Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord C

Luke 22:14-23:56

March 24, 2013

After his resurrection, Jesus was thronged by hundreds of people in heaven.

Most were there to welcome him; some were there to thank him for the help he had given them while on earth.

A few were there in wonder -in wonder at how he had endured so much during his passion.

When the excitement died down, these latter few cornered Jesus to ask him how he had managed to accept so much pain and suffering.

They discussed what had made him do it.

Was it the thought of getting it over and getting to heaven?

No

Was it the memory of all these grateful faces of people he had helped during his lifetime?

No

Was it a matter of duty to accomplish what God had sent him to do?

No

Was it to inspire all of Jesus' followers to hang in there when the going got rough?

No

So the twenty-question interrogation continued until one of the group finally asked Jesus directly what had kept him going.

Jesus' answer was simple.

He was about ready to give it all up when Judas turned him over to the soldiers for thirty pieces of silver.

This betrayal was shattering.

Just when Jesus thought it could get no worse, Peter turned on him by denying him three times.

This was worse than the sting of any whip-lash.

Jesus felt that his whole life had been wasted on men he had trusted,

but who ran in the face of adversity.

Just when he was about to give up, Jesus noticed something that gave him all the support he needed to make his ordeal worth it.

At a short distance away, he caught sight of a small group of women who were standing watch with him.

They feared no one, didn't care whether anyone saw them.

What scared the men away brought these women closer.

They knew what it meant to suffer for others and they were not going to abandon the one who was suffering for them.

And for Jesus, this made all the difference.

Lent 5 C

John 8:1-11

March 17, 2013

Last Sunday we read the parable of the Prodigal Son.

It is the story of the two bad sons of a good father.

The younger son lived a bad life, then realized his waywardness and returned to the embrace of his father.

The elder son lived a law-abiding life, but ended up outside the father’s house and absent from the big feast of the fat cow he had helped to raise.

Which of these two sons can we compare to Saul, who later became the apostle Paul?

Many of us will quickly answer, “the younger son.”

Paul lived a wayward life and then experienced a total conversion to the ways of God, right?

Wrong.

Paul never lived a wayward life? Right from his youth he lived a strict religious life. As he said before the tribune in Jerusalem,

“I am a Jew ... brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, educated strictly according to our ancestral law, being zealous for God, just as all of you are today” No, Paul was not wayward at all.

He was a religious Jew of strict observance.

He was like the elder son in the parable of the Prodigal Son, who was always law-abiding and intent of doing his father’s will.

Paul’s conversion was not a change from a life of waywardness to a life of discipline.

It was a conversion from one form of righteousness to another form of righteousness.

The younger son in the parable needed a conversion of the unrighteous, to return to the father’s house.

The elder son needed a conversion of the righteous, from self-righteousness to true righteousness in Christ or,

 as Paul describes it in today’s second reading, “not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.

This is the kind of conversion that Paul had.

Which goes to show us that, whether we judge ourself to be righteous or judge ourself to be unrighteous, we all need a conversion, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

Which is better, the self-righteousness of the law-abiding Pharisees or the unrighteousness of the tax-collectors and sinners?

You know the answer.

Jesus was harder on the self-righteous Pharisees than he was on the sinful tax-collectors and prostitutes.

Don’t get me wrong.

Both the Pharisee and the tax-collector have gone astray and wandered from the path of true righteousness.

But whereas it is easy for sinners to recognize their sinfulness and turn back to God, it is very hard for the self-righteous to recognize that they too are in error.

This is because when they compare themselves with others they say, “I am not doing too badly, after all. I am better than most people.”

How can we tell when we are entangled in the sinister web of self-righteousness? The test is pretty simple:

How tolerant are we of those we perceive as sinners?

Am I an easy person lo live with?

Jesus was an easy person to live with.

But look at the self-righteous elder brother of the prodigal son.

He was so intolerant of his “sinful”junior brother that he walked out on him, on his family and on the feast.

Look at the life of the rabbi Saul before his conversion.

