Lifted Up

 

 

Ascension

Cycle C

 

Lifted Up

 

The apostles didn’t know what to think. One minute their master was dead, then he just shows up every once in awhile when they least expect it. First he’s here, then he’s there, then he’s over there. What an amazing roller coaster of emotions they must have been on. Was he really not dead? Was he really going to stay this time? Why is he being taken from us again? How will we carry on without him?

 

Has that ever been your experience of Jesus? First he’s here, then he’s there, then he’s over there. Have you ever been confused about what you’re supposed to do next? Have you experienced the ups and downs of believing? The apostles didn’t have the whole story, didn’t understand the entire plan they still walked away rejoicing, because they trusted in the promise. They didn’t know how the promise would be fulfilled, but their experience of the risen Lord and their love for him was enough for them to believe. Have you ever had that same experience and felt that same joy in the promise, even in the face of unknowing?

 

Luke says Jesus was lifted up and taken from their sight. He wasn’t gone, they just couldn’t see him. Sometimes we lose him. Other times he seems to be hidden from us. Sometimes he chooses to seem far away to allow us to do things for ourselves. Other times he is right next to us and we cannot recognize him, as he was with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus on Easter evening. But most of the time I think we push him from our sight. He is hidden from us by our own sinfulness and unwillingness to bend our will to his. We hide him away because what he has to say can be offensive to our sensibilities. We’re embarrassed to bring him out into the open because we’re afraid of what others will say about us. And most of all he is hidden by our fear. We’re afraid that maybe he has left us here on our own. Maybe he’s not coming back.  Like the apostles, we’ve been hurt and have felt very alone so many times. It’s hard to trust. It’s easier keep him here, in the church, where we can come to see him every once in awhile. It’s safe in here.

 

But the promise is not safe. Jesus had to be lifted up on the cross before he could be lifted up into heaven. Jesus was lifted up, taken higher, exalted, glorified, given his rightful place, because he submitted his will to his father’s. And it is the same for us. St. Paul tells us that Jesus Christ is like us in all things but sin. It’s not just that Jesus can truly relate to and understand our human condition, but that we also share in his divine nature. As he is, we will be. We will die and rise again on the last day. His resurrection and ascension will also be ours. We also will be lifted up and share in his glory.

 

What a wonderful promise of hope for us all.

 

In the ascension Jesus joined heaven and earth together. Just as the resurrection was the conclusion to Jesus’ death, the ascension was the conclusion to the resurrection. He ascended so that he could come again in glory. The ascension was not the end of hope but the beginning of hope. It may have been the end of Jesus’ physical presence and ministry here on earth, but not of his mission. He commissioned his disciples – us – to go and make disciples of all the nations, teaching them everything he has commanded us, and to baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We are to be his witnesses, even to the ends of the earth. It’s almost as if the angels present at the ascension were saying “Men of Galilee, what are you looking at? Why are you hanging around here? It’s time to get to work! Get busy!”

 

By giving us that commission he has honored and strengthened the thing that makes us truly human, our free will. He has honored us by making us coworkers in the vineyard. He actually said that we would do the same, and even greater things, than he had done. All in his name. He left behind a very small seed that has grown to spread over the entire world. We have gone and made disciples of all the nations. We have and do teach the world everything he had commanded us. We are his hands at work in the world, being the instruments of his promise. That small group of disciples has grown to truly transform the face of the earth.

 

The Holy Spirit allowed the apostles to continue to experience the risen Jesus in one other. After the ascension they did not split up and return to their old ways of life. They did not go off by themselves into the hills or take up their old jobs. They stuck together, as a community. They did and shared all things in common. They worked and prayed and hoped as community. They told stories of Jesus to each other. They broke bread together. They lived and died together. It seemed the natural thing to do.

 

Because it is. And that is why we also follow Jesus in community. Because we are all in this together. It is natural for us to get together each week and share Jesus stories, to break bread together. To pray and to hope together. To live and die together. We live out Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension every time we participate in the holy Mass. We lift our hearts to the Lord, the priest lifts the body and blood of Christ on high, and we witness the great hope of our own glorification into eternal life.

 

No, just like the apostles, we don’t have all the answers, but we have the promise. And that is a cause for great rejoicing for us as well.

