Baptized or Burned

(3 Advent, C)

Brothers and sisters, we have a choice to make. To those who came to him in heartfelt expectation and received the baptism of repentance, John the Baptist announces that a fire is coming upon the earth. What will this fire will be for us? Will it be the fiery baptism with the Holy Spirit or the unquenchable fire that burns the chaff? John promises that both are coming. Indeed, they are the same thing.

For those who have looked forward to the arrival of the Savior and are ready to receive Him, this is a moment of rejoicing. “Fear not, O Zion, be not discouraged! The LORD, your God, is in your midst” proclaims the prophet Zephaniah. The love and salvation of God is arriving in our world and in our lives, and there is no greater cause for rejoicing. The classic name for this third Sunday of Advent is Gaudete Sunday, from the Entrance Antiphon for today’s Mass, which is taken from the second reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians: Gaudéte in Dómino simper: íterum dico, gaudéte. Dóminus enim prope est. “Rejoice in the Lord always: again I say, rejoice! The Lord is near.”

This nearness of the Lord is the coming fire of which John the Baptist speaks. The fire is the passionate love of God, God’s burning desire for our salvation. In his infinite compassion, God saves the world by uniting his own divine life to our humanity in Christ, so that our human nature—yours and mine—can be reformed and re-created from the inside out. Jesus Christ continues this divine mission each day for us who are baptized into his death and receive his Risen Life into our very bodies in Holy Communion. The Body and Blood of Christ is the medicine of the divine physician, meant to cleanse and re-create our lives from within.

The Incarnation of the Word, which we prepare to celebrate at Christmas, is the dawn of this divine plan of salvation, the arrival of the fire of God’s burning love in our humanity.

As God’s burning love descends to make a home within us, it is up to us to decide what this divine fire will be for us. It is too intense to ignore, and if we try it will burn us away like chaff in the wind, lost to eternity. Instead, may we rejoice to consent to God’s love as a cleansing, spiritual, fiery baptism for each of our hearts and lives. Let us make ourselves homes for the fire of God’s love, that God’s delight may be our joy as we become those called to radiate divine love to the world.

Joy, Longing, and Mission

(2 Advent, C)

“I am confident of this,” St. Paul assures us, “that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.” This is our whole Advent spirituality, brothers and sisters. We are those in whom God has begun the “good work.” We have been baptized into the death and Resurrection of Christ, confirmed in his Holy Spirit, and each Sunday we are further configured to the Sacrifice of Christ here by our prayerful participation here at Mass.

This “good work” is accomplished in us by the God who is always arriving in our daily life. Advent reminds us that our God is precisely that: adventitious, showing up at certain and graced moments. Theologically, this is because God is eternal; there is nothing God was doing yesterday that he is not doing today, and nothing God will be about at the end of time that is not already with us—though obscurely—in the present. In our own limited consciousness as temporal creatures, the closest thing to eternity in our experience is the now, the present moment in which we always find ourselves. And this is where God is revealed; gently arriving in our lives through the call to prayer, the love and care of people around us, our wonder at the beauty of creation, and in many other ways as well.

The spirituality of this Advent season is to find the deep part of our hearts that longs for the fullness of this revelation of God. God has begun this good work in us, and caught our souls for this path. We who have had this taste of the grace of God arriving in our lives are called to “prepare the way” for God’s saving goodness to find a home more and more in this world. This is the work by which we take up and imitate the ministry of John the Baptist. We are called, in the words of the classic Advent hymn, On Jordan’s Bank, to “make straight the way of God within.” One of the intercessions in the Liturgy of the Hours caught me earlier this week in this regard, “Bring low the mountains of our pride, and fill up the valleys of our weakness.” This is a good example of the ascetic work we are called to during the Advent season: we know that the Lord Jesus seeks to be born into our hearts and make a home in our lives, so let us sweep his new home clean and prepare a fitting place for Him.

Advent comes to us as a joy, as a longing, and as a mission. We recall our joy at being those within whom God has begun his good work of inaugurating the new creation. As Baruch puts it, we rejoice that we are “remembered by God.” We long for the fulfillment of this great work, which God has begun in a mysterious and obscure in the birth of our Savior, and in a public and definitive way in his Resurrection. For those of us who have the grace of his knowledge of Truth, and of God’s purpose, we are called to prepare His way within, and to call the world to recognize the arriving grace of God, until the destined Day when “all flesh will see the salvation of God.”

Clothed and Adorned

(Gaudete Sunday, B)

In the midst of this season of “joyful expectation” we arrive at this especially joyful day, the third Sunday of Advent, traditionally called Gaudete Sunday. This name comes from traditional entrance antiphon for today, Gaudéte in Dómino semper: íterum dico, gaudéte. Dóminus enim prope est, which sings St. Paul’s imperative from the fourth chapter of Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say, rejoice. The Lord is near!”

