Ascension

Ascension of the Lord, B

Happy feast day, brothers and sisters. Happy solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord. Pope St. Leo the Great describes our joy when he says that "we are commemorating that day on which our poor human nature was carried up, in Christ, above all the hosts of heaven, above all the ranks of angels, beyond the highest heavenly powers to the very throne of God the Father."

Yes, Jesus Christ has taken on our humanity, and, in his Ascension, has brought it into the presence of God the Father in heaven. This means that, in our communion with the Body of Christ here at the Eucharist, we are already seated in heaven and, in some sense, our ultimate destiny is already accomplished. We can now rejoice because our own bodily death, when it comes, will mean nothing more than a continuation of the communion with Christ that we celebrate here at Holy Mass.

Creation

(Pentecost Sunday)

Jesus breathed on his disciples and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Brothers and sisters, this is an act of creation. The breath of the Spirit which Jesus breathes on his disciples is the same wind that swept over the waters at the very beginning of time. That wind is the breath that carried the creating Word of God: “God said…and it came to be.” This same Spirit breathed in Mary and brought forth Jesus, the Word made flesh, the first fruits of the final harvest of love which is the destiny of all created being.

Creation is not just something from the past, as if God made the world and then stepped back when it was all set. God is not “set it and forget it.” God—because He is love—is a Creator by nature, and he is always creating and offering us a renovation of ourselves and the world, drawing all to a perfect fulfillment of love and joy.

The Holy Spirit, just as He is the breath by which the creation came to be through God’s Word, just as He conceived Our Lord in the womb of Mary to make an indestructible marriage between humanity and divinity, now breathes himself on us so that we may become re-created, renovated citizens of the fulfilled creation.

We see examples of this renovation in the scriptures today. In the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles the Holy Spirit reverses the prideful and arrogant divisions we bring upon humanity, represented by the confusion of languages that began at the Tower of Babel. In the second reading, St. Paul teaches us about the particular manifestations of the Holy Spirit that each of us will have. ‘Grace builds on nature,’ after all, and because each of us has a nature that is a unique and unrepeatable creation, the Christian each of us becomes through the Holy Spirit will be a unique, unrepeatable, and precious manifestation of God’s grace. From the larger contours of our life’s vocation to the smallest ways in which our personalities become redeemed for the sake of goodness and gentleness toward each other, all of these are the ways that the creating, Holy Spirit of God works to renovate the creation through us.

Let us rejoice today in this beginning. “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…a mighty wind swept over the waters.” That wind is here now, calling us into the fulfilled, new creation. Let us accept anew the gifts of grace and love that the Spirit brings to birth in each of us, and take up our new citizenship with joy.

The Resurrection, Continued

(2 Easter, C)

Brothers and sisters, we arrive at “octave” of Easter, the eighth day of the Easter season. Having first celebrated the good news of Jesus’ resurrection last Sunday, the readings and prayers today invite us to drill a little deeper into the mystery. Who is this risen Jesus? What does He do? Where can He be found?

The answer to that last question is simple to say, but not so simple to understand and accept. For the risen Lord is right here. He is the eternal life living in each of us who are baptized into his death and resurrection. When each of us descended into the water on the day of our baptism, we went down into his death. When we came up again, we rose in the resurrection of Christ. We became newborn parts of the risen, human body of Christ. When we receive Holy Communion here at Sunday Mass, we receive Him whom we are, and the eternal life within us in nourished and fortified. When the minister of Holy Communion says to us, “The Body of Christ,” he is addressing us by name, calling us by our deepest identity.

If the presence of Christ risen from the dead lives and breathes in our humanity through our baptism and Holy Communion, then our ordinary behavior will resemble the historical, human life of Jesus. Simply put, we will do what Jesus did. This is what we hear in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles today. Peter and the apostles were at the Temple curing a great number of people who were sick or afflicted with unclean spirits. The healing ministry of Jesus not only continues in them, but is multiplied in them. This is the mission for which we are sent by the risen Lord in the gospel today, when he breathes the Spirit on the disciples. In his resurrection, Jesus hands over his mission to us, that we, in our lives, might continue and multiply his work of healing, reconciliation, and proclamation of the Kingdom of God to the world. This is what it means for us to be the Body of Christ we become at each Sunday Eucharist; in the simplest terms, we are to be Jesus for one another and the world. The mission of Jesus is risen into our faith and action; this is the fruit of resurrection.