 Topsy Turvy

7^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle C

1 SM 26:2, 7-9, 12-13, 22-23

1 COR 15:45-49

LK 6:27-38

 

How many of you are familiar with the story in today’s gospel? Show of hands.

 

This is Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, similar to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. We’ve heard it our entire lives, and we know it by heart. It’s almost become a cliché. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Golden Rule again. “Do unto others as you would like others to do unto you.” How many of you sort of tuned out when you first heard it again today? No show of hands this time.

 

It was the same with Jesus’ audience that day, too. Everything Jesus was telling them wasn’t new to them. He was just re-stating what they had heard over and over again in the Jewish law and the prophets. But Jesus gave it the twist that you should do these things for those you don’t like or even to those who hate you. That’s the hard part, isn’t it? That’s the part that goes against all our sense of fairness and justice. That is the part that can get us hurt. It’s not so much the lending and giving without expecting something in return part that’s hard, it’s the opening of our hearts to people who don’t care or who won’t love us in return or who will even outright reject us and attack us.

 

This goes against all the conventional wisdom of the past 50 years. Since the 1960s and especially the past 20 years we have been ruled not by the Golden Rule but by two principles: the personal liberty principle, where we are free to do whatever we like as long as we don’t harm anyone else, and the tolerance principle, where we must tolerate whatever other people do as long as they aren’t harming anyone else, which is basically allowing others to live by their own personal liberty principle.

Both principles are really different sides to the same coin, and they are both really selfish.

 

Letting me do what I want to do is easy to understand. But I really believe that we tolerate other people’s behavior, good or bad, not because we care about them so much as we want them to leave us alone to do what we want to do. It’s sort of like the new Golden Rule is “Let people do whatever they want to do so they will let me do whatever I want to do.” Both are all about me. The big problem lately is who defines what is harmful and what isn’t. There are no more objective moral standards, just my feelings. You do you and I’ll do me. You live your truth and I’ll live mine, as if there is no such thing as objective truth. It doesn’t matter if you do anything wrong, if I think you’ve wronged me than that makes it wrong. And so chaos ensues.

 

We push so hard telling people that they have to love themselves first and foremost. Love your enemies has become “Don’t surround yourself with people who bring you down.” Find your authentic self and then live it. If it feels good do it. These pop culture philosophies are so self-centered. But the only life worth living is one lived for others.

 

Nothing Jesus says today is self-directed, but other directed. The challenging thing is that we are called by Jesus to open our hearts to everyone, not just to those who we can get something back in return. He said “Love one another as I have loved you” not “Love one another as I have loved myself”. The greatest love is the love we give to those who do not love us. Jesus died for those who killed him out of love for them.

 

We are not called to remove ourselves completely from hurtful people. We are called to love and to pray for them, not just for their good but for ours. And that can be the most painful kind of love. Unless we love them we can never let go of the hurt they have caused us. Jesus told his disciples, “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven and whose sins you retain are retained.” We retain other people’s sins all the time, allowing them to fester in us and make us bitter. But as Luke says, “He himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” That’s what love is and that’s what love does.

 

What’s ironic, or perhaps genius, is that the only way to be true to yourself, to live the personal liberty principle, is to actually focus on others, not yourself. It’s the exact opposite of the common wisdom today. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is not just going to make life better for them, but better for you too. This will actually make you happy. This will actually bring you peace. This will give your life meaning. It seems counterintuitive because we are called to do these things in the midst of our suffering. Loving those who are hurting us actually stops the hurting. The more you sacrifice the more you will receive. If you want more, give more. And always forgive, forgive, forgive.

 

Forgive and you will be forgiven may seem to be a throwaway line, but just like if you give more you will receive more, the opposite is true also. If you give less you will receive less. You will be forgiven to the extent that you forgive. In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount Jesus says, “But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.  If you don’t forgive you won’t be forgiven. And you will be judged by the same measure you judge others. If you judge harshly you will be judged harshly.

 

But that’s not fair. We’ve been taught our entire lives that God will forgive us no matter what, right? Isn’t that what unconditional love is? And there is no judgment, really, because there are no standards to judge by anymore. A loving God is not a judge, we’re all going to heaven anyway. But that thinking removes our free will and personal responsibility, and that’s what’s really unfair.

