The Good Samaritan

(15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

Today, friends, we have St. Luke’s beautiful parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s a very rich parable and it deserves some sustained reflection. And one classic way to enter into Jesus’ parables is to imagine ourselves as one of the characters in the story, immersing ourselves in the feelings and spiritual insight of the experience. And so I’d like to try that today.

So let us imagine ourselves as the wounded man, for we are all wounded. We are bodies that are subject to decay, disease and eventually death. We are souls that are often compromised by our selfishness, shortsightedness and sin. In all of these things we experience ourselves as very limited in this world: sometimes frustrated, often anxious, sometimes depressed.

Who can save us from this wretched situation, as we lie hurt on the side of the road, often unable to move forward with our lives in every way we feel we should? Well, back to the story:

Who comes by first as we lie there half-dead? It’s the priest. But can the priest save us? No, the priest walks right by. The clergy, if we’re good, we might be able to point the way, but we can’t save anyone. Only God can do that. Who comes by next? It’s the Levite, the servant of God’s Temple. He represents the practice of religion. Can this save us? Will we be saved by our many prayers or devotions or religious practices? No, these can’t save us either, because salvation can never be earned—it is always a free and unmerited gift. The Levite walks right by us too—he can’t help our wounded situation.

But then someone comes by who has a compassion big enough to save us. It’s the Good Samaritan, an outsider, someone from somewhere else. It’s Jesus Christ, the human being who is also God, the Word of the Father made flesh. It is he who can save us, he who can tend our wounds. This is one of the deeper meanings of the parable: that the Good Samaritan is Jesus Christ himself.

So how does he save us? First he soothes our wounds with oil. This is the anointing of our baptism and our confirmation, both of which claim and mark us for Christ. He then pours wine on our wounds, disinfecting them. This is the Precious Blood of Christ that is the wine of this Eucharist—which we receive and which heals the wounds of sin and sadness in our hearts.

Then, having tended our hurts the Good Samaritan takes us to an inn where we may rest and recuperate. And this inn is the Church, brothers and sisters. Some people think the Church is a club for self-righteous saints. No—in the variously attributed quote, the Church is a “hospital for sinners.”

Thus, our wounds tended, finding ourselves in the safety of the inn, the Good Samaritan promises to tend to us again on his return journey. In the same way, as we proclaim in every Mass, “Christ will come again,” to bring us along in his journey back to the Father.

Now if we are even a little bit grateful for all this—that Jesus has come to us in our wounded state, soothed and disinfected our injuries, brought us to a place of safety and security, and promised to collect us on his way back to the Father—if we are at all grateful, there is only one appropriate response. And it’s the one Jesus himself gives after telling the parable: “go and do likewise.”

And this means that we who have been treated with such mercy and compassion by God should join in with God’s work in the world. As Jesus has been such a good neighbor to all of us, so we are called to be neighbor to all we see in need. And if we respond generously, we will join God is the great and divine work of healing, soothing, and making this world a place of safety. Let us “go and do likewise.”

Lambs among Wolves

(14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

We continue today, friends, on the journey we began last week. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, and he sends his disciples ahead of him to proclaim the arrival of the kingdom of God. This is us, brothers and sisters! In our hearing of this gospel, we too are sent by the Lord to proclaim his kingdom to all who have ears to hear. This is our call, this is our vocation, and this is our God-given mission.

And as the Lord sends us out as the laborers for the great harvest of God’s kingdom, well, there’s good news…and there’s challenging news.

Let’s take the good news first. For one thing, this mission we have all received requires no more preparation or equipment than each of us already has. Jesus sends his disciples forth with nothing—no money, no bag. All they needed was the grace of God and the path that the Spirit of God would show them. And it’s the same with us. In order to follow the Lord we don’t need a degree, or an office, or a religious habit. All anyone needs is a little desire to be faithful to God. Nothing more. In fact, we are always sent with nothing so that we might possess God alone and depend only on him for everything we need. Rejoice then! You already have everything you need to live a life of perfect discipleship in Christ.

