Question of the week for September 1, 2013

Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Seeking humility

Reading I Sirach 3:17–18, 20, 28–29 (humility)

Reading II Hebrews 12:18–19, 22–24a (God the judge; Jesus the mediator)

Gospel Luke 14:1, 7–14 (a lesson in humility)

Key Passage Jesus said, “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” (Luke 14:13–14)

Adult: Has the hunger for status and influence in the world around you endangered your life as a Christian?

Child: Does it make you a better person to be chosen first for a team or some other honor? Why or why not?

Twenty-first Sunday Ordinary Time C

August, 25, 2013

For today's scripture readings, click here.

Several cotton farmers were whiling away a winter afternoon around the potbellied stove.

They soon became entangled in a heated discussion on the merits of their respective religions.

The eldest of the farmers had been sitting quietly, just listening, when the group turned to him and demanded,"Who's right, old Jim? Which one of these religions is the right one?"

"Well,"said Jim thoughtfully,"you know there are three ways to get from here to the cotton gin.

You can go right over the big hill. That's shorter but it's a powerful climb.

You can go around the east side of the hill. That's not too far, but the road is rougher and difficult.

Or you can go around the west side of the hill, which is the longest way, but the easiest."

"But you know," he said, looking them squarely in the eye,"when you get there, the gin man won't ask you how you came or what religion you believe.

He just asks, 'Man, how good is your cotton?'"

Jesus uses the parable of the locked door to explain to his followers that there is more to being a follower of Jesus than they might think.

The parable of the locked door refers to those who tarry in accepting Jesus.

Jesus says very clearly that it is not enough to follow Jesus, eat meals with him and listen to him.

We cannot claim discipleship by mere affiliation.

There is something more that has to be done.

Having once accepted Jesus' invitation, each one has to live by his teachings every moment of every day.

Those who do not remain faithful to him will be left outside.

Jesus is warning people of faith not to take their salvation for granted.

What he does say is that salvation is not guaranteed for anyone.”We are your people” will not be good enough.

What Jesus is saying is that no one, no matter who he is, has an absolute guarantee of being saved, of being accepted by God.

No one is saved by claiming identity with a particular group or by carrying a particular name tag.

So, merely “being descended from Abraham, Jacob and all the prophets” as the Jews were - did not count;

there is no such thing as national salvation.

The narrow gate indicates that salvation is not cheap.

We need to discipline ourselves, use the things that happen to us to help us grow, rather than get us down.

We need to remember that the tested people, the people with the most problems, the last people, may be the ones who get in the door first.

Those are the people that will easily slip through the narrow door.

Indeed, many are lost because they do not choose the narrow door.

They prefer a religion that is not too demanding, one that does not make it mandatory to, say, merely show up for Mass every Sunday.

We may be surprised to discover that some who seem less worthy will enter the kingdom before us.

To end, salvation is a gift from a God which must be willingly and fully embraced.

Christian life is a daily struggle to rise to a higher spiritual plain.

It is wrong to sit back and relax after we have made a personal commitment to Christ.

We cannot remain stagnant in our loyalty to God’s kingdom; unless we move forward we shall move backward.

And this is the Good News of today.

Question of the week for August 25, 2013

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

The narrow door

Reading I                Isaiah 66:18–21                    (gathering of the nations)

Reading II              Hebrews 12:5–7, 11–13        (the discipline of God)

Gospel                    Luke 13:22–30                     (the narrow door)

Key Passage            Jesus answered them, “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.” (Luke 13:24)

Adult                     What daily choices are you making that will allow you to be recognized at the doorway of the reign of God?

Child                      What good habits are you practicing in order to be a good Christian?

Why Creeds?

The changes to the Roman Missal have been a struggle for many priests -- including myself. Many more changes affect the clergy than they do the laity. However, one complaint I have heard more often than any other is about the changes in our Creed. I have discovered a series of articles on the Creed that, while not addressing all the complaints, do explain the Creed in a way I have found helpful. I believe they might be enlightening for you too. Following is the first of the series:

 The best summary of the core teachings of the Catholic Church is found in the Nicene Creed. It was crafted in ancient Christianity and is proclaimed at Sunday Mass. In this series, we’ll be taking a walk through that creed, looking at its elements and unpacking it.

I became a Christian with the help of a small group of non-denominational believers on my college dorm floor who believed that "the Bible alone" was suf­ficient to know Christ's revelation and to live as he wanted us to.

We had a great fear of the word religion. And creeds seemed to be a dose of religion in chemical purity: an attempt to put the living God in a box.

