a picture on the wall or a piece of jewelry around our necks. We enjoy hearing stories about how much God loves us no matter what we do. We like to hear stories of Jesus’ miracles and compassion. It really doesn’t matter if we sin, because we’re forgiven.

We like these stories because we’ve reduced the Messiah down to a warm fuzzy friend who’s non-threatening. We fit Jesus into our individualistic lives. It’s all about me, so I like the messiah who’s all about me, but don’t ask me to truly follow him. Jesus wants me to take up my cross daily, but don’t ask me to actually change my life. Don’t challenge me to turn from my sinfulness. Gimme but don’t ask me to give.

Does Jesus meet your expectations? Do you see him as a gentle, soft, cuddly person who just wants everyone to love everyone, or do you see him as a stern savior, stern as death, who actually has set up standards for us to live by and that we will be judged by?

As Fr. Dass said last week, our understanding of ourselves starts first with our understanding of who God is, who the Son of God is. Our image of ourselves comes from our image of God. Are we created in God’s image or do we mold him into our images?

Who do you say you are? Do you see yourself as God sees you? Do you love yourself as God loves you?

What does it mean to you to be a disciple? Do you understand that while his yoke is easy and his burden light, we are still called to take up our cross each and every day and follow him on our road to our own calvary?

We all have our Peter moment. Jesus asks us all the same question.We will have our aha moment when we make our own statement of faith in who we say Jesus is, then like Peter we will spend the rest of our lives developing that, trying to understand what that faith really means.

St. Paul says that now I see indistinctly, as in a mirror. Then I will truly know as I am truly known.

We do tend to see Jesus as if we are looking in a mirror. We see him as an image, how we want to see him. Only when we see him face to face will we be able to see him as he truly is and see ourselves in him.

 

 

Wisdom

 

17^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle A

1 Kgs 3:5, 7-12

Rm 8: 28-30

Mt 13:44-52

 

Wisdom

 

I was in a conversation with someone last week, I can’t remember who it was or what exactly we were talking about, but she said that I was wise. I was taken aback a bit, because wisdom is not a virtue I usually think about or even think I have. Wiseguy maybe, but I’m not how I would imagine a wise man to be. I have the image of the guru sitting on top of the hill dispensing pearls of wisdom. Someone who is gentle and compassionate, who seems to always say the right things, profound things. Someone who people go to for advice. That’s not how I see myself. I feel that more often than not I play the fool. Maybe it’s my age or my position or ministry that give people that impression. Maybe it’s the white hair.

 

We seem to equate wisdom with age. I joke that wisdom is knowing the right way to act or the right thing to do, and the way to gain wisdom is to choose the wrong way and do the wrong thing. Wisdom comes from learning from your mistakes. I’m sure that is a large part of it, if we truly learn from our mistakes and work to avoid making the same mistakes again. That’s the hard part.

 

But now I see that wisdom is an example of God’s grace working in our lives. It is an attribute of God himself. It doesn’t necessarily come with age. There are lots of foolish old people. And how many times have we taken advice from someone we trust and have found it wanting? Solomon was young, he hadn’t made a lot of mistakes to learn from yet. Interestingly, when he got older, he made a lot of mistakes, and he actually lost his wisdom. But he asked for the gift, and God gave it to him. And as usual, God went overboard with the gift. When we act humbly God blesses us more abundantly.

 

Wisdom can come from many places. As a gift from God, through our own experiences, from study, and from observing and learning from others’ experiences. You can work at being wise, and like faith, wisdom is a gift that can increase and like grace, it builds upon itself, so that we can become wiser and wiser if we choose. Or not. Just because we know how we should act and think doesn’t mean that we always choose to do so. What’s that saying that common wisdom is not necessarily common sense, and common sense is not necessarily common practice?