And God promises every good thing to those who follow him and let themselves be sent to proclaim his kingdom. As the prophet Isaiah proclaims in the first reading today, God “will spread prosperity over Jerusalem like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing torrent.” And this promise is ours as the heirs of all the promises God made to his people in the old covenant—as Paul says in the second reading today, we are the “Israel of God;” we who believe in Jesus as the Son of God are the New Jerusalem. And as we gather here as God’s people, as the “Israel of God” and as the New Jerusalem growing in the world, the prosperity of God’s grace flows over us in this Eucharist—the Precious Blood of Christ poured out in the new and eternal covenant.

So that’s the good news in our call to be disciples: we have all we need for the journey, and God will bless us abundantly in it. But there is also challenging news.

As Jesus himself admits in today’s gospel, sometimes people don’t want to hear our message. Sometimes we and our message of peace will not be received. And we all know this. The world around us, so driven by competition and greed, often does not want to hear the gospel. Dominated by the fear of terrorism and the crime of pre-emptive war, they don’t want to hear about the dignity of the human being. Committed to a culture of convenience and abortion, they don’t want to hear about the gospel of life that we Christians proclaim.

And we can all expect to experience difficulty, rejection, misunderstanding and all kinds of trouble as we fulfill our mission as disciples who proclaim the kingdom of God.

St. Paul was no stranger to this. In many places he catalogues the sufferings he endured for the sake of the Gospel: beatings, imprisonments, shipwrecks. And he points to what he endured in the second reading today when he says, “let no one make troubles for me, for I bear the marks of Jesus on my body.”

The word translated “marks” is stigmata. And we all know about the saints who had the stigmata like St. Francis or Padre Pio. They shared in the wounds of Christ. And yet Paul points out to us today that the sufferings he endured for the sake of Gospel mark him out as belonging to Jesus Christ.

And again, it is the same with us. Every suffering, every rejection, every misunderstanding that we suffer in our effort to follow the Lord and to proclaim his kingdom—these are all way in which we share in the very sufferings of Christ. In this Eucharist we receive the Body of Christ and we become what we receive. Our sufferings become his, and his become ours. Everything difficult we go through marks us for Jesus as our stigmata, our sharing in the sufferings of Christ. When we take up our cross, the Lord makes it his own.

And we know by faith that within the cross is the path to the new life of the Resurrection—a new heaven and new earth. Let us allow ourselves to be sent on our journey toward them today.

Priorites

(13 Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

“Lord, let me go first and bury my father,” but Jesus answered him, “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God”

These are strong words that we have from Jesus today. And as I reflected upon how we might understand them, I was reminded of someone I met once. I spent one of my summers when I was in college volunteering down in Appalachian coal country, and one of the things I did was pay visits to the older folks who often lived alone and weren’t able to get out much. I would see how they were doing, and if they needed anything. It was certainly never boring. One day I would be helping with the canning of tomatoes or cabbage and on another I was invited to throw rocks at the wood-pile to “scare away them snakes.”

In the course of my adventures I met a wonderful older woman named Ocie. That’s O-C-I-E. Ocie had recently lost her husband, so I went to see her to see how she was doing. When I asked her how she was doing with her grief, she said to me:

“Young man, it was sad to see him go, but I’m not too troubled.”

“Oh?” I said. She continued,

“’Well, before my husband died I asked him a question. I said, who do you love more, me or the good Lord’? And he said, ‘Well, Ocie, I love you, but I reckon I love the good Lord more.’”

Ocie was delighted with this answer! She said,

“When I knew my husband loved the good Lord more than me, I knew I would be with him again in heaven.”

Now this is an expression of a simple faith, but I think it can help us to understand what God demands of us as disciples of Jesus Christ. It’s not that in order to follow Jesus we have to leave everyone we love behind, but that when we put God first the way we relate to them will be transformed by grace. It can help us understand the Lord’s words that “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.”

