Missionaries Among Us

30^TH Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle A

World Mission Sunday

Well, Mitt Romney is running for president again, and it hasn’t taken long for religion to become a central controversy of his campaign. Pastor Robert Jeffress from the First Baptist Church of Dallas has weighed in, calling Mormonism a cult and declaring that Mormons are not Christians. Nothing really new there. And, as usual, the news hasn’t gone over well in Utah. It seems that the subject of Mormons being Christians or not rears its ugly head periodically. Baptists seem to make that claim every year during LDS conference weekend. Both the Evangelicals and the LDS get their hackles up, and the argument devolves into “Yes we are” versus “No you’re not.”

We Utah Catholics don’t usually get involved in these discussions, I think partly because of our own history of being persecuted here in America, and because, heck, the Baptists really don’t think we’re Christians either. No big whoop.

We have a lot of theological differences with our LDS brothers and sisters, and this is not the time or place to discuss them. However, today’s readings get to the heart and soul of what it means to be a Christian, so I think we do need to look into that a bit, because it means something when we claim to be Christian. The way we define ourselves is important. What exactly is a Christian? What is the criteria? And are we Christians simply because we claim to be?

In the gospel today we hear Jesus going up against the Pharisees, the Evangelicals of his day. They, like a lot of folks these days, claimed that their interpretation of the law and scriptures was the correct one, and it was ladened down with hundreds of strict rules and regulations. If you didn’t follow the letter of the law you really weren’t a good or true Jew. They came to test Jesus’ interpretation of the law, thinking that it wasn’t exactly kosher. They would get all worked up because Jesus cured people on the Sabbath, when the law said that no work was to be done. The conundrum was, which was more important, mercy or adherence to the law.

In reply Jesus distilled their entire interpretation into two simple commandments. Love God and love your neighbor. In that statement, Jesus brought the two sides together. The law must be followed, and that law said we were to be merciful. You need to have both.

We Catholics also seem to have a lot of rules and regulations. Come to Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation. Go to confession at least once a year. Fast and abstain on certain days during Lent. Does being a Christian mean you have to follow all the rules and regulations to a T, or can it simply be boiled down to love God and love your neighbor? Is it as simple as that? The Mormons have just about as many rules as we do. And like us, most of their rules are there to help them live up to the challenge of loving God and our neighbor.

The Mormons do not share our concept of God and his plan for our salvation, but if being a Christian means loving God and our neighbor as ourselves, then who’s to say that they aren’t? And what about those folks who don’t profess to belong to any particular church, but live their lives according to these two great commandments? Are they Christians in practice if not in name? Jesus himself told his disciples, “If someone is not against us, they are with us.”

Believe it or not, one of the practices we share with our LDS brethren is the concept of mission and missionaries. In fact, we thought it up two thousand years ago. What do you think Paul and Barnabas were doing walking all over the countryside? And who do you think those young men and women walking two by two throughout your neighborhood are modeling their activities on? If you truly love your neighbor as yourself you would want to share with them what is most precious to you, your faith. What greater sign of your love for your neighbors than to want to share eternity with them?

Today is World Mission Sunday, when in every parish church in the world we focus our attention on the needs of the missions. I remember sitting in Mass as a kid when once a year some guy in a funny looking outfit would appear and give the homily, usually a story of his life working in some far off country with an unpronounceable name with desperately poor people whose main goal in life was having drinkable water. Usually the missionary was barely understandable his English was so bad, and I never got his full message, just the feeling that I really had it pretty good here in comparison.

That was my impression of the missions and missionaries. So very far removed from the reality of my world. But do you know which has been the largest mission field in the world? The North American continent and specifically the USA. The Spanish and the French brought the Jesuits and Franciscans along on their voyages of conquest. The French went north into Canada, the Spanish to the South into Mexico and Central and South America. California was discovered by missionary priests, and Fr. Escalante was here in Utah before the Mormons arrived.

