Only One Thing is Required

16^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle C

We are so anxious and worried about so many things. Only one thing is required.

Summertime is a time for barbecues and weddings and such. There are so many events going on here, so many things to prepare for, so many visitors in town and in our homes. Many of us travel to see family and friends and welcome them as they visit us. Summer is the time for vacations. Summer is a time for connections. Summer is a time of hospitality. And oftentimes summer is a time for worry and anxiety over so many things to do, so many things to get ready for, so many details to attend to.

Have you ever gotten back from vacation and felt you needed a vacation from the vacation? You did and saw a lot of things but never truly relaxed? It took you a couple days to unplug from work, you had a couple days of real vacationing, then the last couple days you were thinking about getting ready to go back to work again? We never really vacate, do we? We never really leave our jobs and homes behind in our minds. Vacations are supposed to help us recharge, to step out of the pressures of our lives for a while so that we can return to them refreshed, stronger, and with new perspectives. For many of us that is rarely the case.

There are some people who have chosen to spend their entire lives or careers studying the scriptures and serving God. They seem to be singularly focused on Jesus. Nothing else is as important as learning all they can from and about him. And Jesus says today that that is the better portion. Did Jesus mean we are to ignore everything except that type of singular focus?

Most of us have not chosen the studious or professed religious or contemplative life. Most of us are living and working in the world. We have families and careers and mortgages. We take our relationships very seriously, especially our relationship with Jesus. We invite him into our lives, just as Martha invited Jesus into hers. We strive to keep Jesus the center of our lives, even as busy as we are.

It is important, no, vital, that we all study and listen and internalize the Word of God if we are to be his disciples. For he has the words of eternal life. But we must do that in the midst of the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives.

Martha wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was doing what custom said she was supposed to do. She was being the good hostess. She was the good servant.

There is grace in hospitality. Martha was serving, but Mary was being fed.

Martha was focused on serving Jesus in a worldly way, worried about the traditions and requirements of hospitality. Mary was focused on the servant himself. Martha was making things complicated; Mary was keeping it simple. Martha was concerned with getting it just right; Mary was concerned with her relationship with Jesus.

And I think that is really what Jesus was getting at. He wasn’t telling Martha that what she was doing wasn’t necessary or important. Somebody had to make dinner. Martha’s problem was that she wasn’t serving with joy. She was resenting her sister and begrudging her tasks. What was important was that Jesus was in their midst. He was there right in front of them, and that was where they should focus. There would always be time to cook and clean and attend to the details of living. But when Jesus is present in our midst we should not worry about all those things and just be in his presence.

There are a lot of preparations that must be made for our liturgies to be sacred times. It takes the efforts of over 80 people to celebrate our weekend Masses alone. But when Jesus is in our midst that is where we should focus. It’s tough sometimes to get everything set up, get all the people in their places, handle all the little mishaps that inevitably spring up, and still be able to let it all go and experience the living Jesus in our midst.

It is hard to get up early on a Sunday morning, get the kids washed, dressed and fed, herd everyone into the pew, clean up the spilled Cheerios, fuss with a crying baby, and still be able to experience the living Jesus in our midst. It’s hard to turn off the world for a few moments to be in the presence of Christ. We come here to experience a bit of peace in our week. We come here to enter into the transcendent, to enter into the mystery. Our everyday lives can be so worrisome and complicated. Here things should be simpler. Here it should be all about Jesus.

But liturgy is messy. People are messy. There are many times I think that we come here hoping to find peace and be fed, but distractions in the church and worries about our problems do not allow us to just sit at the feet of Jesus and be in his presence. We can’t just flip a switch and the world goes away. And Jesus knows that. I think we can still find joy in the midst of our distractions and worries. Joy is a decision. We acknowledge our problems but we do not let them wear us down. We don’t come here to escape the world, but to make the world holy. Our presence here is as important to Jesus as his presence here is to us.

St. John says that the same Martha who was so worried about getting it right was the one who declared Jesus to be the Messiah when her brother Lazarus died. It was Martha who came out to meet Jesus before he even came into the village. She had been waiting for him and looking for him. Mary stayed at home. Mary the student did not go out in search of the Master that day. Martha the servant did.

The person who was so concerned with convention and doing everything just right is the one who found Jesus in the end. It was the servant who recognized the savior. It seems that Martha had taken Jesus’ admonition to heart.

So don’t worry about it. Seek first the kingdom of God, and its righteousness, and all other things will be given to you. Keep your focus on what is truly important, on who is truly important, and all the other things will work out. Serve one another with joy, and I think you’ll find Jesus there, too.