It’s not as if in order to follow Jesus we need to run away to the desert or abandon our families or jobs. Because once we put God first, the way we love and work will be made new by grace. So when we return from prayer to our daily life, we’re not looking back, but looking forward to the kingdom of God, because the way we will do even the plainest things will be lifted by the light of grace.

Look at the prophet Elisha. Yes, his life was radically changed by the call to become a prophet of Israel. He even destroys the plow and oxen that were his livelihood. But what does he do with them? He cooks the animals, using the plow as fuel, and feeds the people he leaves behind. The call of God never leaves anyone abandoned.

Take the Lord’s own words as another example, “let the dead bury their dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Being Christians doesn’t mean that we should ignore the needs of those we love while they are alive, or not bury them with dignity when they leave us. But once we put the kingdom of God first, once we make it our first priority in life to have the love of God reign in our hearts and minds, we will no longer care for those we love or bury those who die in the same way.

In fact, once we put God first, the love with which we love those around us becomes part of God’s love—and thus we touch the caring and gentle Mystery at the heart of all reality. Once we put God first, though we might seem to be burying the dead, we are actually just saying goodbye to those who are being born ahead of us into eternal life. So when we grieve for our loved ones who have passed on, we are not the dead burying the dead, but the living who suffer with a brief separation from the living. The way we remember those who have passed from this world ought to reflect our faith in the eternal life we have in Christ, the eternal life of which this Eucharist is like a sample taste.

And to live this way is freedom from sin and selfishness, as Paul points out in the second reading. Because when we put God first, everything else we do becomes a little part of what God is doing in the world. And in God there is no misery or evil. In the inner life of God there is only peace and gentleness and joy. And this life is ours through the humanity of Christ, through the Body of Christ we receive and we become at this Eucharist. So let us follow receive the Body of Christ and follow the Lord into the peace of his kingdom. Amen.

John the Baptist

This past Thursday we had the longest day of the year—with just over fifteen hours of sunlight. For the rest of the year, until we celebrate the great feast of Christmas, we will lose a little bit of that light each day. And so it’s fitting that this Sunday we celebrate John the Baptist, who proclaimed that he had to decrease that Christ, the light of the world, could increase. John came not as the Light, but as witness to the true Light, Jesus Christ.

John the Baptist is the hinge that connects the Old Covenant with the New. He is the last and greatest of the prophets of Israel, and yet, his main role in the history of God’s salvation is to be the forerunner of Christ. For as the Gospel teaches us, in Jesus we have a prophet, and yes, more than a prophet.

By fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord…make straight a highway for our God,” John the Baptist sets up the means by which God will make the promises made to the little nation of Israel the inheritance of all the peoples of the world.

For in Christ, all of the promises made to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses, and to David…all these promises burst out and become the hope of all the earth. Indeed, as Paul says in the second reading today, it was to the family of Abraham that “the word of salvation has been sent.” But it is in Christ that the first reading, the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled: that the people of Israel would be made a “light to the nations,” that God’s “salvation might reach to the ends of the earth.”

God promised to Abraham that he would be a great nation, and that God would settle him in a land of peace and prosperity. In Christ this promise becomes our own as heirs and citizens of the kingdom of God. No, it’s not a kingdom like the ones of this world, but it is a place we are to cultivate in our hearts, our families, and our communities, that, like John the Baptist, we may prepare a place for the Lord in this world.

Every Christian shares in the vocation of John the Baptist, as the forerunner of the Lord. Quoting the Gospel of John, the entrance antiphon for today’s Mass puts it quite simply: “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came to bear witness to the Light, to prepare an upright people for the Lord.” All of us who know Christ are sent in the same way. We are to bear witness to the presence of God in the world, so that we may share in the raising up—the Resurrection—of this world in Christ.

Recall another line from John’s Gospel—one that we proclaim in every Mass as we prepare to receive Holy Communion. When John saw Jesus he announced, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”

We share in this ministry of pointing out the Lamb of God! Sometimes people call this “naming grace.” It’s simply the practice of noticing that God is at work in the world. And it’s a practice we need, because the world is largely ignorant of God, and even we ourselves with all of our busyness and chatter often miss the presence of God.