He was so intolerant of those who had left the synagogue and joined the Christian church that he was prepared to kill.

He unleashed a campaign to visit suffering and death on Christians who, he believed, were messing up the good, old religion that came down from their ancestors.

But when he converted and came to Christ, he realized that the sign of true zeal for the faith is readiness to die for one’s beliefs, not readiness to kill for one’s beliefs.

From then on Paul’s goal became, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10).

Paul, the killer of Christians, would one day give his life to die as a Christian.

He had attained his life’s goal to suffer and die with Christ.

This, brothers and sisters, is true righteousness.

 Let us today pray in the words of Peter Marshall:

Lord, when we are wrong, make us willing to change.

And when we are right, make us easy to live with.

Lent 4 C

Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

March 10, 2013

The story of the man born blind is a one-act play in six scenes with a huge cast of characters as biblical stories go:

disciples, neighbors, Pharisees, parents, Jesus and the man himself.

These last two people are the only so-called sinners in the show--

Jesus because he broke the Sabbath and the man because he was born blind.

They are also the two who make everything else happen, while the others stand around asking questions.

If there were auditions for this play, I expect most of us would go after the part of the blind man.

It's a hard part, but a great part.

There he is just minding his own tin-cup business when the light of the world comes along and opens his eyes, shoving him into the spotlight where people stand in line to question him.

.

How were your eyes opened?

Where is the man who did it?

How could he do that?

What did he do to you?

How did he open your eyes?

What do you say about him, since he opened your eyes?

Not one living soul says, "Alleluia!" or "Thank God!"

No one asks him what it is like to see for the first time or whether the light hurts his eyes.

All they want to know is how, who, where and what.

Furthermore, the man is on his own under this barrage.

Jesus healed him and then disappeared, leaving him on stage all alone.

Like any of us who live between Christ's coming and his coming again, the man has to make his own sense out of what has happened to him and decide what he will say about it, in the face of enormous opposition.

His answers are timid one-liners at first.

"I am the man," he says. "I do not know."

"He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and I see."

But as the questions go on and even his own parents back quietly into the wings, the man grows both in eloquence and in courage, finally answering the Pharisees so sharply that they throw him out of the congregation.

"Why, this is a marvel!" he says to them, suddenly saucy. "You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.... If this man were not from God, he could do nothing."

He has come a long way.

At the beginning of the story he called Jesus a man, then a prophet, now a man come from God.

It is almost as if his vision has kept on improving, so that he sees more and more clearly who has given him his sight…

Meanwhile, his inquisitors keep colliding in the dark.

As far as they are concerned, what has happened to the man is nothing compared to what it might mean,

and that is their job: to decide whether or not this healing constitutes an authentic act of God.

One reason they are so repellent to us, I think, is because they remind us of ourselves.

However much we prefer the role of the blind man, we are not naturals for the part.

We are not outcasts, most of us.

We have not been set outside the community for our sins.

We are consummate insiders--fully initiated, law-abiding, pledge-paying, creed-saying members of the congregation of the faithful--

or in shorthand, Pharisees, who can work up our own anxiety about whether or not a mighty act should be ascribed to God.

There are a lot of astounding things that happen in the world that may not have anything to do with the power of God.

They may have to do only with the power of the human imagination, or the power of suggestion, or worse yet, with the power of outright deception.

What if something is not God and we believe that it is?

The story of the man born blind suggests that there is another question at least as important as that one.

Not "What if it is not God and I believe that it is?"

but "What if it is God and I believe that it is not?"

That is the one question the Pharisees forgot to ask.

They were so sure of everything--that God did not work on Sundays, that Moses was God's only spokesman,

that anyone born blind had to be a sinner and ditto for anyone who broke the Sabbath,

that God did not work through sinners,

that God did not work on sinners and that furthermore no one could teach them anything.

Their system was a closed one and it worked.

It closed Jesus out and it closed them in--not in outer darkness this time, but in inner darkness--because they let their fear of being wrong keep them from being in the light.