Now, this sounds great, but maybe it’s all a little abstract. How do we get started on our vocation as the risen Body of Christ, the healing presence of Jesus in the world? How do we come to experience it, to really believe it? For this we have our dear friend Thomas in the gospel today. He comes to that perfect confession of faith, “My Lord and my God!” after he puts he puts his fingers and hand into the wounds of Jesus Christ. If we want to truly know the risen Lord, brothers and sisters, we must do the same thing. First, we must put our hands into Christ’s wounds by bringing our own hurts and betreyals, griefs and injuries into our prayer. Jesus has united these personal sufferings of ours to his own suffering on the Cross, and by embracing them we find Him. He has made our wounds His own. By offering our own pain, and allowing Jesus to unite it to His Passion, we come to know ourselves as people whom God is dying to save.

Through this kind of prayer, we get to know ourselves as people saved by our incorporation into the Body of Christ. We are then empowered to go out and get our hands dirty and blessed by putting them into the suffering of others, into the lives of all of the poor, sick, and lonely of our neighborhoods and our world. When we encounter the suffering Christ in others, we too will know the great confession of faith welling up from within: “My Lord and my God!” We will become the Presence of the risen Lord for each other, members of the risen Body of Christ.

The Good Shepherd

(4th Sunday of Easter, B)

Each year on this middle Sunday of the seven Sundays of the Easter season, the gospel we proclaim invites us to reflect on Jesus the Good Shepherd. It is one of the most beloved and traditional images of our Lord, is it not? But comforting images of Jesus with his sheep and shepherd’s crook aside, in what does Jesus’ good shepherding consist? As we heard the Good Shepherd himself say, it is because “he lays down his life for the sheep.” Unlike the “hired man” who takes care of himself when danger comes, Jesus sacrifices himself to the danger that threatens the sheep in order to save them.

So we see that Jesus as the Good Shepherd is really a way to understand his Passion. Danger threatens the sheep; we all, to one degree or another, live in a world threatened by suffering and misery. This is the plain old ‘problem of evil.’ And Jesus the Good Shepherd—who lays down his life for the sheep—is God’s answer to the misery and danger human sin and stupidity have brought into the world.

You know the standard question: if God is so good; indeed, if there is a God at all, why does he permit such suffering and evil to thrive in the world? Well, first of all, is the suffering in the world God’s fault? No; it’s the fault of individual human sin, much of which has metastasized into structures of injustice in society. And as any parent knows, if you always magically fix the consequences that a child brings upon himself with bad choices, he gets to be spoiled and irresponsible, right? So—on the one hand—this is part of how it is between God and us. On the other hand, though, God has made a definitive and saving response to evil in the world. The trouble for some people is that this isn’t the overt intervention they think God should make; God’s answer to evil and suffering is not a magical fix, but solidarity.

God’s infinite love is moved by human suffering and the cry of the poor, and Jesus in his self-sacrifice becomes God’s response. In his Passion, Jesus unites God himself with the worst we bring upon ourselves and each other with our sins—even to the point of how we disregard, torture, and kill one another.

But here’s the thing: this also unites the infinitely creative power of the divinity of the Son of God—through whom all things were made—into the experience of human suffering. And that means that each of us, in our own pain, alienation, and suffering have access to the power of God. And this power can free us from the effects of sin that hold us down: as individuals, our selfishness, depression, and anxiety, and as a society, poverty and our addiction to violence. This is the mystery we call the Resurrection.

This is how Jesus is for us the Good Shepherd: by laying down his life and suffering with us so that we might find, with him, the path out of sin to new life. The effects of Jesus having shepherded us through the misery of sin to new life are revealed in the first two readings we hear today. The first letter of John proclaims that we are no “children of God.” This is to say that as Christians, we enjoy the same relationship to God the Father as Jesus does. We are caught up into that mystical dynamic of Father and Son, Source and Word—the one unified relationship from which all creation spills forth in superabundance. We become daughters and sons in the Son; our lives and souls gathered into the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity.

And just as Peter proclaims, this new life will give us the power to uncripple ourselves and the world around us, that all creation might be renewed and renovated by the power of the Good Shepherd revealed in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ.