America has always been mission country. Utah continues to be so. We have 13 missions in this diocese, one right next door in Heber. America has rarely been served by native born priests in the past and this will not change in the future. First they came from Spain and France, then during the great migrations of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries from Ireland and Italy and Germany and Poland. Then in the later part of the 20^th century from Africa and Asia, Southeast Asia and the Southern hemisphere. For our entire history they have come here, to the United States, the largest mission in the world. Why? Because they have chosen to love their neighbors as themselves. A true lover of neighbor is a missionary.

We are privileged to have two outstanding missionaries in our midst here at St. Mary’s and St. Lawrence. Both our priests have left their homelands, their families and heritage, to come here to serve us. We oftentimes think of the sacrifices our priests make for us; it is even more so with our missionary priests. They come here and stay with us out of love for us. They leave their families in order to join our families. And we embrace them as our own in return.

On World Mission Sunday we are called to think about the far flung missions of the world, but we need to recognize that we are also in need of “missioning”. We may think we have no need of missionaries because we have money and resources to give, but we need to humbly recognize that we are also poor children who need missionaries to show us God’s love.

We need to not only learn to act as missionaries, but as mission. As mission we need to first be grateful. We need to thank God every day for the gift of the missionaries he sends us. When we do not have men answering the call to priesthood from our own parishes, God sends us willing and dedicated men from around the world. We also need to show our gratitude to those men themselves and never take them for granted, or treat them differently because they are from another country.

As mission we need to be patient with our missionaries. Part of our rich history is all the thousands of immigrants who have brought their faith, and their priests, here to build the wonderful melting pot that is the Catholic Church in America. Just as it would take us time to fully assimilate into a foreign culture, we need to ease the way for our missionary priests into our culture.

Unlike the LDS missionaries of whom only a certain number are called to serve a mission, we are all called to serve a mission. We all need to be missionaries and we all need to be missioned to. Sometimes that mission is in our own homes. Sometimes our mission is in the workplace. Sometimes the mission is to our own hearts. But if we are to truly love our God and our neighbor, we must reach out to everyone with the love of Jesus Christ, welcome and honor them, and allow them to welcome and honor us.

Jesus said to go and make disciples of all nations. Sometimes that nation is our own.

Forgive and Forget

24^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle A

Sir 27:30-28:7

Rom14:7-9

Mt 18:21-35

This weekend we will be memorializing the terrible events that occurred on September 11, 2001. Ten years ago. How our lives have changed in those ten years. There will be solemn events at Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania, and we will see once again the stunning video footage of those planes hitting those buildings and the ruin they caused. We will hear the heart wrenching stories of those who continue to mourn, and it will be like the scab is being ripped off our national wound once again, a wound that has scarred over but has never really healed.

We will remember. And that’s not a bad thing. We will remember the heroic men and women who gave their lives selflessly to save others. We will remember the lives of the thousands who died that day. We will remember their families. We will hopefully remember how we all came together as a unified nation, for a brief time. And we will continue to ask why. Why did this all happen? What could have been done to prevent it, and what can and should we do to ensure it never happens again? We hope that by remembering and never forgetting the events of that terrible day that we will finally be able to be healed.

On practically all the TV promos and event banners I have seen so far have been the words, “Never Forget”. I think that the sentiment behind “Never Forget” is different than “Always Remember”. “Never Forget” can be taken a couple of ways. Never forget the people who died or the heroes who worked to save them. Or never forget what the bad guys did to us, because someday we’ll get even.

Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord? Is it really ever possible to forgive and forget?

Anger against injustice and hurtful actions is a natural reaction, and everyone experiences it. Sirach is not saying we are not to be angry. He is saying that we should not nourish it and foster it and let it grow as a cancer within us. Wrath is not the same thing as justice. We are called to pursue justice, but we will never be healed ourselves unless we let go of our anger and not let it consume us. Anger is such a strong emotion that it easily leads to hatred, and hatred is like a wall built up around our hearts, a wall so high and so thick that God himself cannot penetrate it.

Is it ok to forgive and not forget? When we offer up memorials around sinful events are we just ensuring that we will never be able to forgive the people who perpetuated them? I don’t think so. I think it is possible for us to forgive the misguided people and their sinful actions, and still remember what they did. Because we are not memorializing them, we are remembering the innocent victims and the heroism of good people that day. We don’t build monuments to evil but to what we perceive as good.