The formerly blind man, meanwhile, was looking right at it.

"Lord, I believe," he said when he laid eye's on Jesus at last.

And he worshiped him.

Every time this drama repeats itself in our own time, we get to try out for a different part.

We may even get to add one:

the dazzled witness who says, "Praise God, will you look at that!" while everyone else is playing 20 questions.

Because wonder, not suspicion, is the beginning of worship, and seeing is believing only if we are willing to believe.

Lent 3 C

"God's hand"

 

Luke 13: 1-9

March 3, 2013

 

 

 

You have to be careful with people, because if they don't know the answer, they may well just make something up.

A few years ago I was with a group on a mission trip to Haiti, and we were flying from one side of the island to another in a little propeller plane driven by a missionary pilot.

The turbulence was horrible and once we landed we were all thankful to finally be on solid ground again.

 While unloading the baggage, one member of the group says to another, "I wasn't worried. Our pastor was head bowed in prayer the whole flight."

And I'm glad that when she saw me with my head bowed on that turbulent flight that's what she thought I was doing--because in reality I was putting my head down because I thought that would keep me from throwing up.

 

Sometimes we make up what we need to hear in the moment--and whether what we make up is the truth or not may not matter--because what we make up may be more comforting than the truth.

There was a group of Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices--this phrase isn't as descriptive as it could be--but what we may assume is that they were murdered by Pilate while on pilgrimage to make a sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem.

We want to know, "Why do bad things happen?" and so we ask.

Why did Pilate murder those people?

Why did that tower fall?

And how can I prevent the same thing from happening to me and the people I love?

Any answer to these questions will do, just so long as there is an answer, and the more an answer allows me to believe that the same thing won't happen to me the better.

 

An answer that the masses seemed to cling to explaining the murder of those Galileans and the tragic death of the eighteen was that of retribution for sin--that bad things happen to bad people, that suffering is deserved, that when people suffer, when they are punished, you need not worry about falling to the same fate as long as you keep your nose clean and you mind your own business.

 

And this is a Biblical enough answer. We read from Deuteronomy that disobedience results in punishment, not only for the disobedient, but the children, even unto the grandchildren.

But Jesus doesn't buy it. Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?

          When the crowd comes to Jesus pointing fingers, Jesus does not join in but calls the crowd to account for their own infractions.

"But unless you repent," he says.

"         Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did."

 

Christ calls us to focus not on what lies outside of our control.

He calls us not to accept simple or judgmental explanations that only build up self-righteousness.

Christ instead calls us to focus on what we are in control of, which is easier said than done.

 

Something that I love are nights when sleep comes so easy

I realize I am dreaming before I've put my book down.

 On those nights I place my book on my bedside table, turn out the lampThen I close my eyes and rest sweeps over me.

Something that I hate is a night when worry preoccupies me.

I worry about what people are saying about me, why so and so hasn't been coming to church, and why what's his name wrote such a hateful email and what I should do to change his attitude.

 

I worry about the environment and why it's so warm and what is this world coming to.

And I worry about who is hungry and who isn't and why would there be so much tragedy and when is someone going to do something about it?

It's often enough to keep me up, and sometimes it's even enough to keep me in bed the next morning.

With so much in the world that seems so bad, why not give up?

 

"Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?" The vineyard owner says to the gardener.

"Sir," the man replied, "leave it alone for one more year; and I'll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down."

The scripture lesson ends with that, an ambiguous ending if ever there was one.

But if we have today, we can all assume we have been spared the ax, unlike the men, women, and children victim to the tragedies of life.

So what will you do with today?

You've been given another year thanks be to God, but should you use God's blessing as an opportunity to return to old ways, or will you be so bold as to seize this day that you have to do something different?

Whatever yesterday was like, disappointments, mistakes, you have been given the gift of today; and today the gardener is ready to work through you, nourishing you by his Spirit, forgiving you your sins by his almighty grace that you might bear fruit.

 

In this time of Lent, you are called to give thanks to the one who has spared you from the ax and given you the gift of today.