A Taste of Easter

(Conversion of Paul, Apostle)

This feast of the Conversion of Paul is like a little bit of Easter that intrudes upon us in the middle of winter. It’s like a taste of Easter because today is about the Resurrection of the Lord, and the power of his Risen Presence to re-form and trans-form human lives, indeed to recreate the world anew. In this case we are talking about the transformation of one human life, that of the devout Jew Saul of Tarsus who becomes for us St. Paul the Apostle. His conversion is a big deal for us Christians; the writings of St. Paul make up almost a fifth of our specifically Christian Scriptures, commonly called the New Testament. In fact, if we add those books written by Paul’s co-workers and disciples, we’re up to about a quarter of the New Testament. Paul himself is the second most represented author in the New Testament, after St. Luke.

Because of all this, Paul’s influence upon us and our understanding of the faith is almost incalculable. As a preacher he is adamant that the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ have forever changed the situation of the human person in the world. As a founder of churches he has left us with a missionary model and legacy employed by Christians to this day. And all this because of one encounter with Jesus Christ risen from the dead, while on his way to Damascus.

Now here’s the kicker, brothers and sisters. The Resurrection is a matter of eternity; the Lord risen from the dead enters into his eternal existence at the right hand of the Father. Now notice what this means for us: the Resurrection is just as much a matter of right now as it was on that first Easter morning, and as it was for Paul when his journey was interrupted by grace. This means that the experience of the Resurrection is available to us. Indeed, that is the deepest meaning of our gathering here for the holy Eucharist. Drawn together by the Holy Spirit, we are lifted up and made into the Body of Christ risen from the dead. His risen Presence is here in the Word we hear and in the Holy Communion we share.

To experience the Resurrection is to avail ourselves of the opportunity for transformation, to have our lives reformed and renovated by the presence of Christ, who is God united to our humanity. Listen to how St. Mark describes the transformation of those who encounter and believe in Christ: They will drive out demons and they will speak new languages. And so it can be for us. With our hearts renovated and our thoughts transformed in Christ, we will be empowered to drive from ourselves the demons of selfishness, despair, anxiety, and depression. And then we will be free to drive from our society the demons of violence, poverty, and the ‘culture of death.’ We will speak new languages. Instead of the tired excuses for sin and the toleration of structures of injustice in our society, we will be empowered to speak the word of peace and of God’s desire for the flourishing and salvation of all people. The power flowing from Christ’s Resurrection can do this for us, as it does for Paul. Let us pray for our conversion, for our transformation in Christ, that we too might become the missionaries God desires to send for the renewal of the world.

Pentecost

(Pentecost Sunday)

(N.B. There are alternate endings for the vigil Mass and the Mass during the day)

Today is the fulfillment of all the mysteries of the Lord we have been celebrating all year, from his Nativity and his ministry to his Passion, death, and Resurrection. They all lead to that most wonderful of gifts to us, the Presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, our minds, our families, and in us assembled as church.

God is not someone who just sits there. It’s not like God just holds court in heaven enjoying his own perfection and the company of his angels and his saints. No! God is a dynamic movement, a perfect process of Love. This is part of what we mean when we say that God is a Trinity, trying to describe this God who is a dynamic movement of Love.

Anyone of us who has been in love knows that love wants more than anything to share itself with the other. And so it is with the perfect Love that we call God. From the most perfect charity which desires nothing more than the pure benefit and good of another all the way down to the most basic sexual desire in which our very bodies seem to reach out and long for the other, in all of these experiences of love we come to know a hint or a shadow of the tremendous passion of God to share his very self with the world.

The overflowing of the love of God, this stretching forth as it were, of God’s love for his creation, we call the Holy Spirit. This Spirit was present in the very beginning: as we read in Genesis, before God even began to create the heavens and the earth, the breath or spirit of God hovered over the waters. From the very beginning it wasn’t as if God sat aloof from his creation. Instead, God was intimately present, loving the creation into being.

This is also what it means when the gospels say that Jesus “was conceived by the Holy Spirit.” The same Spirit, the same divine Love which embraced creation from the very beginning, now accomplishes the perfect unification between God and our humanity in Jesus Christ. God desires so much to be present to us, to love us as we are, that he gives up all the power and prerogative that goes with being God and becomes one of us, vulnerable for sure, but able to relate to us perfectly as our brother.