The problem came as we tried to live out the gospel in the real world. As time goes on your prayer group graduates and tries to become a local church. As it starts to attract a few strangers from the neighborhood who aren't part of your cozy circle of friends, things get complicated.

Fairly quickly, somebody asks, "What do you believe?" and you no lon­ger can rely on a sort of trust that you and your friends are decent folk who wouldn't believe or do anything at odds with the Gospel. You have to try to articulate what, precisely, you believe in a way that is intelligible to somebody who doesn't know you.

And so we found ourselves, a group of perhaps 30 young adults, huddled in a room with a blackboard, trying to summarize what we, as Bible-believing, charismatic Christians, believed in: a "Statement of Faith." It was, in its own way, a hilarious afternoon (at least in retrospect). The chalkboard was soon filled with different clauses and points of doctrine, connected in a baffling web of arrows that looked like a football diagram in a Goofy cartoon. After several

hours, we gave it up as a bad job and went home.    

A week or so later, the pastor just pounded out something on his own typewriter about how we believed in the Bible, God the Father, Jesus his Son, the Holy Spirit, and about our being a com­munity of Spirit-filled servants. I thought to myself dimly, This reminds me of something I've heard somewhere. My lack of familiarity with historical Christianity had prevented me from having much knowledge of the Apostles' or Nicene Creeds. I didn't even know Catholics recited the Creed at Mass every Sunday! When I did discover the Creeds a few years later, it began to dawn on me that we could have saved a lot of time just copying them instead of reinventing this wheel with corners on it.

It is worth noting that pagans didn't have creeds. You don't need a creed for a collection of tales about gods in Asgaard, Olympus, or the Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon. The myths of Greece or Rome or the folktales of Germany, Asia, or the Great Plains required only poets and bards, not creeds. It was only when heaven began to upset the apple cart by involving itself in the mundane day-to-day events of a very real group of humans called Israel, whom the Lord God had brought from Egypt, that something like a creed began to emerge.

Suddenly something had happened, not once upon a time, but to a specific group of people in history, who lived at a specific address. Moreover, these people were constantly being pressured by their neighbors and by their own sinful tendencies to forget what had happened. And so, their history became one long and careful act of remembering, not imagining—designed to make sure that their past was not lost.

When the Church began, that need to remember and summarize what had happened continued. And since what had happened was so strange—and so fraught with the possibility of being misunderstood in a thousand ways—the Church also immediately was committed to creating summaries of the faith that, though initially brief ("Jesus is Lord"), expanded in length over time to make sure that the broad contours of the basic story and its meaning were not lost. That's because the central command around which the entire Church was built was "Do this in memory of me." The Creed keeps our memory clear.

Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time C

August 18, 2013

Click here for scripture readings

Today's readings invite us to explore one of the most perplexing issues for Christian people: dealing with conflict, division and anger.

I know, from my earliest years in family and school, I was taught that good boys and girls always get along, are always well-liked and never get angry and fight with one another.

Having five younger brothers gave my mom and dad plenty of opportunities to remind me of this!

Well, it seems clear from today's readings that Jeremiah and Jesus were not "good boys."

Jesus and Jeremiah both offended many good religious people of their societies.

Jesus speaks of bringing divisions even within family

Jeremiah was put down the cistern by people who thought they knew God's will better than he did.

The people who opposed Jesus and Jeremiah were not all bad; they, for the most part, had strong religious convictions and were sincere in what they believed.

They just simply believed that Jesus and Jeremiah were wrong about God!

And, like many of us today, they would rather "shoot the messenger" than listen to what might prove to be an unwelcome, unpleasant and /or difficult message

Just look at what made them angry at Jesus and Jeremiah:

Jesus challenged beliefs about how to know God.

He preached that God was forgiving, not vengeful

Jeremiah advocated surrendering Jerusalem to the Babylonians, saying God's will would be worked through the enemy.

Just think how that way of thinking would go over today in the U.S. where patriotism is often a stronger value, even among Christians, than the Gospel

The thing is, people who are very sure about religious matters often do not want to listen to those who say God's Word is different from their perception of it.

For instance, the very people who today still consider our black brothers and sisters inferior cloak themselves in Christianity; most would admit to being very faithful Christians.

Raymond Brown, one of our most respected Catholic scripture scholars, cautions all of us who preach and teach the Bible to make this aspect of Jesus' teachings clear:

The constant message of the Gospels is that Jesus offended genuinely religious people

And we have to realize that he would continue to upset religious people of every generation if they understood the radical challenge of his message; indeed, he would offend many of us in this assembly today.

Jesus taught metanoia, with which he prefaced his proclamation of the kingdom, if it be translated literally as "change your mind", not "repent" as is often translated, catches the offense.