Do not squander this gift by returning to the ways of sin, but be about the practice of examination, not to the examination of your neighbors to fuel self-righteousness, but to the examination of something you can actually change: your own behavior.

 

The gift of today is for me the chance to become the kind of pastor who prays during a turbulent flight, the opportunity to be not the kind of pastor that I am but the kind of pastor that those mission trip participants thought I was.

 

The season of Lent is a time to focus not on who is worse or what is wrong with everybody else, for this season of Lent is time to focus on what is wrong with me, with you.

I tell you, unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.

Turn away from the ways of sin and death and towards the one who will bring new life.

The fig tree was spared the ax, and if you are hearing this, so were you.

But what will you do with today

 

 

 

Lent 2 C

 

 

Luke 9:28b-36

February 24, 2013

 

 

There was a lot of bad winter weather in the Midwest right now.

The heavy snow coupled with it's intensity, frightened those who were out on the roads.

Just as Luke writes about the disciples in today's Gospel, "they became frightened when they entered the cloud," so too, did drivers become fearful when confronting the cloud of snow.

What is it that frightens us?

What leads us to be afraid?

And on the other side of the equation, what is it that brings us hope?

In the Gospel, Peter, James and John were frightened when they entered the cloud.

Imagine driving down the road and encountering a wall of fog or the white-out of a blizzard.

Most of us have had that experience, where we grip tightly to the steering wheel as we feel the adrenalin rush, preparing us for what lies ahead.

When we get through the fog bank, or pull into our driveway, we feel that sudden release that tells us that everything will be all right.

Everything is suddenly clear.

Lent may just be the time for us to ask ourselves, "What frightens me about what God asks of me? What is it that God wants, that I'm not sure I want to do?

Is there something that resists what God desires for me and of me?"

Hard questions, and ones that we don't always ask.

This season may be the time for us to take a few moments for some clear-headed thinking about our relationship with God.

Some quiet time away from the distractions of the day ( when we get up in the morning, before going to bed and the kids already tucked away.)

may be just what we need to help us consider where we are at with God, before we are caught unawares in the cloud of unknowing .

If transfiguration is ever going to be more than a Gospel story for each of us, then we must keep asking these questions of ourselves.

God wants to transfigure us.

Are we willing to let God do it?



Lent 1 C

 

Luke 4:1-13

February 10, 2013

 

 

In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year's income to some holy use.

For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year's days.

After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus.

During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.

If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn't, which side would get your money and why?

When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?

 If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less?

 Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo?

 Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember?

 Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that, if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?

 If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?

 

To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become.

It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end



Fourth Sunday Ordinary time

 

Luke 4:21-30

February 3, 2013

 

 

Anyone with children can relate to this parable.

Sadly, parents don’t always act like the father in the story.

On the occasions when they do, family restoration is always healthier.

But this parable is not only about the dysfunctional family home, but also about the dysfunctional community.

It is easy to point fingers at those rebellious sons and daughters who are in a faraway country and not see the rebellion in our own house.

Some  look at the fringe people in our parishes and say, "If only they would get more involved."

However, we overlook that we ourselves may be over-involved, in fact, self-involved, to the point of being dangerously close to the mind and heart of the older son.

 Some who experienced the transition from the pre-Vatican II church to the post-Vatican II church often sound like the older son when they complain of how things used to be:

they were always good, law-abiding Catholics;

now, the church is soft on the law, the liturgies are not private anymore and if we had to learn all that Latin then, why doesn't everybody have to learn it now?

It isn't fair!

Contrast those folks with some post-Vatican II people who sometimes self-righteously and arrogantly insist on rigid adherence to Vatican II.

They have replaced the old legalism with a more current, up-to-date, enlightened legalism.

Repentance and humility are lacking in both instances.

The parable of the prodigal invites us to accept Christ's offer of love-in-humiliation and to examine our hearts.

Do we, as community, stand humbly with the prodigal or arrogantly with the older son?