And that is exactly why we are invited into this mood of rejoicing today, because the Lord is near. But why should we be so happy about the arrival of the Lord in the coming feast of his Nativity? The second part of the reading we hear from the prophet Isaiah says it all: God “has clothed me with a robe of salvation and wrapped me in a mantle of justice.” Listen to force of these verbs! ‘Clothed me,’ ‘wrapped me,’ as Isaiah says, made beautiful as a bride. Who is he talking about? It’s us, brothers and sisters. For when the Son of God is born as one of us, in our humanity, yours and mine, our humanity is clothed with the blessing of God, wrapped in salvation, and restored to the original beauty God has meant for us all. That’s the good news of Christmas; not just the miracle of the Word made flesh, but all the miracles of our humanity being lifted up to God. As the priest says when he prepares the chalice, “Through the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” The Son of God becomes flesh in order to establish a union between our humanity and God. It is us who are given the opportunity of changing from water into wine, friends.

This is the great work of God of which our religion is meant to be a celebration. As St. Paul puts it in the second reading today: “May the God of peace make you perfectly holy and may you entirely, spirit, soul, and body, be preserved blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will also accomplish it.” This is God’s passion and desire—to take on our humanity in the Incarnation, so as to lift us up to perfect holiness. Too often we think of holiness as something we have to accomplish by our own agonistic effort. No! As Paul says, it is God who will make us holy and prepare us for the end and goal and purpose of creation. By uniting himself to us in the Lord whose human birth we will soon celebrate, all of the holiness of God becomes available to our human nature.

So rejoice, brothers and sisters. And if this time of year finds us a little more tired or even a little more blue, be encouraged. The true Light to which John the Baptist witnessed is coming into the world. In whatever darkness we find in our own hearts or our own families or in our society, let us fix our gaze on this Light that is coming into the world. The mystery of Christmas teaches us that it is in these places of darkness that the Light wants to be born. This Light from Light—as we say in the Creed—is the hope for each of us. For God’s great work of uniting himself to us in Christ means that we will be clothed in comfort and wrapped in salvation.

The Imitation of Christ

(26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

In the second reading today, we hear the beautiful first part of the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Here Paul records a hymn to the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. In Christ, God “empties himself” in the perfect act of sublime humility. We heard this same hymn two weeks ago on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, but today we get the fuller passage that includes Paul’s set up and interpretation of what the humility of the Incarnation of the Son of God can mean for us.

 We’re used to the idea that Jesus reveals God. In his humble birth, his preaching, his miracles, and most of all in his sorrowful Passion and glorious Resurrection, Jesus reveals to us the personality of the unseen and mysterious Source and Ground of all being we call God the Father. Most of the faith and practice of our religion is based on this, and rightly so.

 But it’s also good for us to look at the other side of the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ. For Jesus Christ—truly God and truly human—reveals not only God the Father but our humanity as well. The life and death of Jesus shows us God’s idea of what our human life is meant to be about; it’s as if you were to ask God, ‘How should I live? How can I be happy and be a better person?’ By way of an answer the Eternal Word of God borrows our humanity from our Blessed Mother and becomes one of us, in order to show us how to be human.

This is why it is so important for us as Christians to pay attention to the person of Jesus Christ as he comes to us in the Gospels. By noticing how he relates to and treats people, he models for us the way to be happy and peace in our relationships with each other. By meditating on his suffering, death, and Resurrection we learn how to let go of ourselves and come to true freedom and happiness.

The classic spiritual strategy of the imitatio Christi, the ‘imitation of Christ’ is so powerful because to model ourselves on Jesus is to make ourselves over according to God’s will and desire for true and perfect humanity. This is what Paul recommends to us in the second reading when he invites us to “participation in the Spirit” by being of “the same mind…united in heart, thinking one thing.” The word which we translate “participation” in Paul’s Greek is koinonia, the word the New Testament uses frequently for communion. It’s the same as the greeting of the priest at the beginning of Mass, “the fellowship—the communicatio—of the Holy Spirit be with you.”

The Holy Communion we celebrate and receive here at Mass is meant to make us into what we receive. By this fellowship with Christ, by our communion in his Body and Blood, our humanity, our lives, are taken up into his divine humanity. This will empower us to become like Christ, indeed to become alteri Christi, “other Christs” in the classic spiritual language. Here at Mass we celebrate God’s revelation—in Christ—of what it means to be a human being, to be called to that perfect humility that lets go of self in order to take the form of servants to one another. In the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, the communion of God with us in Christ, we are invited to do just as he did: to let our bodies become the Body of Christ and to let our hearts become homes for his Precious Blood. Then we find the true humanity of giving ourselves away for the sake of each other.

