It’s all His

Today’s first reading continues an idea we heard in yesterday’s first reading. Yesterday we heard:

For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned. And how could a thing remain, unless you willed it; or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you? 

Today St. Paul reminds us in more concisely:

For from him and through him and for him are all things. 

There seems to be a human desire to sort things into categories. We like binary, this or that, good and evil.

These readings remind us that it is even simpler than that.  God loves everything that is. It came into existence and is sustained in existence because God wills it to continue to exist and it therefore must have a good purpose. 

To miss the mark

Two men went up to the temple to pray...

Yes, the first man Jesus describes is a bit of a caricature.

O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity --
greedy, dishonest, adulterous -- or even like this tax collector.

Most of us would never quite have the hubris he describes, although I think we often come close.

We spent the last half-century building up our "self-esteem" convinced that it would make us better people.  The evidence now shows that it has done quite the opposite.  We overshot the mark and went past self-esteem to egocentrism.

The tax collector in today's gospel utters a simple act of contrition:

O God, be merciful to me a sinner

With those simple words, six words in Greek, he places before God all of his sins and begs for mercy.  He does what, in our culture, has become almost impossible. He humbles himself.

The word St. Luke uses for sinner, amartolos, literally refers to  the archer who has missed the mark and therefore does not share the prize.

We have convinced ourselves that we are so fragile we can't say, "That was bad" or "That is not good enough".

Jesus teaches us that we are stronger than that. We were created to be more. We were created to be saints. But to get there we must be able to admit when we fail, when we have missed the mark. And we must be willing to throw ourselves on the mercy of God. Then, and only then, He can remake us into the image of His Son Jesus Christ.

Reaching fully convinced

In Paul's letter to the Romans today we hear that Abraham

was empowered by faith and gave glory to God and was fully convinced that what God had promised he was also able to do.

It is easy for us when sitting in Church to speak of faith and to proclaim our belief that with God all things are possible but the faith of Abraham was not something to be lived in the isolation of a religious building.

The faith that empowered Abraham was a force strong enough to compel him to abandon everything he knew, everything that was safe and set out on a journey into the unknown. His faith took him to the brink of sacrificing his own son. There was no aspect of his life that was not shaped by his faith.

 Yes, it is true that faith is a gift but like other gifts it can and must be developed. The only way to develop it is with practice - intentional, consistent practice.

We use phrases like "work-life balance" to try and categorize and manage our activities. The simple truth is that work is part of life.  All of our actions are parts of a single life, given to each of us. Our faith too cannot be one aspect of life. It must be something that permeates every aspect of our life, every choice we make.

Our goal to reach the faith of Abraham. Perhaps then too we will be fully convinced.

Return to the blog

As many have noted, in the last couple of years I have become very sporadic in writing this blog.  For me it has been a time of great prayer. I have struggled with my Church as I have watched our bishops, stumble like a child learning to walk, unable to find their footing. Some have continued to simply ignore the law of the Church, as if they are above it. Others have thrown priests, living and dead, under the bus with no due process, hoping to distract from their own failings. Some of my brother priests have been quite public in venting their spleen. 

But I write this today because I still believe.  I still believe that this Church, with all its failing, was established by Christ. I still believe that the head of the Church, Jesus, remains joined to the body. I still profess faith in the one holy catholic and apostolic church. I still believe that the Holy Spirit was the ultimate guide in the selection of Pope Francis. 

People think that the most difficult of the promises we make at ordination is celibacy. Perhaps that is because we live in a world obsessed with sex. But in truth I believe that the most difficult of the promises is obedience. When we are ordained, we kneel down and promise respect and obedience not only to that bishop but to his successors. At that moment we have no idea who the successors will be.  It is an absolute leap of faith. And news flash, none of them are perfect. And each is imperfect in his own way, just as each of us is imperfect in our own way. 

Sunday mass attendance in many places has dropped. Every cleric knows that at any moment he can be accused of anything by anyone and he will be presumed guilty. But those of us who remain cannot surrender. We must dig deep and find our faith and our hope. 

Today’s gospel tells us that 

the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. 

To give up hope would be that blasphemy. We may in fact be a smaller church. We may be a poorer church. And these may be good things. In the RCIA process we refer to the Lenten Season as a time of “Purification and Enlightenment.”  The Church is made up of individual members. The Church can only be purified and enlightened if we the individual members pray for that same purification and enlightenment.