Think about it. Even in the most war-torn and troubled places on earth people still insist on falling in love with each other. How can this be? Because the presence of God—who is love—is more powerful than any of the suffering we inflict on each other with our sins. Wherever there is compassion, wherever there is gentleness, forgiveness, and care, we know that it is the pure grace of the loving Mystery we call God.

It is up to us to imitate John the Baptist by naming this grace, by proclaiming to the world that the love of God is in its midst, especially when people don’t know it. In this ministry each one of us fulfills our vocation as forerunners of the Lord, as those who prepare a path for God in the world.

(Nativity of John the Baptist, Mass during the day)

How to be a Sinner

This past Lent I was invited to help with a day of recollection at one of our parishes in Manhattan. The focus was on St. Francis’ Prayer before the Crucifix, and the line I was given to speak on was the one in which Francis prays, “enlighten the darkness of my heart.” Now you can only make such a prayer if you have and are aware of some darkness inside. So I asked the people I was working with, “Is there anybody here who sometimes has some darkness in their heart?” Well, every hand in the place went up, and mine too!

Everyone can relate to a consciousness of sin. We can all say with confidence, “I am a sinner.” Now I haven’t had the chance to meet all of you here at Sacred Heart, but I doubt that many of us here are sinners with the intensity of the great king David, who was not only adulterous, but who also made himself a murderer in order to commit adultery. But we can all identify with the words that God speaks to David in the first reading: “Look at everything I have done for you. Why have you spurned the Lord and done evil in his sight?”

Yes, even the saints know that their great holiness is inadequate when it is compared to the burning and intense generosity of God. The love and mercy of God are so overwhelming that they always make us look lukewarm and more aware of our faults.

But our confession before God that we are sinners begs another spiritual question: What do we do with this awareness?

The easiest thing to do is to be ashamed. This is the answer on the human level. We feel like we have sinned against God, so we stay away from God, stay away from prayer, stay away from communion with Body of the Lord here in the Eucharist.

This is the certainly the response that Simon the Pharisee expected of the sinful woman in today’s Gospel. There he was, hosting a nice dinner party with respectable people and entertaining this local celebrity, Jesus of Nazareth. And then his party is crashed by this woman who was known to be a public sinner. You can almost hear him saying to her, “Get out my house, and go back in the street where dirty people like you belong. Can’t you see this is a man of God! Have some respect! A sinner like you shouldn’t approach the great teacher.”

But Jesus explains to Simon the Pharisee how he has it all wrong. Jesus points out how the sinful woman showed much more love than Simon, the decent, respectable, religious man. And with the simple parable of the two debtors Jesus explains why she loved more: the one who is forgiven more will love that much more.

And this is what we must do. When we are aware of our sinfulness it ought not to discourage us. We shouldn’t let it make us stay away from prayer or from this Eucharist. When we are aware of our sinfulness it ought to make us more grateful for the forgiveness of sins that God has accomplished in Christ. The more we are aware of how much we have been forgiven, the more we will love in return.

So let’s give thanks that we begin every Eucharist with an invitation from the priest to “call to mind our sins.” Because is we do this well, it will make us more grateful for our Savior and will make us love the Eucharist even more. On this altar the Precious Blood of the Lord is poured out, precisely for the forgiveness of sins. And this life-giving and renewing Blood washes over us. As the author of the book of Revelation puts it, we are washed and made clean in the Blood of the Lamb.

Let us confidently approach the throne of grace today, knowing that we are sinners. We shouldn’t be happy about our sins, but we should be grateful for the knowledge that we are sinners. Our role model today, the sinful woman, shows us how this knowledge will make us love God even more.