 

A friend of mine posted a meme on Facebook this week that said, “Nope, not going to worry about being judged in the afterlife. God made me this way.” I know he was joking, but many, many people today believe that.

 

Judgment is real and is based upon fairness. My friend says he’s not responsible for his actions, but he is. We all are. We won’t be judged on how much we loved ourselves and found self-fulfillment in all the things here we think will make us happy. We will be judged on what we have done for the least of our brothers and sisters. Did we feed the hungry and clothe the naked? Did we help the poor and visit prisoners? How much did we do beyond ourselves?

 

This is a great gospel to help you prepare for lent in a couple weeks. Just as I have heard this gospel a hundred times and so can seem mundane, as I get older the idea of Lent becomes more and more routine. It gets harder to focus on penance and preparation with all the whirlwind going on in my life and I have run out of ideas of how to make it worthwhile. It has become just another thing I have to do. Maybe I can take today’s gospel and work on some of Jesus’ admonitions this lent.

 

Who can I give to without expecting repayment? Who can I pray for who has hurt me? Who disagrees with me that I can be gracious to? Who has unknowingly hurt me that I can forgive? Whose injury to me is causing bitterness in my heart, and how can I let go of it and be at peace? Who can I be kind to who has been ungrateful to me? What debts can I repay? What grudges can I let go of?

Who have I hurt, and can I have the courage to ask them for forgiveness?

 

It's all topsy turvy and backwards. But then, God sees things differently than we do, thankfully. Jesus taught us the way and then showed us how to live it.

 

Thank God for mercy and for giving me more than I could ever deserve.

 

Give, and gifts will be given to you;
a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing,
will be poured into your lap.

 

Have You Ever Fallen in Love?

 

4^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle C

Jer 1:4-5, 17-19

1 Cor 12:31-13:30

Lk 4:21-30

 

Have you ever fallen in love?

 

I’ve actually given a lot of thought to this concept of being in love this past year. I have really struggled with it. Have I ever truly been in love? When and how? And how do I know? What did it feel like, who was it with? Have I ever truly loved? Have I ever truly been loved? I have tried to look back over the most important relationships in my life and then judged them according to the criteria St. Paul lays out in today’s letter to the Corinthians. There are a lot of descriptions there of what love is and isn’t. Can I truly say that I have loved and been loved that way?

 

Love can seem so ethereal sometimes. I mean, you can’t touch it or see it. We think we can feel it, but it is so much more than a feeling, so much more than our romanticized concepts. We set high expectations for love, much of it formed by what we see, read and hear in movies, books, and music. We seem to be obsessed with love, especially with being loved, but we so often miss the mark when it comes to understanding or defining it, and I believe so many broken relationships and feelings of depression and lack of meaning in our lives can be traced to our unreal expectations of love. Can we ever live up to the true definition of love?

 

Jon Sweeney, in his book, Cloister Talks, recounts a conversation he had with Fr. Luke, a Trappist monk, around the question of love. Fr. Luke said, “There’s clearly enormous potential, and a desperate market, for real love in the world. Love, real love, is far more rare than violence. And real love is more personally dangerous than violence.” He went on to say, “You suffer it, which means that becoming open so as to truly love leads to a new depth of life, and that depth includes pain. The happy-go-lucky-I-love-everyone sort of blather makes no sense really. To love everyone can sometimes amount to truly loving no one. Jesus said that to love is to make yourself personally vulnerable. Hospitality, for instance, does not simply mean a bowl of soup and a place to sleep, but also an open heart. To care for the stranger is to be open to him, to be willing to be wounded by him. “

 

I remember the moment my first child was born. I don’t believe that I knew the meaning of love until then. At that instant I was struck with such an overwhelming feeling of joy, wonder, fear and responsibility, something I hadn’t even felt when I fell in love with my wife. I had just met that little person, and I knew that I would literally die for him. Not just to protect him, I knew I had a new purpose in my life to dedicate everything I am to him. On that day in 1985 I knew for the first time what it felt to have my heart broken, woundedly open. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything in the world…and I’ve only really duplicated it when I witnessed by daughter and grandsons being born.

 

You know, Jesus feels the same way about you and me. From the moment he first met you, the moment he first conceived of you as a person, unique in all of history, he loved you that fiercely. Just as I felt I was willing and able to actually die for those little babies Jesus was willing and able to actually die for us.