And now this same Spirit which hovered over the waters in the beginning, which conceived Jesus Christ in the womb of Mary, and which most perfectly of all, raised Jesus from the dead, is given to us. The Spirit is given to us so that we too might be lifted up with Jesus. The Spirit both bids us and helps us rise from all of the violence , depression, anxiety—from all of this approximation of death that we have brought upon ourselves with our sins. The Spirit gives us true freedom. The presence of the Spirit which we have by uniting ourselves to the humanity of Christ in prayer, faith, and sacrament, rolls us up into the dynamic movement of love which is the Trinity of God. In this great Gift we become—obscurely, mysteriously, sacramentally—part of the very inner life of God.

This great gift leaves us with a mission, a mission with which we are sent forth at the end of this Easter season. And this mission is nothing less than the healing of all of human civilization.

Vigil

In the first reading from the book of Genesis we heard the story of the tower of Babel, and how the language of the people working there became so confused that they could no longer work together and were “scattered all over the earth.” So what went wrong with their project? Think back to the beginning of the reading. They said to themselves, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves.”

This is the original sin of every politics and human effort at leadership that leaves God out of the picture. For when we try to build a family, a community, or a civilization for our own glory, it only ends in confusion and alienation. We must learn to run our communities, our society, and our countries for the glory of God rather than ourselves, and according to the Spirit of God rather than the wisdom of this world. That is why the very last scene in the whole of the Bible is the New Jerusalem coming out of heaven and joining itself to the earth.

God entrusts us with the mission of building up this civilization of the Spirit. And when we begin we will find that our differences are no longer confusing and scattering. We will find a new unity for humanity in the love and the Spirit of God, and we will let the Holy Spirit create the world anew.

Day

Jesus gives to his disciples this power to heal the world in the Gospel we hear today. He breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This is the same Holy Spirit which hovered over the waters at the beginning of creation. It is the same Holy Spirit which overshadowed Mary and conceived Jesus in her womb. And now this Holy Spirit is on us. It is an empowering Spirit, and Jesus describes the power that it gives: “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain and retained.”

Today the power of divine forgiveness is put into our hands, yours and mine. And this is power to stop all of the cycles of violence which hinder and injure our personal relationships and break out into the wars which scar all of human history.

After all, the real power of violence lies not in its ability to hurt, but in its ability to reproduce and to grow. You hit me, I hit you harder. Nations retaliate against each other and wars escalate. Those who suffer abuse as children often grow up to be abusers. And murderers are executed to make the point that killing people is unacceptable.

The Holy Spirit empowers us to stop these cycles of violence in their tracks by forgiveness. And this is nothing less than an imitation of Christ’s own Passion, in which he takes to himself on the Cross all the violence and hate that we can dish out, and gives nothing back but the blessing and kindness of the Resurrection.

Let us gladly accept the power to forgive with the very forgiveness and compassion of God. By forgiving let us let go of every bitterness of heart that injures our personal relationships with gossip, detraction, and betrayal. And if we start there, let us have confidence that we are allowing the Holy Spirit to heal the world with the soothing forgiveness that will end all violence and war, and will create the world anew in the love that is the Spirit of God.

Handing On The Spirit

(6th Sunday of Easter, A)

Easter is the longest of the privileged seasons of our Christian year, but it always seems to go by very quickly. And again we find ourselves in the last couple of weeks in the great fifty days of Easter. So where are we left? The Lord’s Resurrection, which we recall every Sunday, we have celebrated in a most special and joyful way in these days. We have heard each week of the miraculous progress of the early Church of the apostles, empowered as it was by the overwhelmingly good news of the Gospel and the power flowing from Christ’s Resurrection. But what about us, we who sometimes seem to live in a time and place so far removed from the events we hear about in the Sacred Scriptures?

It seems to me that the end of the Easter season, leading up as it does to the great feast of Pentecost, is exactly about this question. We live in that middle time, the time after the Ascension of Jesus to the Father and before his return at the end of time. Jesus Christ is present to us neither as he was present to his apostles, in the human life of Jesus of Nazareth, nor in the undeniable way he will present to the whole world when everything rolls back into God at the end of time. So for us who live in this “in between” time, how is Jesus Christ present to us?

In the Gospel we hear today, Jesus himself helps us to understand how his presence remains with us, his disciples, after he leaves us to return to the Father. He gives a few different names to the mysterious but very real Presence of himself that he leaves behind. He calls this Presence the “Spirit.” He calls it “love.” But most of all, he calls this Presence of himself remaining with us the Paraclete. Our translation of the Scriptures renders this word as “advocate.” But we could also translate paraclete as “comforter” or “helper.”