We can find holiness in the ordinary. We are here in the 16^th week of ordinary time, and while technically all ordinary time means in the liturgical year is that we are not celebrating any of the great feast seasons such as Advent, Lent and Easter, the fact that there are far many more weeks in Ordinary Time than in the other seasons is a sign that most of the time we are living our ordinary lives, doing all the everyday things that can seem so routine and cause us so much stress. And in the middle of all of that Jesus is there, making the ordinary extraordinary.

I think it is important that we take time out of the busyness of our lives to recharge with Jesus. Sit at his feet and just spend time with him. Take a half hour a week and pray in quiet here before the Blessed Sacrament. Go on retreat every once in a while. Come to the Way of Christ talk and meal on Thursday nights here at St. Mary’s. Simply create a habit of prayer every day to build your relationship with God. It’s those little connection points with Jesus that make all the difference. They keep us focused, help us live worry-free, and give us hope.

Tell Them the Truth

5^th Sunday of Easter

Cycle C

Acts 14:21-27

Rev 21:1-5a

Jn 13:31-33a, 34-35

 “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” How are we doing with that?

I like to read Catholic blogs. There are so many really good ones out there, and since I am called upon very often to defend and explain the faith, I am always looking for another insight on how to do so. Some blogs are very deep and profound. Others are funny and show common sense. But what I find about most of them is that they are respectful, forthright, and charitable in the way they explain the truths of the Catholic faith. They show no hatred or intolerance towards those who hold differing opinions. However, the same cannot be said of the people who comment on these blogs.

And it’s not just the comments that oppose the position of the blogger. It’s the people who comment on the comments. That’s where you see the divisions amongst the people in the pews. That’s where you see the ignorance and intolerance and name calling and sometimes pure venom. Usually, when someone cannot articulate a good argument they resort to name calling and ad hominem attacks.

The issues of the day have polarized us all. If we disagree with someone, we don’t have civil discourse, we attack them personally. The advent of social media means we can call people all sorts of names anonymously with no threat of reprisal. We post statements that make sweeping condemnations of entire groups of people, not thinking that we may be calling some of our closest friends bigots or racists or worse by association. So many friendships have been lost this way.

All the time we are fighting amongst ourselves we fail to address the tidal wave that is approaching us from outside. We are all worried about how our religious freedom is being whittled away day by day, and we see all the attacks on the Church and its members around the world, but do you blame them? How can the world see the Church as a loving presence in the world when we cannot even show love for one another?

If we ourselves are attacking one another, how can we expect the world to treat us any differently than we treat ourselves? If all we show the world is our own self hatred, how can we expect them to see anything in the Church to emulate and admire?

Gandhi once said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

In the time of the apostles, the most attractive thing about Christianity was that its adherents didn’t just believe differently, the acted differently. They seemed to care about one another. They took care of the widows and orphans, gave to the poor and healed the sick. Their worship was not based upon individuals fulfilling a prescribed set of rituals in this temple or that, with the hope of appeasing this or that god. Instead, they gathered as one community to worship a different kind of a god. Their god was humble and gentle and loving, not stern and demanding of obedience and sacrifice. He actually gave his life for his disciples, to free the entire world of sin.

These Christians were peaceful. They didn’t join the army, they weren’t vengeful, and they tried to love their neighbors as they loved themselves. They welcomed the people on the margins of society; slaves, women, the poor. There were no class distinctions among them. Everyone was welcome and everyone had the same hope of salvation and eternal life. That was a very attractive lifestyle, and I think that is one of the main reasons why the early church grew so quickly. It is also one of the reasons why it weathered so many periods of severe persecution. Jesus told them to love one another because he knew that that love would be the thing that held them together during those persecutions.

It will be the same today. The attacks on our discipleship from without are getting stronger and louder every day. Our love for one another will be what gets us through this time of trial.

But I think many of us have forgotten Jesus’ admonition to love one another. We have had it pretty easy as disciples. There have really not been very many challenges to our faith here in the U.S. in our lifetime, until now. Catholicism has been the majority religion in this country for as long as we can remember, and the potshots that have been taken at it have mostly either bounced off because of our numbers and influence, or worse, have been absorbed into our beliefs and made us more worldly rather than the other way around.

When I was growing up back East, Catholics were still the minority, and Italian-Americans were still looked down on, and so we tended to gather together as a group for support. Whenever a group is discriminated against they tend to circle the wagons. Christianity is no longer a radical way of living and believing, it has been watered down. We haven’t needed to defend ourselves until the past 50 years or so, and we have become complacent and may have forgotten where we come from and what we’re really all about.