 

Jesus says that there is no greater sign of love than to lay down your life for your friends. Most of us are never called to make the ultimate sacrifice of dying for someone else, but we lay down our lives for those we love every day through our commitment to them and their needs above our own.

 

This passage from 1 Corinthians is the most requested for weddings. And it makes sense, because a wedding is all about love, love, love, and the bride and groom are bathed in such strong emotional feelings for each other, it must be love, right?  But the reality is that in a married relationship we fall in and out of love so many times. Sometimes we feel it so strongly and other times we struggle to find it at all. And most times it is just the soup that we swim in; it’s the framework of our existence.

We always know it’s there but it’s sort of in the background most times, almost like our operating system for living.

 

I actually printed out a copy of that passage today, you know, love is patient, love is kind, etc. and taped it to the wall next to my desk in my office, and for a while I would read it out loud every morning before starting work, just to try to focus on it throughout the day. And there are a lot of beautiful, unselfish sentiments there. But there is also an undercurrent of suffering there. Being patient, not brooding, not holding grudges, assumes that there are so many times that we have to put up with people and situations that hurt us. And that part about rejoicing with the truth so often requires us to have courage to stand up to lies and insincerity and lack of love.

 

We see it in the reading from Jeremiah today. Jeremiah is the prophet of lamentation, and he had a really rough go of it. His calling as a prophet put him at odds with the entire country. He was calling them to repentance and conversion, and they didn’t want to hear that. His life was constantly in danger, but he had to testify to the truth. He was called to love those who hated him and to actually lay down his life for them. Yes, love is patient and love is kind, but love is also tough and cold and hard sometimes. Telling the truth to people you love takes a lot of courage.

 

I imagine it was really hard for Jesus that day in Nazareth, too. He had just returned home after going throughout the countryside preaching, healing and teaching. Word had reached Nazareth of all the wonders he had been performing in other towns, and now he had come into their synagogue with a prophetic message. The blind would see, the deaf would hear, and the poor would have the good news proclaimed to them, and all of this was being fulfilled in their hearing. They thought that was pretty cool, until they realized who it was who was telling them this. Isn’t this just Joseph’s son? Where does he come up with this stuff? And all they really wanted to see were the miracles, anyway. Remember that these were his relatives and friends, and they were probably very incredulous. Familiarity breeds contempt, they say. And so, Jesus hits them hard with the truth. No prophet has honor in his own place, with his own people. And that made them mad. What do you mean you won’t perform miracles here for us, your people, who know you so well? We know you’re nobody special, just the carpenter’s son. And so, as with all prophets, they tried to kill him. That rejection must have hurt Jesus deeply. It doesn’t say in scripture if he ever returned to Nazareth.

 

But he had to admonish them because he loved them. We also are hurt deepest by those we love the most, by those we think should love us the most. I have always found it curious that the one thing St. Paul fails to say is that love forgives and love receives forgiveness. A wise monk once told me that one of the most loving acts we can do is to say we are sorry to someone, because when we ask for forgiveness we are giving them the opportunity to love us. We love most when we give those we love the opportunity to love us in return.

 

And the truest love is to continue to love those who refuse to love us, to open our hearts to the possibility of rejection. I used to think that true love had to be the love that was reciprocated, now I believe it is continuing to love in the face of rejection. Jeremiah still prophesized to those who sought to kill him, and Jesus still died on the cross for his family and friends who rejected him, belittled him, and tried to kill him also.

 

Faith, hope and love. It is love that gives us faith and both love and faith give us hope. And I believe we are desperate for hope, just as we are desperate for love. We need to know that there is something else beyond ourselves, someone who will always be faithful and true to us, even when we fail to be faithful and true to him. Someone who will always have a heart open for us.

 

We image our creator in so many ways, but mainly in our ability to love, because God is love. Take all those attributes St. Paul gives the Corinthians and substitute the word God for love. This is the kind of God we have.

 

God is patient, God is kind.

God is not jealous, God is not pompous,

God is not inflated, God is not rude,

God does not seek his own interests,

God is not quick-tempered, God does not brood over injury,

God does not rejoice in wrongdoing,

But rejoices in the truth.

God bears all things, believes all things,

Hopes all things, endures all things.

 

God never fails