Religious people always seem to "know" what God wants, so telling the religious Jews of Jesus' time or the religious Christians of our time that God might want something radically different from what they have been doing could and can and does create fierce hostility toward the message.

The tendency for us when faced with these challenges is to think: "Yes, Jesus would offend those (translated "others") who think differently from the way I do."

When perhaps we should be thinking: "With my religious views Jesus might very well offend me."

For instance, what are you views on capital punishment?

And how do you make them correspond to what Jesus says about forgiveness 70 X 70?

What are your views on gays and lesbians? 

And how do you fit your view into Jesus' acceptance and love for the despised and hated people of his time?

Like Jeremiah, we have been taught that there are truths we should not speak because they would be demoralizing.

Like Jesus, we know that the reign of God issues an imperative call that relativises all other relationships C of kinship, of race, of class

Following The Gospel call often stretches these other relationships, making us reach for a point where all become father and mother and brother and sister to us.

In the process we discover that our anger and our love are really different faces of the same holy energy.

Adrienne Rich writes:

Anger and tenderness: my selves.

...they breathe in me

as angels, not polarities.

Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius

to spin and weave in the same action

from her own boy, anywhere

.

.

Nineteenth Sunday Ordinary Time C

Divided

August 18, 2013

Click here for scripture readings for the day

Christians have always believed in a God who is concerned with the natural world.

We have prayed to God from the depths of coal mines to the heights of Everest and from outer space.

We have blessed ships and planes in God’s name, built soaring cathedrals to the honor and glory of the Almighty, and even equated scientific achievements to God’s guidance and blessing.

These are all material things, because we believe in a material God.

Today’s readings cause us to step back for a moment and consider God in another light, as one who is beyond the material.

In the passage from Isaiah, God castigates the people of Sodom because they have allowed material things such as incense and sacrifices of animals to become more important than their relationship with God.

 God defines the relationship as being centered on justice and care for orphans, not expensive feasts and liturgies, as God commands the people to “seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”

The quality here is not material, but a spirituality that deeply honors a God who cares passionately for the whole of creation and doesn’t need to be appeased with sacrifice when things are going badly.

It’s not about God; it’s about us.

And God expects us to address the things that are amiss, not fix them through incantations.

However, we continue to write a check for the hungry without learning why there is hunger in the world.

We pass legislation that addresses immigration reform without wanting to know why people want so badly to come to America that they are willing to risk imprisonment and deportation to do it, leaving their families behind while they work to send money home.

The truth of the causes for both of these issues has as much to do with our demands for cheap goods and food as anything else.

We cannot appease God while we try to have everything we want.

In our gospel reading today, Jesus addresses this issue of how we are to live with God:

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Sell your possessions, and give alms.

Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Recently a conversation took place in a coffee shop.

A woman with a loud voice revealed how frustrated she had been because she couldn’t find a parking spot.

She then related how she had loudly prayed, “OK, God, I give up. You find me a parking place or I’m going home.”

As she drove around the block for the fourth time a place opened up right in front of the coffee shop.

Her friend, a rather quiet woman, smiled and then shared how she had been praying for weeks for her friend who had received a bad prognosis for her recurring cancer.

She had just spoken to her friend that morning and learned that the doctors were now confident she would recover.

Both of these women were sincere, but the one who asked for healing for her friend knows what God’s power is for – it’s not for finding parking places!

We are not going to get very far with God as long as we understand the Kingdom as material rather than spiritual.

We are not going to have much of a relationship with God when our weekends are spent spending the money we have earned on more material things.

Sabbath is not shopping; it is rest.

It is time set aside for us to enjoy quiet, rest and refreshment.

Sabbath is the rest that helps us to prepare for the return of the Son of Man, the final breaking in of the kingdom.

We are given the commandment to observe the Sabbath for our better selves.

We are given the space to rest, restore our spiritual lives, and avoid being completely swamped by the world’s material goods.

Nothing that rusts or wears out will enter the kingdom of heaven.

We need to be able to leave it all behind.

Outside of these readings but deeply inside their message, is the great voice of the Creator reminding us how much we are loved, not for what we have, but for who we are.

We are treasures, servants who are blessed by the Holy One.

 Our economic standing, our homes and wealth are of no account to God.

What matters is our lives.

How we live, how we approach justice, care for the poor among us, and how we treat one another is the bottom line for judgment.

Our success in worldly things will mean nothing.

Summer is a good time to take another look at all that we possess and inventory in our hearts and minds the spiritual treasures we have, the friends who love us without condition, the church that keeps us in communion with each other and God, the beauty of the material world that belongs to every human being.