His Descent Is Our Ascent

(Exaltation of the Holy Cross)

Today we celebrate a contradiction, a paradox. Indeed, it’s the contradiction and paradox which is at the heart of our faith, at the heart of Christianity. It’s right there in the title of the solemnity we celebrate today: The Exaltation of the Cross. We exalt the Cross, meaning that we lift it high and make the Cross of Christ something we look up to. But what is this Cross which we exalt? It is one of the cruelest and humiliating means of execution known to the ancient world. It’s a sign of us human beings at our worst, at our least human, at our most evil.

So what does it mean to say that we exalt, that we lift up and venerate this sign of ourselves at our worst? Let us attend to the Sacred Scriptures we hear today. As Paul says in the great hymn of the letter to the Philippians, the Son of God, the Eternal Word, “emptied himself” of all that it should mean to be God, and “took the form of a slave, coming in human likeness.” In Jesus Christ we see God descending, letting go of all divine prerogative, and entering into the deepest and most horrible consequences of sin—the violence of us human beings torturing, humiliating, and killing one another.

This is the meaning of the Cross: God identifying with us in the pain and torment we have brought upon ourselves with our sins, even to the point of feeling ourselves alienated from God altogether: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.” Behold the Cross and see God himself taking on the suffering that we earn for ourselves with our sins and violence against one another. This is an almost indescribable love and kindness, that the all-powerful God should empty himself and take on the burdens of our faults. But that’s the overwhelming Love we call God, a Love that is literally just dying to save us from ourselves.

The good news is that this descent of God becomes our ascent out of the prison of selfishness and sin and into the new life of grace. Just as the Israelites were able to look up to the serpent in the desert and be healed, so we, if we turn our gaze to the Cross, God will reveal to us the path to new life.

That’s the secret. We have to look up to the descent of God. For God descends into our suffering and pain in order to rob it of its power from the inside. Jesus Christ, though he was able to die in the humanity he borrowed from us, could never die in his divine nature. And so he bursts forth from death, taking his transformed humanity with him, into the New Life we call the Resurrection.

Let us look up the humility of God, for God’s humiliation is our exaltation. Let us turn the gaze of our hearts and minds upward to the Cross of Christ, for the descent of God is the ascent of our humanity into freedom from violence and sin.

The Forgiving Body of Christ

(23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

At first glance the gospel passage we hear today might seem like a simple procedure for dealing with trouble in the Christian community. Jesus advises us to take a step-by-step approach in dealing with someone who is trapped in a sin that is hurting the unity or the holiness of the Body of Christ.

Let’s notice, though, Jesus’ astonishing statement at the end of gospel. Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when we heard St. Peter’s great confession of faith, and how Jesus gave him the “keys to the kingdom of heaven,” so that whatever he bound on earth would be bound on earth and whatever he loosed on earth would be loosed in heaven? Well in today’s gospel we hear Jesus giving that same authority to all of his disciples. Consider what this means: the forgiveness of God is in our hands! When we forgive someone, we forgive them not just with our forgiveness but with the forgiveness of God himself. “Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

Why should this be, that God has handed over to us the power to dispense his own forgiveness to each other? It is because we are the Body of Christ. As St. Paul writes in the letter to the Philippians, God “emptied himself” into the human life of Jesus Christ, so that in Christ we see the full revelation of God on our human terms. And where is this revelation of God now, for us? It is right here. Jesus Christ, who died on the Cross for us, is risen into the new life of the Living Bread and Precious Blood of the Eucharist we celebrate each Sunday. We who receive this Holy Communion with the humanity of Christ, become what we receive. We become the Body of Christ, risen from the dead.

So if we are the Body of Christ, what does the Body of Christ do? First of all it preaches the Kingdom of God, and so this is our primary vocation as Christians. Second, the Body of Christ allows itself to be broken for the salvation of the world. And so we who are Christians allow the suffering of the world around us to break our hearts, that we might learn compassion for all. Finally, as we hear in the gospel today, as the Body of Christ, the forgiveness of God is on our hands. “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

We are all well acquainted with our sins. As the old saying goes, a clean conscience is a sign of a bad memory. We all know what it’s like to long for the healing forgiveness of God. Indeed the whole world longs for this forgiveness, for the forgiving of one another from the heart is the only thing that will stop this world’s endless cycles of violence. So if we have ever longed for God’s forgiveness, let us fulfill the injunction to love our neighbor as ourselves, and give God’s forgiveness to each other. It is ours to give, as the living Body of Christ, the revelation of God in the world. To forgive is to heal, to stop the cycles of violence and sin that hurt everyone. To forgive is to love perfectly. To stop the reproduction of violence and sin is to take up the Cross and fulfill our vocation as Christ’s risen Body. It is the love that is the fullest expression of the Mystery we call “God.”