I think we need to get back to the basics of what made Christianity such an attractive way of life. It is all based upon love, and love needs to start at home. Jesus said our mission is to go and make disciples of the entire world. But first we must be disciples ourselves. Tramping around foreign countries as missionaries isn’t in the cards for most of us, but why can’t we simply love? It starts small. First, we must see that we ourselves are loved beyond measure, just because we are. We are celebrating the great manifestation of that love these fifty days of Easter.

You notice I didn’t say, “First you must love yourself”. The danger of self-love is that it has limits and oftentimes our love just stops there. Self-love is inner directed while true love is directed outwards. Our love can fail; God’s love cannot, so build your foundation on that unchanging truth.

You know, Jesus didn’t say, “This is how all will know you are my disciples, if you love everyone in the world.” Instead, as usual, he focused on what was right in front of him. He knew that if only his small group of close friends could learn to love one another, then that would be an attractive example to the rest of the world. He said, first, love one another. Then go and make more disciples who love one another, and after a while the whole world would be disciples who love one another. And that is how he would renew the face of the earth.

Just strive to love those closest to you. Jesus didn’t say, “Love one another as I have loved all the crowds I’ve been preaching to and healing these past three years.” He said, “Love one another as I have loved…you”. He loved his friends. Jesus didn’t show his love to the crowds, he showed it to those right in front of him who were hurting. He taught the crowds; he had compassion for and healed individuals. It is sometimes easier for us to be kind to a stranger in need than it is for us to be kind to the people in our families. Why not start there?

And when there is need for correction, do so with love. St. Paul said we are to admonish one another out of love. Pope Saint John Paul II used to say that the best way to love someone was to tell them the truth:  To teach the truth with love. Get it right, know what you’re talking about, and then offer correction with compassion and charity. But do you know the truth? Do you believe the truth? Do you live the truth? Do you testify to and defend the truth? This can be hard when the truth is the exact opposite of the conventional wisdom. The truth can lose friendships, the truth can alienate your children, the truth can get you fired or even physically attacked. "It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God." 

A disciple is more than someone who just learns from the master; a disciple becomes like the master. A disciple patterns his or her entire life on the master’s, and then calls others to do the same. What did Jesus do? He gave his entire life for the people he loved. He laid done his life for those he loved.

If we truly showed that kind of love for our families, we wouldn’t have to worry about them eroding. If we showed that kind of love for our spouses, we wouldn’t have to worry about the institution of marriage. If we showed that kind of love for our children, there would be no abortion or abuse of any kind. If our families are truly images of Jesus, society would be transformed in just a few generations.

So be kind to one another. Pray for one another. Admonish one another to live moral lives. Give material and spiritual support to those closest to you in need. Lift each other up. That’s how we show our love for one another. Start there and maybe, just maybe, other people we see that love and be attracted to that love and want a part of that love in their lives, too.

And when they ask you about it, tell them. Tell them why you love and who you follow. Tell them the truth.

Blind Man's Bluff

4^th Sunday of Lent (Scrutiny)

Are you a sinner or are you someone who sins?

One of our catechists asked that question of our RCIA class a couple weeks ago. It was one of those questions that caused everyone to pause a second, think about it, and then say “Hmmm”. It wasn’t as simple as it sounded. What was she getting at? Of course we’re all sinners, right? Isn’t that a core Christian belief?

But this question stopped us in our tracks. Most of the class answered at first that we are sinners. Isn’t that what original sin is all about? But then the whole mercy thing kicked in, and they started waffling. Being a sinner is a definition of who we are. Being someone who sins seems more like something outside of ourselves. It is something I do, not who I am. I think it gets to the core of what you think sin is and how you view yourself. No, it’s really about how God views you.

What is your image of how you were created? Were you created bad and in need of saving, or were you created good but you make bad decisions and are in need of forgiveness? The first image is sort of fatalistic. You’re condemned before you’re even born. You were created in sin, and you are basically evil. Martin Luther wrote, “Conceived in sorrow and corruption, the child sins in his mother’s womb”, and he described the human soul as a pile of dung that is covered by a blanket of snow. On the outside we may look pure, but deep inside we’re really…well, you know.

The Catholic view of humanity is that while we are fallen, we are not worthless excrement. Rather, we have great value. Our God values us so much he died to conquer our sinfulness. As St. Paul wrote in the letter to the Romans,

“Just as through one man’s disobedience

all became sinners,

so through one man’s obedience

all shall become just.”