It is a good time to look up at the stars in awe,

 and remember that the God who made us also made them,

but they are nothing compared with the treasure we have of being loved by that same God who asks us to show that love and care to every person we meet

Eighteenth Sunday Ordinary Time C

Miser

August 4, 2013

Click here for scripture readings

It is summer!

Today is the fourth of August, and for many it is tough going.

No matter where you live in the United States, summer and August make for some uncomfortable days. It gets hot and dry.

Vacations are used up; school is almost ready to begin.

Early August is an in-between time and it is easy to feel a little worn, a little down, a little tired.

So the church serves up a great text to boost our spirits and help us keep going. Here in early August, in the middle of summer, we get the spiritual equivalent of a supervitamin.

I will take the liberty of creating a paraphrase for today’s text about being raised with Christ.

The writer of Colossians seems to say, “If you have been raised with Christ, then live like it!

Don’t get dragged down into ordinary, casual living.

Live like people who are alive in Christ.

Remember how good you look in the new clothes Christ has put on you.

Walk with a spring in your step and a song in your heart.

You have been raised with Christ.”

In the dog days of summer this is a great text to take to heart.

Living like we have been raised with Christ means to take faith off the shelf and onto the street.

It means to realize in fresh ways that the Christian faith is not so much about what we know as it is about what we do.

Think of faith as a verb and not a noun.

 Let’s consider how the life raised with Christ might look in these days.

When we are raised with Christ we can dare to live tomorrow’s life today.

We can stop putting off living the best lives we are capable of.

We no longer have to make cheap and easy compromise with our best selves that says, “One day when things are right, I will do this or I will love more or I will be more kind or trust more.”

Today is the day to live like this.

Because we have been raised with Christ, we can take the future and live it now.

We can dare to make real the petition of the Lord’s Prayer for the kingdom to come on earth as it already has in heaven.

We can dare to live lovingly in a world in love with war and destruction.

We can dare to live generously in a world choked by stinginess.

We can dare to offer cups of cold water to strangers whom everyone else fears. Let the experience of being raised with Christ intoxicate you so that you dare to live as though tomorrow is today.

If you have been raised with Christ, do something for the good of the world.

Don’t get weighed down by the mundane concerns of life.

Keep scanning the horizon and working for the kingdom of God.

A college professor once told his students, “All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely.

But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop, skip, or dance; just don’t tiptoe.”

 Bored people tiptoe through life.

The antidote for boredom is to give ourselves to something larger than ourselves.

Have you ever had an idea pop into your head about how to do something or create something that would make life better for others?

I am sure you have.

When that happens, usually another voice starts in our heads saying that the idea is not practical, or no one will listen, or we should not be so foolish.

We should just get back to doing what we know and are familiar with. Unfortunately, too many of us do just that and we start tiptoeing toward death. It is a tragic way to live.

I believe that people who have been raised with Christ have the power to create a new world.

The challenge of faithfulness is to live that power every day; to stay so focused on the resurrection experience

that we know we have overcome all obstacles and can dare to live with holy boldness because of a Savior who walks with us every step of the way.

It is summer.

The days are long and at times oppressively hot.

To hot and tired people comes the challenge to reclaim the experience of being raised with Christ in order to know his energy and aliveness for today’s ministry.

 A minister friend of mine related a story that he says is true and that illustrates what being raised with Christ means today.

An Episcopal priest, dressed in civilian clothes, walked into a motorcycle shop to look over the latest in two-wheel travel options.

As he stood on the showroom floor wishing he could afford a large and powerful motorcycle, a salesman began to talk to him.

The conversation went something like this.

“Hey, dude. That’s some bike, ain’t it?”

“It sure is,” said the minister.

“Man, you could put your woman on the back of this baby and really haul. I mean, it will leave rubber in three gears!

Dude, if you come to town on this hog, there ain’t anybody who will mess with you.

I’m telling you, this is one mean machine.

By the way, bro, what do you do for your bread?”

“I’m a minister.”

“Oh, excuse me . . . Reverend or Mister. What do they call you?

You know, these bikes, I mean machines, they really get good gas mileage, and you can park them anywhere.

Why, I sold one to a doctor the other day.”

Reflecting on this encounter the minister observed, “No one is surprised to find a Christian looking at lawn mowers.

Lawn mowers are safe, middle-class, and boring.

 Is being a Christian more like pushing a lawn mower or riding a motorcycle?”

Good question!

“If you have been raised with Christ . . .” Brothers and sisters, maybe it’s time we take our living faith out on the road and give it the gas and see what the old church can do.

Vroom!