Anything can be forgiven. Anything can be healed. The only unforgivable is to give up on the power of the Holy Spirit. 

The polar opposites

Today we celebrate two opposites: Mary and Jonah. 

Mary is called by God and give the perfect total yes. Let it be done to me according to your Word. 

Jonah gives the opposite response. When God calls Jonah and gives him his mission, he runs. God says go to Nineveh and Jonah hops a boat in the opposite direction, Tarshish. 

 Both Mary and Jonah are afraid, and for good reason. Jonah allowed his fear to control him, Mary did not. 

The good news for Jonah is that if we are people of faith, even when we are slow to listen God remains faithful. As the first reading ends today, the large fish has spit him up and Jonah is back at the start.  Tomorrow God we give him a second chance to listen and get it right. 

The overseer

In the first reading today we hear the qualifications for the role of episkopos, literally the overseer. The word has made its way into English as bishop. The things that are connected to the bishop we describe the the adjective, episcopal. St. Paul provides quite a length list of qualifications.

a bishop must be irreproachable, married only once, temperate, self-controlled, decent, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not aggressive, but gentle, not contentious, not a lover of money.

Of all these, it is perhaps the last one that provides the greatest challenge. 

On the one hand, a Church must have money to operate. As so, every bishop, like every other minister, must engage in fund-raising. We continue to come up with new euphemisms for it. We call it “development” or “advancement”, but at the end of the day it is about convincing people to give money. 

And for a good cause. 

On the other hand, the money must never become the thing to which we are attached. How far will we go to obtain the money? How far will we go to protect the money?

How many Christian Churches have over the years sold the best seats to those who give the most money? How many priests were in the old system named Monsignor, not because of the holiness of their lives, but because they could raise money? Sadly, our churches are covered with the names of wealthy patrons. Where are the names of the poor but holy, those who worked hard and gave good example, but had no money to donate?

Worse by far, were the crimes covered up by bishops in order to protect the money. And today, how many dead innocent priests have had their reputations ruined, because of an accusation that had no proof? We used to believe in the presumption of innocence. We used to believe in due process. We used to believe that a person had a right to face their accuser. Now we seem willing to throw it all aside to protect the money, to avoid a potential lawsuit. 

The lure of money is seductive and on a practical level we all need it to survive. But St. Paul reminds us today that we should never place protecting money over the protection of people. As individuals and as a Church, caring our brother and sisters must always come first, especially the most vulnerable, and the most broken among us. 

Choosing Leaders

We tend to act as if the first 12 Jesus called were the Apostles. In fact, today’s gospel would suggest something a more complex.

What Jesus has word disciples, students apprentices. And the according to St. Luke.,

Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God. When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named Apostles

How many disciples there were by this point in Jesus’s ministry? We have no idea.  What we are told, in the very same reading, is that after the selection of the 12 he gathered with a “great crowd of disciples”.  Do we ever stop to think about the ones who were no chosen? How much grumbling and jealousy was going on in that crowd as they saw who got chosen? We humans are fragile creatures; our insecurities easily provoked. And certainly by this time there were other disciples who could name all the defects in the 12 that were chosen. 

That fact that Jesus spent all night praying over the decision says that it was not an easy one.  When was the last time any of us stayed up all night praying over a decision?

In the last few years we have gone from anger over abusive priests to anger over, not only abusive bishops, but bishops who knew about and participated in the cover up of abuse by others. Even now there appears to be a great inequality in the way cases are handled. A priest is accused and instantly suspended. A Bishop is accused and he cuts back on his public appearances. 

Some people seek facile solutions. Do any of us think elections would guarantee better candidates? Just look at our top politicians. 

But perhaps today’s gospel is a call for prayerful discernment by the entire body of Christ, a time for us to pray with the intensity that Jesus prayed that He will pour out on the Church a Spirit of Wisdom so that we might know how we can transform our present system into one that will produce, not perfect, but better leadership. Presently, bishops are nominated by bishops and so the system itself all but guarantees more of the same.  

We will never know precisely what criteria Jesus used in choosing His twelve. St. Paul provides us with his thoughts but they are pretty basic. What we do know is that the process cannot simply be a step by step climbing of the ladder. Pope Francis has for quite some time decried that system. It must include prolonged prayer. 

Let us pray for a system that will provide the leadership that God knows will be best for the Church in the 21st century.