(11th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

Farewell

Friends, I’m especially grateful to our pastor Fr. Joseph, for the chance to preach today, on my last weekend here at St. Anne-St. Augustin. The friars have assigned me to our parish in Yonkers, New York, where your own pastor’s predecessor, Fr. John, is pastor. I will be moving there in the coming days. Thanks to your prayers, I will eventually serve there as priest.

Preaching today gives me the chance, even though I have been with you only a short time, to tell you how and why I am grateful for the opportunity to have prayed and walked and broken open the Word of God with you over these past nine months.

As I thought about how I could express my thanks to you, the people of this parish, I thought—just trust me on this one—I might start with original sin.

I say this because I think one of the most debilitating consequences of original sin is our frequent inability to notice what is good in us. Instead of rejoicing and being grateful for our good points and the things we have accomplished through cooperation with the grace of God, we often tend to focus instead on our faults, on our failures, on the things about us that aren’t quite as they should be. And this goes both for us as individuals and as communities.

Therefore it is a great grace to have in our lives people who will remind us of how good we are. We all need folks around us to remind us the action of grace in our lives. That’s part of what friends are for. I know personally that it’s one of the great things about having my religious brothers. Though I don’t have the experience myself, I imagine that this is one of the graces of marriage as well, to have someone who will quietly insist to us that we are irresistibly loveable, even though, sometimes, we can hardly believe it ourselves.

So, as I finish up my time here, I want to try to do exactly this for you. In case you don’t see it, and in case it would be good to be reminded, I want to tell you, from the point of view of one visitor to your parish, what it is that makes this place so loveable and so graced by the Holy Spirit of God.

Now I’ve spent just about my whole life in the Order in multicultural and multi-lingual parishes. Even when I was a novice among the cornfields of Wisconsin, there were old folks in church on Sunday speaking to each other in German. In both New York and Boston I have served in parishes with a Spanish-speaking majority. So I’ve been around the multicultural block, as it were.

Now nobody knows how to do this multicultural thing real well. It’s awkward, almost by definition. And yet, here, in this place, I have seen, more than anywhere else I have ever been, the willingness to risk, to try, and experiment, and to learn.

In most places, different language and cultural communities are happy to co-exist. But you are doing more—reaching out to each other, hearing each other’s stories, praying with each other to the one God. And I want to tell you today that this is a tremendous grace that you have going for you here. It’s a hopeful stab at the unity that is God’s own desire and dream, not only for little parish of St. Anne-St. Augustin, but for the whole world. This is the very prayer of the Lord himself in today’s gospel, that all might be one as he and the Father are one. Rejoice and be grateful for your hope-filled response to God’s own dream of unity!

Recall the visions of the prophet Isaiah that we hear so much during Advent. Isaiah prophesied that all nations would come streaming to God’s blessings. And as we know, this hope is fulfilled for us in Christ. In Christ, the promises made to the little nation of the Israelites become the hope of all peoples of all times. And the final fulfillment of these prophecies comes in our second reading today, as people from all nations, having washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb, enter through the Tree of Life—the Cross—into the New Jerusalem.

What I want to tell you today is that when you gather here for the Eucharist, and especially when people of different cultures and languages—all the nations of the world, as it were—process up to receive the Body and Blood of Christ, to affirm and receive communion with the Lord and with one another, these words of the prophets and these visions of Revelation are being fulfilled here and now. Rejoice and be glad, for this is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God is here.

If the prophet Isaiah were here today, I have no doubt he would praise God to see the fulfillment of his vision of different cultures streaming to the Lord’s blessings. And if John, the author of Revelation, were to see the communion procession of the people of God here at St. Anne-St. Augustin, I have no doubt that he would rejoice, and see in you his vision of the saints processing into the New Jerusalem.

So, be grateful to God for the work of the Spirit in this place. Your faith and willingness are answering the Lord’s own prayer for the unity of those who believe. And for my part, I want to thank you for the chance to meet you and to be edified by your faith. I go forth better for having known you, and encouraged in the Lord. Thank you.

(7th Sunday of Easter, C, Last Sunday at St. Anne-St. Augustin)

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)