Jesus leaves us the Holy Spirit to be our helper, comforter, and advocate during our sojourn in this “in between” time. We are a people who remember what God has done for us in Christ, celebrating this Eucharist which is first of all a memorial of Christ’s work of our salvation on the Cross. We are a people who look forward to Christ’s return when all creation will come to its final destiny in God.

As we remember, on the one hand, what God has done for us in Christ, and look forward, on the other hand, to the final fulfillment of history at the end of time, we have as our advocate, helper and comforter the Holy Spirit who is the Presence of Jesus Christ abiding in his people. This Spirit which Jesus leaves with empowers us in so many ways, but I’ll just mention three:

First, as Jesus says, the Spirit is the spirit of Truth, and thus the Holy Spirit enables us to know and speak the truth revealed by God about who we are and what we are to do. And our aimless world of violence and manipulation, overshadowed as it is by the “culture of death,” needs this Truth very much. As St. Peter says today in the second reading, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.” And it is the Spirit that enables to do this with courage, reverence, and gentleness.

Second, the Holy Spirit present among enables us to continue the work of Jesus in the world by becoming ourselves reconcilers, healers, and peacemakers. That is what it means to become the Body of Christ we receive in this Eucharist, to allow the saving and healing work of Jesus to continue in us.

Finally, the Holy Spirit empowers and compels us to pass on the grace we have received. In the first reading we hear about how Peter and John laid hands on the Samaritans that they might also the Holy Spirit. This is what we mean by Tradition; it is a “handing on” of the grace we have received in Christ. Our word tradition comes from the Latin verb trado, tradere, to hand on. It also comes into English as our simple word “trade” and is also the root word of “betray,” to hand someone over in the negative sense. As Peter and John handed on the Spirit of God, so we are also called to hand on the truth, faith, and grace we have received in Christ. From the apostles and martyrs down to our own mothers and fathers—both spiritual and biological—all of these made great sacrifices of themselves to hand on the faith and the Holy Spirit of God to us.

As Jesus handed over his life for us and as his Spirit was handed on to us by those who came before us, so it is now our privilege and work to continue to hand on the Holy Spirit.

On The Way

(3rd Sunday of Easter, A)

The Resurrection is a matter of eternity. Like all the mysteries of our Lord’s Incarnation, from his Nativity, through his teaching and healing to his Passion and death, the Resurrection is the eternity of God breaking into our world and personal history by means of the humanity of Christ. And because the Resurrection is a matter of eternity, it is just as present and fresh to us as it was to the first disciples. The Resurrection is just as real right now, in this place, as it was on that first Easter evening we heard about in the Gospel, or at Pentecost when Peter made the great speech we heard in the first reading. Therefore we can read the accounts of the experience of the Risen Lord that come to us in the Scriptures as about us too. Since the Risen Lord is just as present now as he was to the first disciples, we can read ourselves into the Scriptures. And the Gospel of the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, which we hear today, provides a beautiful example of how the Risen Lord is present to us on the way.

For we all are on the way, we are all on the journey of our personal history, of the histories of our families and communities, and of the secret, inner journey of our path with God in prayer. And just like he does for the disciples on the way in the Gospel, the Risen Jesus comes and walks with us. Though we seldom recognize this Presence with us, he is faithfully there. And what does he do? He encourages us to recount and reflect on our journey: “What are you discussing as you walk along?” The Presence with us that calls us to reflect on our life with God and to call us to prayer, this is the Presence of the Risen Lord walking with us on the way.

And though perhaps we still don’t always recognize him, if we are faithful to this journey of prayer and reflection, we find that our understanding grows. We start to see glimpses of the great mystery of God. As the Gospel puts it today, “he opened the Scriptures” for the two disciples. And this will happen for us too, if we allow ourselves the dialogue with God which is the prayer of people on the way.

As our minds and hearts are opened to the Presence of the Risen Lord, as we “taste and see the goodness of the Lord,” we will want him to stay with us, and like the disciples in the Gospel we will want to sit at table with the Lord and have him break bread for us. And that is what we do in this Eucharist!