We are not God. God may be able to forgive and forget because to God, every moment is now. There is no past to forget. There is no future to look forward to. It is all now. God has no memory because every moment is the present to him. We live in time, and so we have memories to cherish and memories that are painful. And so I don’t think we can ever really forget the evils that have affected us so deeply, just as we don’t want to forget all the good times. And sometimes it is good not to forget, because those memories can make us stronger, help us to right injustices, force us to look at ourselves and make ourselves better people, both as individuals and as a nation.

I’m not one of those who think that we got what we deserved on 9/11, that it was somehow the result of our actions. But I think most of us did some soul searching in the aftermath of that tragedy and we at least asked the question, why. And I think it was telling that on that day the churches were full. Because we turn to God searching for answers when life does not make sense. We prayed that day for the dead, the hurt, and the mourning. But did we pray that God forgive the terrorists? Did we pray that God would give us the strength to forgive them?

Sirach says, “Forgive your neighbor’s injustice; then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.” If we hold hatred or resentment against another, even if their actions may seem to justify it, we cannot pray as we should. Our souls cannot hold both love and hatred at the same time. And hatred can grow so large in our souls that it blocks out everything else, and we cannot even communicate with our Father. Unless we forgive we cannot pray, and if we cannot pray, we cannot ask for forgiveness for our own sins, and so we cannot be forgiven.

But remembering can also rip us back into pain. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say, but time also heals all wounds. And the passage of time can help us forget our pain. But what if your pain is not just in the past? What if you are confronted with the same hurt again and again and again? Then it can be very difficult to forgive and move on. I think of divorced couples who have to see each other all the time. How difficult it must be to forget the hurtful things that have been said and done. How difficult it must be for the families of the victims of violence to ever heal, because they can never really forget. Their pain is a daily reminder of what they have lost.

How many times are we to forgive those who continue to hurt us? Jesus tells Peter that we must never not forgive, even when those hurts go on and on. I have a tendency to dwell on the slights I perceive other people to have given me. If someone insults me or gets up in my face I will dwell on it over and over again, for days or even weeks. I get angrier and more self righteous. And even if something reminds me of it years later, I will still get worked up about it, even if consciously I think I have forgiven the person. If I will not let it go, have I really forgiven? I once confessed this to a priest, and he told me that whenever I thought about what that person did to me I should just close my eyes and simply say, “Jesus, forgive him” and let it go. Or, if it’s someone who is continually bugging me, I say, “Give him a change of heart”. Maybe we need to forgive seventy seven times because that’s how long it will take us to truly forgive.

Forgiveness is not always done quickly. Sometimes it is a journey that can take a lifetime. But forgiveness is a choice we make, not just because the other person needs to receive it, but because we need to give it. Sometimes the person who hurt us does not want to be forgiven. Those terrorists did not think they were doing anything sinful. They actually thought they would be rewarded in heaven for what they’d done. Our forgiveness of their actions now will have no effect on them. It will only have an effect on us.

When we say forgive and forget we mean we will not hold a grudge. But sometimes we must forgive and remember. Not for vengeance sake, but for healing sake. Jesus did not forgive and forget. He forgave his betrayer, his torturers, and his executioners, yet he still bears the scars of his crucifixion. And he bears them because he does not want to forget what he did for you. And he doesn’t want you to forget what he’s done for you.

Would That All God's People Were Prophets

22^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle A

Jer 20:7-9

Rom 12:1-2

Mt 16:21-27

What is a prophet?

When we think of prophets, we usually think of someone who can foretell the future, sort of like Nostradamus. We see them as fortune tellers, soothsayers, people from the carnival. We flip to the history channel and see the seeming coincidences of the prophecies of a Nostradamus and think, “How cool is that?” and then flip back to American Idol.

Or we hear the writings of the prophets read during Sunday Mass and just let the words pass right by us, because those words are usually a downer. They talk about suffering and lamentation and call us to change. Let’s get to the gospel so we can hear Jesus telling us he loves us. I would suspect that the vast majority of us sitting in this church right now have never even cracked open the prophetic books of the Old Testament; have never heard the words of the prophets spoken anywhere but at Mass. We don’t think their words are relevant to us today.