God doesn’t create anything evil, but because he has given us free will we sin. It may seem like a subtle distinction, but I think it means a lot. One image I think is a positive, hopeful view of human nature and the other is a negative, destructive image of human nature, one that has caused great suffering in the world. We see both images at play in today’s gospel.

The Pharisees believed, as did all Jews at the time, that prosperity, good health and good fortune were signs that a person was righteous. Conversely, if you were sick or poor or suffered misfortune it was because you were a sinner. This was especially true if you had some serious disease like leprosy or a major disability like blindness or deafness. And in the case of someone born disabled, the thinking was that since a baby really couldn’t be held responsible for their affliction, it must have been because of the sins of the parents. And if the child continued in their affliction, the sins of the parents lived on in them.

The blind man could not enter the temple. Everybody said he shouldn’t be there, and he himself thought he shouldn’t be there. He also thought he was unworthy to be in the presence of God, because he was a sinner. He was reduced to begging at the door. The people who passed him every day saw him as unworthy, beneath them, worthless to God and man. And so he saw himself as unworthy and worthless. How could he ever become worthy? How could he ever come in out of the darkness and be included among the seeing?

And the self-righteous people, the good church going folks who had it all together shunned and avoided the unrighteous. Publicly. Just like today.

What is sin today? Do we even see it anymore? It is topsy turvy. Many actions that are sinful are socially acceptable and to be lauded and what does not conform to the conventional wisdom is considered sin. The modern day Pharisees are the self-righteous who condemn people because of the groups they do or don’t belong to. Just as the Pharisees condemned the blind man as a sinner because of his affliction, so today we condemn people because of their affiliation. We shun the “sinners” who are not the same color as us, who don’t have as much money as we do, who don’t share our religious or political views. We paint entire groups of people as evil because they’re different from us, and we do it in the most humiliating and vicious and public ways imaginable. If you disagree with me, you are not just mistaken, you are evil. All you have to do is check out the comment boxes on social media to see that this is true.

Non-conformity has become sinful, and real sin is misunderstood or ignored.

Sin is a reality. We must recognize and acknowledge that sin is real, that it affects all of us, even the sins we do not commit ourselves. Then we must acknowledge that we ourselves sin. This may seem a silly thing to say, but I believe that there are millions of people in the world today who do not believe in sin, that right and wrong depend on what the individual person thinks is or isn’t wrong. There are no moral absolutes, no objective evil, just the individual will.

And on the other side, there are many people who feel so guilty when they sin that they actually believe they are unforgivable. Their sense of their sinfulness has become a crushing burden. We can be both blind to our sin and blind to the mercy of God that frees us from sin.

We must have a balanced sense of sin, both in our individual lives and in society. If we refuse to believe we sin, we will be destroyed. If we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by our sinfulness, we will be destroyed. We must not be so blind to our own sinfulness that we think everything we do is ok and yet not be so discouraged by our sin that we feel worthless, helpless, and lose hope in God’s mercy.

We must always live in the hope of our redemption. We sin, yet we are still very much valued and loved by God. We need to focus not on our failures, but on God’s mercy. The hopeless have no desire to change. We must confront our sinfulness with the resolve to be better than we sometimes are.

Jesus did not see the man born blind as someone steeped in sin from his birth and therefore without hope of salvation. He saw his very purpose in being born to be for the glory of God. And he physically cured the man without even addressing his sinfulness. He actually turned the beliefs of the Pharisees against them by removing the very thing that they thought made the man a sinner. He cured his blindness. The Pharisees could no longer claim that the man was a sinner because he had been made whole. And the blind man began to see himself differently, too. Jesus exploded their entire world view and reversed their situations. The blind could see and the seeing remained blind.

Jesus has the power to cure the body and the soul. Physical afflictions do not make us sinners. Our own choices do that. But Jesus forgives us our sins. He does not see us as inherently bad people; he sees us as good with infinite potential but in need of forgiveness because we choose to sin. He saw the goodness in the blind man as a son of God. He showed him great mercy. He sees the same in us and offers us the same mercy.

This morning we will be celebrating the second scrutiny with our elect and candidates preparing for the sacraments of initiation at the Easter Vigil. It is good that we all scrutinize our lives along with them, to acknowledge that we have sinned and accept the forgiving love of God that continually calls us all to conversion. I now call forward our elect and candidates along with their godparents and sponsors to the foot of the altar.