Here, in this assembly, just as Jesus took, blessed, and broke bread for those two disciples on the first Easter evening, he does so with us. And it is in this “breaking of the bread” that we see most clearly the abiding presence of Jesus with us. For in the Eucharist, the same Body which was broken for our salvation on the cross is broken for our nourishment, and the same Blood which was poured out for the forgiveness of sins on the Cross is poured out for the ratification of the new and eternal covenant. The humanity of Christ, which death could not hold on to, is risen into this assembly, into the bread and wine of this Eucharist. Before this mystery we stand in awe at the “sublime humility” of the God who, as St. Francis said, “hides himself under the little form of bread.”

But let’s not forget what happened to those two disciples in the Gospel when they recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread—he “vanished from their sight.” This is one of the great challenges of the spiritual life, that as soon as we feel like we’ve come to an experience or an understanding God, God seems to retreat from us. As soon as we are able to say, “Wow, I get it, or I’ve had an experience of God,” it’s gone, and we feel like we don’t get it, like we’re not sure what we mean by “God.” But this is not an abandonment, but an invitation. For this is the way that God invites us to go deeper into ourselves, into who we really are, and to hear him calling us at a new level closer to our true identity.

If we are faithful to this journey, faithful to the walking on the way with God, even when it seems like we are being led into incomprehensible darkness, this is where we find pure faith. And we will begin to hear God calling us at our deepest and truest identity, which is, after all, the humanity of the Christ.

My Lord and My God

(2nd Sunday of Easter, A)

Thomas wasn’t with the others when they first saw the Risen Lord. As John tells us, he didn’t believe it right away. He wanted to see for himself. Thomas wants to make sure that whatever experience the disciples were having, this was the same Jesus who they knew in his historical life. That’s why he wants to see and touch Jesus’ wounds, to make sure that this Risen Lord is the same guy. But even though—thanks to many artists—we often imagine Thomas touching the Lord’s wounds, the evangelist never says that he did. In fact, as soon as Thomas sees the Lord, right away he utters the greatest and most perfect of confessions, “My Lord and my God!” At that moment, all of his conditions and caveats evaporate in a moment of perfect vision and faith.

Nevertheless, Thomas’s concerns are matters for us too. For we too need to come to grips with the challenging and amazing truth that the Jesus whose teachings and miracles we proclaim in the Gospels each Sunday, this Jesus is the same Lord who is present to us now.

This is the good news of the Resurrection, that Jesus Christ, the Word of God made man, who walked the earth with his dusty feet, is just as present to us now as we was to his first disciples who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. Our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles gives us a picture of how the Risen Lord is present to us: “They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and the communal life, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.”

Prayer is the primary way the Resurrected Lord is present to us. When we pray it seems to us that it is something we are doing, and that it is we who are praying to God. But this is a kind of optical illusion of the spiritual eyes. Prayer happens not when we do something, but when we simply consent to the Holy Spirit praying within us. The Holy Spirit, who after all is the abiding presence of Jesus in the Church, prays within us, catching us up into the loving and dynamic inner life of the Trinity of God. Prayer is nothing more than that, but what more could we want?

The Breaking of Bread is also one of the preeminent ways that the Risen Jesus abides with us. Just as his human body was broken on the Cross and given for the life of the world, so the bread of this Eucharist is broken for our spiritual nourishment. St. Francis of Assisi marveled at the humility and gentleness of a God who was willed to be present to us “under the little form of bread.” He called it God’s “sublime humility” and “humble sublimity.”

These blessings are free to all. If only we are willing to see the Risen Lord among us in our prayer and in the Breaking of Bread, we will realize that we too have been raised up with Christ and have received a “new birth to a living hope” as St. Peter says in the second reading today. And just like it happened to St. Thomas, with this realization our heart will blurt out, “My Lord and my God!”

We too see the Risen Lord, and if we consent to it, this experience of faith will give us such strength that we will actually burn with the desire to transform our world into the life of perfect generosity and communal sharing we heard about in the Acts of the Apostles.

The Baptism of the Lord

(Baptism of the Lord, A)

John the Baptist preached the coming judgment and called for repentance. He offered people a sign of repentance in the baptism he gave for the forgiveness of sins. And so, when it comes to the baptism of Jesus, perhaps we share some of John’s reticence. Why should Jesus Christ, like us in all things but sin, need to be baptized? What need for repentance did he have?