And today we hear from the prophet Jeremiah, not one of the most uplifting prophets. The weeping prophet. It’s good to know his story, because not only is his message ageless, his situation and life are also mirrored in today’s events.

Jeremiah was called to prophetic ministry in 626 BC. He was young, probably just a teenager or in his early twenties, and he was a reluctant prophet. He really didn’t want to be God’s mouthpiece, and he came up with all sorts of excuses not to do it. He came from a well-off priestly family, and probably was not what most people thought of when they thought of a prophet. The times in Judah were tough. The last few kings had not been faithful to God, choosing to worship the god Baal, one of the local pagan gods. They went so far as to adopt the practice of child sacrifice. There were rumors that the Babylonians were planning to sweep down and invade the country, as they had so many others, so the people were looking to the king to make the right alliances to protect them.

And so Jeremiah shows up and starts telling them that they don’t need to rely on human alliances, they really just need to repent and put their trust in God. Jeremiah’s job was to reveal the sins of the people and explain the reason for the impending destruction and captivity by the Babylonian army. “And when your people say, 'Why has the Lord our God done all these things to us?' you shall say to them, 'As you have forsaken me and served foreign gods in your land, so you shall serve foreigners in a land that is not yours.'" Not exactly a popular message. And Jeremiah was attacked for it.

Jeremiah was attacked by his own brothers, beaten and put into the stocks by a priest, imprisoned by the king, threatened with death, thrown into a cistern and left to die, and opposed by a false prophet. It was ironic that it was the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, who seized Jerusalem in 586 BC, who ordered that Jeremiah be freed from prison and treated well.

Jeremiah is in our midst today.

There is a picture going around the internet of a group of young people in Madrid last week during World Youth Day. For those of you who don’t know, millions of young people gather every two years in a different city, along with the pope, to pray and celebrate being Christian. This year it was in Madrid. Like much of the Western World, Spain is going through some very tough economic and political times. And as you also know, Western Europe has become one of the most secular societies on the planet. Anyway, this picture is of this group of kids kneeling in the street praying while surrounded by a crowd of people screaming and threatening them because they are there for World Youth Day. One of the girls in the group posted her experience on her Facebook page.

She wrote, “We had been wandering Madrid all day, chillin’. One guy who stopped us said there was an anti Catholic protest in Sol so we went to check it out. There was this HUGE crowd of people so Seamus & Louise didn´t want to come check it out with us, they sat at a corner. We went in and people were shouting filthy slurs and cursing the Pope and it was awful. So we knelt down and prayed a rosary for them in the crowd and got surrounded by angry protesters, shouting and threatening and spitting and filming us and mocking us and trying to burn our flags. Anyway, Dominic made us stand up because he felt threatened so we finished our rosary standing but on the last decade, a fight broke out right next to us between the Catholics who had been standing behind us and the protesters so some of the other Catholics led us out of the crowd. We went back and prayed a second rosary on the side of the crowd and we got more of the same, people getting up in our faces screaming. We chanted BENEDICTO, BENEDICTO and VIVA PAPA and waved our Papal flag and so on up against the police line. Lots of people yelled at us still. Then, the police line broke and they charged at us and we had to run for our lives a little more urgently than after our rosary. A lot of people got lost & hurt. The cops wouldn’t let us take the metro so we went off to find a pub.”

Would you have had such courage? I don’t think I would have. I would have just gone off to the pub. These young kids were simply professing their faith. They were there to join with over one and a half million other young Catholics in solidarity with their leader. And they were met with hysterical violence. These young prophets were meeting that violence with peaceful prayer. Like Jeremiah, they could not keep silent. They kept going back.

Prophets are not convenient. Prophets go against the common wisdom of the day.

A prophet discerns the will of God and then submits to it and calls others to change. False prophets maintain the status quo. A prophet speaks universal, eternal truths, because he or she speaks for God, who is eternal and universal. That’s why what prophets said in the past seems to speak to our current day problems so well. They were not foretelling the future, they were speaking for their own generation, but because things never really do change, they were also speaking to us. And because things never really do change, we also persecute and kill prophets today.