 

Maybe part of being wise is realizing your limitations. Wisdom begins with self-awareness. Wise people say and do things that make us stop and think. They give us those aha moments of self-awareness and self-reflection. And those moments should lead to a change of heart and commitment to action. True wisdom is not kept to ourselves, it only works if it’s given away, both by what we say and how we live our lives. Mostly it shows itself in the way we treat other people. And doesn’t that make sense, because it’s the same with love, and if God is love then God’s wisdom would be a sign and effect of love.

 

If God is wisdom, then the best way to develop wisdom in us is to image God, to be holy. And the best way to do that is to learn from Him through His revelation to us. We are so fortunate that we have such a long and rich deposit of faith in the Catholic Church to draw from. Not just sacred scripture but the teaching tradition of the Church. Jesus ends his parables today by saying that every scribe who has been instructed in the Kingdom of Heaven is like the head of the household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old.

 

Ours is a living God and ours is a living Church. There is such an unfathomable storehouse of wisdom that has been handed on to us, beginning with the apostles and built on by so many amazingly wise, capable, thoughtful and holy teachers. I think that the strongest evidence of the Holy Spirit alive and working in the Church is that there has never been deviation in the core traditions of the Church. All church teachings that are true all build on what has gone before.

 

However, we truly bring from that storeroom both the new and the old. The old are those immutable truths in sacred tradition. Those are the “big T” traditions, the ones that we must believe and adhere to if we are to be faithful Christians. We continue to declare those core traditions whenever we recite the creed. Things like Jesus is the Son of God and rose from the dead. That sort of stuff. The new are the ways we hand down and live those truths throughout the ages. Those are the “small T” traditions. That kind of tradition is simply how we adapt the big T traditions to the contemporary world. For example, celebrating the Mass in a particular language.

 

Both the old and the new are good and necessary. There should be no living in the past or discarding it for something completely different. For the Church it’s never either/or, it’s both. It’s not the past was better than today, nor vice versa.

 

It’s like with the study of history. If you don’t understand what happened in the past you will misunderstand what is happening today. Nothing happens suddenly in a vacuum. Current events are always influenced by past events and beliefs. And it is a great mistake to judge past actions by today’s standards. You need to understand so much about each era’s thoughts, culture, and influences in order to weigh the pros and cons of each. St. Paul tells us to question everything through the eyes of faith, weigh what is right from wrong and discard what is wrong. Isn’t that wisdom?

 

And one of the greatest dangers is to let a misunderstanding of sacred tradition cause divisions in the Church. The Church has the authority and responsibility to organize itself and the sacraments. That is a “big T” tradition. Personal interpretation of Church teachings and practices to the point of declaring that this practice or that council is true and this or that one isn’t is to put yourself outside the Church, especially if you condemn those who don’t think as you do.

 

As I grow older, I feel myself softening. When I was young things were more black and white, and I was more of an absolutist and a legalist, which led to being judgmental. Everything had to be done a certain way, typically my way. I tend to let things go more now, probably because I can more easily determine what is important and what isn’t. The parables today tell us that the ultimate wisdom is desiring the Kingdom of Heaven. As there are more years behind me than before, my desire for heaven has increased. If part of wisdom is knowing one’s limitations, the awareness of our mortality focuses us on our greatest limitation here on earth. That understanding should cause us to show more grace to one another, to cut each other some slack, be less judgmental. To realize that everyone has some wisdom to offer me. That I need to be more flexible. I know I’ve been trying.

 

“In essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity.” This is so important, especially the charity part. True wisdom is always loving and welcoming. It is gentle and kind. It understands that while there are some immutable truths that are black and white, people are always gray. True wisdom is always exhibited as mercy. Yes, we are called to instruct and admonish each other, but always out of concern for the soul of the other. The flipside is that we are also called to be instructed and admonished ourselves. We don’t know what we don’t know.

 

Wisdom is not a concept. It is not an idea. It is not a value. It is a person. True wisdom is entering into relationship with God. Not just the idea of God but God himself and his Son, Jesus Christ, in unity with the Holy Spirit. Wisdom is recognizing what is ultimately valuable in this life, and then doing everything in our power to obtain it, even if it takes letting go of everything else we value.

 

Is that relationship that valuable to you?