It is us who need repentance and healing, not the Lord. In his baptism he is baptized not because he needs forgiveness, but because we do. He is entering into our spiritual condition, joining himself to us sinners. That’s why we celebrate the baptism of the Lord as the conclusion of the Christmas season. In his birth the Son enters into our vulnerability and contingent existence. Now in his baptism he joins himself to our hurt and mixed-up spiritual condition. This process of God meeting us in our vulnerability and suffering will culminate on the Cross, when Jesus feels the deep, searing suffering of being totally alienated from God: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

The Lord meets us in the suffering we bring upon ourselves and our world with our sins. That’s the message of having himself baptized for repentance. It’s not Jesus who is a sinner, but me. And that’s where the humanity of Christ meets my humanity in this baptism.

You know, sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking we aren’t good enough for God, that God couldn’t want us because we are so messed up and attached to our sins. But the message of today is that the truth is the opposite. It is precisely in our condition as sinners in need of healing and repentance that God comes to meet us. It is exactly in that state of noticing how depressed and miserable we make ourselves with our sins, that God comes to us in Jesus Christ.

Think of what we say right before receiving Holy Communion. Echoing the centurion from Matthew’s gospel we say, “Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed.” That’s where God meets us. And this healing word that we beg for before accepting Communion has been spoken! It is the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. He is the Word God speaks to the world, and this Word is God saying, ‘I am coming to meet where you are, in your vulnerability, in your depression, in your anxiety. And by coming down and joining my divine Life to your humanity, I will heal you of your sins and your hurt.”

That is the Word of humble and generous God of Christmas. This is the God who is baptized, entering into our need for repentance, that he himself might lift us up and heal us with the Light and Love of his divine presence.

My Peace I Give You

It’s hard to believe that we are already coming near to the end of the Easter season. Easter is the longest of the privileged liturgical seasons, but it seems to go by the fastest.

And as we come to these last Sundays of Easter, we’re aware of a real shift that has occurred in our celebration of the Easter mystery. At the beginning of Easter we recalled with joy the Resurrection appearances. We celebrated the fact that the Lord is risen from the tomb.

But in these later Sundays, we celebrate the mysteries of how the presence of the Risen Lord is with us now. This started in earnest two weeks ago on Good Shepherd Sunday, when we heard about how the presence of Jesus continues to guide and lead us in our lives. Last Sunday we celebrated the new commandment to “love one another” as Jesus Christ has loved us.

Today we hear of another great gift and presence of the Risen Lord among us: Peace. Jesus, as he is preparing his disciples for the coming of the Holy Spirit, tells them not be troubled or afraid—he is giving them the gift of peace. And we have that beautiful expression that we use in every Eucharist as we prepare ourselves for Holy Communion: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”

The active, positive presence of peace wherever it is found, whether it be among friends, within families, or among nations, it is a “real presence” of Jesus Christ, Resurrected and risen anew for the new life of the world.

But notice! The Lord makes a critical distinction when he makes this gift of his peace. He says that he gives us his peace, but “not as the world gives do I give it to you.” So what’s the difference between the peace the world gives and the peace that is the presence of Jesus among us?

Here’s an example of the so-called peace that the world gives. When I was in college I had a girlfriend, and, as sometimes happens, her mother did not approve of me. And one day, she took me aside, and here’s what she said: “Charles, my daughter will love you no matter what you do. But I won’t. Therefore, you might as well do what I say because then you will be pleasing to us both.”

She was offering me a peace treaty, and you can’t argue with the logic. But it’s the peace the world gives, the cheap peace that says, “You and I can be at peace, as soon as you come around to thinking and acting the way I think you should.” And we do this kind of thing to each other all the time, and we mistakenly call it peace. When politicians announce peace at the end of a war, it’s not the real peace that is God’s gift, but simply the fact that one group of people has succeeded in forcing another around to their way of doing things, their way of using resources, or their form of government.

This happens in religion too, as is painfully evident in the first reading today. In the apostolic Church there were struggles between the older, Jewish Christians, and the newer converts, who had not been Jews. And as we heard, the original, Jewish Christians were trying to say that theirs was the only way of being a Christian. They said: it’s great that you gentiles want to be disciples of Jesus Christ, but you have to do it our way.

So thank God for Paul and Barnabas, who had the courage of the Spirit to say that were not going to hold back the grace of God by saying that there was only one way of being a Christian. Without denying the beauty and validity of Jewish Christianity, they found compromises that allowed others to come to the Lord as well. They found a way to make peace.

Too often we let ourselves be tricked into thinking that peace is a kind of absence. We think of peace as the absence of conflict, or as the absence of any difficulties or problems that interfere with our own plans and needs.