Who are our prophets today? They are usually lone voices speaking out against evil with great odds stacked against them. We think of Pope John Paul II, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi. All of whom were met with violence. Two were assassinated and one had an attempt made on his life. All the major prophets in the Old Testament met violent ends. Why is it that the only way human beings seem to be able to react to the loving message of God is through violence? Why do we kill the prophets? Is it because we know deep down that they are right, but we are so deeply entrenched in our lifestyles and habits and selfish pleasures we react violently to anything that threatens to take them away? Why can’t we seem to ever change?

There are no silent prophets. As Jeremiah says in today’s first reading, no matter how hard he tried, he could not keep silent. Even in the face of extreme persecution and danger of death, he could not keep silent. Those kids in Madrid could not keep quiet. Martin Luther King knew he would probably be killed, but he could not keep quiet. Neither could Ghandi. An assassin’s bullet did not stop the pope.

Everyone is a prophet, or should be. Moses once said to Joshua, “Would that all God’s people were prophets.” St. Paul tells the Romans today, “Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Being prophets is transformational, both of ourselves and of society. But we have to think differently than the rest of society, because prophets are countercultural.

Like St. Peter, we are usually thinking not as God does, but as man does. A prophet is someone who thinks as God does. Be a prophet. You are a prophet when you turn off the TV or put down the magazine when they present immoral and unnatural lifestyles and relationships as normal and good. You are a prophet when you take the time to educate yourself on the issues and the candidates, and vote your fully formed Catholic conscience. You are a prophet when you are chaste in your relationships, even when you are married. You are a prophet when you understand what it means to live your marriage as the sacrament of God’s love it is meant to be, and then you live it.

There is no such thing as a passive prophet. Every month when I conduct the baptism preparation classes for young parents, I ask them how they plan on being the first teachers of their children in the ways of faith, and invariably they say that they will be good examples to their kids. That’s great, I tell them, but they also have to talk about it with them. I think many of us think that if we just quietly live our lives according to the teachings of Jesus that’s enough. But prophets must not be silent.

We will be an example to others, for good or for ill, whether we intend to or not. But we must not be silent. Where would civil rights be if Martin Luther King had stayed at home with his family? Would India be a free democracy today if Ghandi had not spoken out and acted against British oppression? Would the Soviet Union still be standing today if John Paul had not spoken out to the millions in Poland? We’ve gotta talk about it.

We need to do more than just turn of f the TV. We need to tell our kids why they can’t watch certain shows, because what they portray about relationships is not true. Enough of us need to turn them off so that Hollywood gets the message that smut doesn’t sell. We need to not buy the products of the companies that sponsor such garbage. We need to stand up and support candidates and policies that espouse Christian values, and not just in the privacy of the voting booth. We need to tell our friends why we are doing it. We need to actively support the sacrament of marriage and not cower when we are threatened.

And we will be threatened. We will be mocked and vilified and called bigots and backward and out of touch. We may lose our jobs and be pushed out of the public arena of ideas. You think it cannot happen here? It is happening every day. Those kids were not threatened with violence in some third world country or by a group of jihadists. They were in Spain, where Catholicism has been the strongest in Europe for centuries. There are countless other stories of American Christians being marginalized as fringe nutcases just because they try to live up to the teachings of the faith.

To be a prophet is to stand up and to stand out. To be a prophet is to get off our tails and do something. To be a prophet is to be a disciple of Jesus, and to be a disciple is to be a prophet, because the greatest prophet was Jesus himself. When you were baptized you were anointed with Sacred Chrism and the priest prayed that “As Christ was anointed Priest, Prophet and King, so may you live always as a member of his body, sharing everlasting life.” For a Christian, prophesying is not an option. We are all anointed prophets.

We have been duped, O Lord, and we have allowed ourselves to be duped. You have called us all to be prophets, and even though you have told us time and again that it won’t be easy, we still think we’ll get a pass. And all you offer us in return is…eternal life.