Happy Eucharist!

Why not “Happy Thanksgiving”? But that’s exactly what I just said, because the word Eucharist literally means “thanksgiving”. Did you know that? Wouldn’t it be great if every time we entered the church to celebrate the Mass we greeted each other by saying “Happy Thanksgiving”! Because that is what it is. The Mass is our greatest prayer of thanksgiving.

When Jesus offered himself up on the cross he did so in thanksgiving. The Last Supper was a memorial meal of thanksgiving. The Jews celebrate the Passover supper in thanksgiving for all that God has done for them throughout the centuries, especially when he rescued them from slavery in Egypt. Jesus was giving thanks to his Father for giving him his disciples and for giving him the opportunity to come down to earth to draw all people to him, and yes, even for the opportunity to die for us.

The Mass should be a happy event. It is a feast, just as much as our dinner later today will be a feast. Have you ever thought about the structure of the Mass? It’s the same as the banquet you are preparing today.

We prepare for this Mass long before we celebrate it, just as you have been getting ready for your dinner today for a long time. We greet each other at the door. We catch up on the latest goings on with each other. We enter the dining room and gather together around the table. We prepare ourselves spiritually by saying we’re sorry for anything we may have done to break our communion with each other since the last time we met, just like we apologize to Great Uncle Lou for getting in that fight over politics last Thanksgiving. We sit and hear stories about our family’s past and remember all who have gone before us in faith. Then we offer up prayers for our needs and the needs of others.

We get ready for the meal by bringing our gifts to the altar, because we’d never dream of going to someone’s house for dinner empty handed. We say grace, our prayers of thanksgiving over the gifts we have brought to the table. Those gifts are from God and from us. We don’t bring grapes and wheat, we bring bread and wine, having taken what God has given us and transformed it into something else.

We hear the most beautiful prayer of the Mass, the Eucharistic Prayer, the Thanksgiving Prayer, when God takes our transformed gifts and transforms them even more into his very self. Jesus has physically joined us at table. And those transformed gifts in turn transform us. We offer one final prayer of awe at the gift God has given us. “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” No, we can never make ourselves worthy, but God wants us to be worthy to be with him forever.

Then we eat and drink. We acknowledge the gift by receiving the Body and Blood of Christ in communion with one another. We receive, we do not take. And we become the Body of Christ as we receive the Body of Christ.

Then we sit back for a bit and take it all in. We’re stuffed and couldn’t eat another bite. We clear the table and do the dishes. We announce when the next get together will be, and we say one final prayer and receive a blessing before we go out into the world once again, where we live the fruits of our thanksgiving.

We set aside a special day once a year to give thanks as a nation for all the blessings we have been given. We give thanks for the gift, but what about the giver? Who are we giving thanks to? If you look at all the decorations and all the advertising, you’d think we are giving thanks to the turkey, or the pilgrims, or something. You never see decorations giving thanks to God, do you. You rarely see or hear mention of God in any of the big celebrations being held across the country. There was no big Jesus balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade this morning. Thanksgiving has become a completely secular holiday, all about food and football. It really should be called “Black Friday Eve” because that’s what all the focus seems to be on.

It wasn’t intended to be that way, and it isn’t that way for us. We don’t just remember our blessings, we remember the one who blesses us. When Abraham Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving Day Proclamation in 1863 he did it to recognize and celebrate all the wonderful things God had given to our country, even in the midst of the most terrible trial we have ever been put through. And he wanted to thank God for all that. That wonderful proclamation was actually a prayer.

“No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”

The way we give our greatest thanks to God is through the Eucharist, so it is entirely fitting that we gather here this morning to link the two celebrations together. What better way to show our national thanksgiving than through our greatest prayer of thanksgiving! So, Happy Eucharist! We are a Eucharistic people, and every day for us is Thanksgiving Day!

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.