Real peace, the peace that is Jesus’ gift to us and is his risen presence among us, is so much more than that. It is a powerful and active force, bubbling up like a leaven for the renewal of all creation. It is the power that can make us brave enough to forgive each other. And it will encourage us to risk the vulnerability that lets us ask for and accept forgiveness for the many ways we have hurt those around us.

“My peace I leave you, my peace I give to you.” Let us rejoice in the Risen Lord’s gift of peace, the peace that, should we accept it, will break our cycles of violence and revenge, and will re-create the world according to the “original blessing” that is the very happiness of God.

(6th Sunday of Easter, C)

Believing is Seeing

Happy Easter, friends. May the new life of the Resurrection bubble up in its freshness in all our tasks and relationships this day and forever.

In our first reading today we have St. Peter’s speech in the house of Cornelius. Peter boldly proclaims how God had anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how Jesus went about doing good and healing all.

But wait a second. Peter? Is this the same Peter whom we heard about two days ago on Good Friday, about how we denied that he even knew Jesus, not once, but three times? Standing there in the cold and darkness of night outside of Jesus’ trial, he didn’t even have enough commitment to the Lord to even admit that he had heard of Jesus.

And yet here he is, in the house of an officer of the Roman army no less, proclaiming that this same Jesus is the judge appointed by God, through whom we receive forgiveness of sins in his name. This is quite a transformation! The same man who denied that he even knew Jesus, not once, but three times, is now proclaiming belief in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins.

This transformation, this change from being someone dominated by fear to someone who preaches the name of Jesus with courage and faith and conviction, this, friends, is the transformation we call the Resurrection.

Recall our second reading today, from the letter to the Colossians, in which we heard that “we are raised with Christ” and that we may now “seek what is above.”

We are the body of Christ, the Church. And the body of Christ is raised from the dead in the Resurrection—it’s us who form his body in the world and in history. Our common baptism into the death of Christ was celebrated by the Churches of God most clearly last night at the Great Vigil of Easter. And by allowing ourselves to be baptized into the Passion and death of Christ, we allow him to take all of our fear, all of our hurt, and all of our sins to die with him on the Cross.

But even though in the humanity he borrows from us, Jesus is able to suffer the abandonment and death we have brought upon ourselves with our sins, these cannot hold onto the almighty power of his divinity. And so the Incarnate Son of God bursts forth from death, destroying death from the inside, and creating a path for all humanity to join him in the new and Risen life of a newly re-created world.

And through the utter generosity of God in Jesus Christ, the fruits of the Resurrection are available to us: freedom from anxiety, freedom from guilt, freedom from slavery to sin—and in the end, freedom from death itself. But you have to believe it.

People like to say, “Seeing in believing.” But, friends, in the case of the Resurrection, it’s the opposite—“Believing is seeing.” You have to believe if want to see Jesus Christ raised from the dead, the Risen Lord who is with us always.

Consider the beautiful Gospel we heard this Easter morning. After Mary Magdalene discovers Jesus’ tomb to be empty, Peter and the Beloved Disciple come to see what has happened. The Beloved Disciple enters the tomb, and the evangelist tells us that, “he saw and believed.”

He saw and believed. But think about it—he didn’t see anything. What he saw was an absence. He saw an empty tomb. What he believed was what the Lord had spoken during his earthly life, and this allowed the Beloved Disciple to see through the empty tomb to the Resurrection—and the Resurrection is the truth that suffering and death could not hold onto the Son of God.

Believe and you will see. Believe that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and you will see his Resurrected Life in the joyful eyes of those you love and in the trees and flowers that come back to life each year at this time. Believe and you will begin to see the re-creation, the renovation of the world in Christ wherever you look.

Believing is seeing, friends. Peter himself says this in his speech in the first reading: Jesus “was raised on the third day” and God “granted that he be visible, not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance.”

Today, this Easter Sunday, we are those witnesses chosen by God. We are chosen by God to have the power to see through all the difficulties and troubles of this world to the new life and hope that is the Resurrection of the Lord.

So let us rejoice today in our divine vocation! Let us believe in Jesus Christ risen from the dead. And let us see in every scrap of hope—the newness of Spring, the wonder in the eyes of children, the fact that no matter how troubled and violent this poor world becomes, people still insist of falling in love with each other—let us see in all these things the re-creating and renovating power of the Resurrection.

(Easter Sunday)