Almost against hope

5th Week of Lent (F): Jer 20.10-13; John 10.31-42
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation

Hear it!
If you don’t believe me, believe the works I do. Jesus is sounding very American this morning, very modern, downright pragmatic even! Why the pragmatism? Why the common sense argument based on evidence? Jesus is doing his job as a teacher, as a preacher, and as One Anointed for sacrifice: he is opening every way, every door, any possible avenue to understanding, to knowing who he is and who he is for us. He is giving the crowd what they need to make the jump, to see their blind spots, to hear what they will not hear, to skip around their settled ideological categories and know cleanly the truth of Jesus’ Messianic claim: “I am the Son of God […] the Father is in me and I am in the Father.

At the risk of sounding a little too Baptist, how did you come to know Jesus as Lord? I mean, how did the full awareness, the complete understanding that Jesus is the Christ, the Anointed One get planted in your head and heart? Think for a moment what you have to believe to be true to draw this astonishing conclusion: you have to believe that there is a God Who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that this God is creator, redeemer, and sanctifier of His creation; that the most filial relationship possible between a Father and His children was violated by disobedience; that centuries of Law, prophets, animal sacrifices, and divine interventions in history and nature failed to bring us back to righteousness; that the second person of the triune God, the Son, took on human flesh in the womb of a virgin and was born a man among us; that he taught the truth of freely abundant mercy, the necessity of repentance and good works, and that he performed sign after sign after sign, pointing unambiguously to his divinity.

This is the historical, theological, philosophical, religious, trail that leads to Jesus’ black and white claim: “I am the Son of God […] the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

Why do you believe this claim? Why do you believe the truth of the claims that lead to this Messianic claim? None of us here saw Jesus walk on water. No one here saw him raise the dead or heal the blind. No one here heard his preaching. But many began to believe in him. Why? Because though John himself never performed a sign, everything he said about Jesus was true. John’s witness, his word about Jesus, was true. And the next step is the first step toward cultivating a habit of trust that produces again and again the good fruits of holiness. That step is? Surrender. To do what the crowd, the Pharisees, the scribes could not do. What Pontius Pilate would not do: accept the opened way, surrender, believe, come to the Father’s love, know Him, and step—one foot after another—into the habit of trust, a life lived steeped in faith, vibrating with the promise of ready abundance, and the fruits of his permanent victory over sin and death.

Surrender to what is to come. Jesus enters Jerusalem. He shares one last meal with his friends. He washes their feet. He suffers betrayal. Brutal violence. Denial. Abandonment and death. And we wait. Vigilant. Against the tomb. Almost against hope. And then we hear, just under the wind, a voice say what we have known all along: “I am the Son of God!”

Will you hear a difficult teaching?

5th Sunday of Lent 2006: Jer 31.31-34; Heb 5.7-9; John 12.20-33
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul’s Hospital and the Church of the Incarnation


Will you hear this difficult teaching: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces good fruit.” You must change. Move from seed to fruit, from kernel to harvest. You must move from what you are to what the Father made you to be at the first flash of creation. There is that moment, that instant when you surrender, when you truly say yes to God, that single breath, that single catch in your throat when the clarity and depth of a foundation-shaking decision dawns in your soul and you say with flesh and bone and heart, “Father, glorify your name in me!” Then you will suffer. Then you will die. And then you will rise again.

Surrender. Suffer. Die. Rise again. This road of redemption is open to you because Jesus walked it first. “Whoever serves me must follow me.” This road is open to you because our Father will have you back. Our Father will love you into your perfection. He will have you again, whole, complete. He loves you to change you.

You are the seed of His glory.

Here are the hard questions of Lent and Holy Week: will you die today? Will you surrender to Christ and follow him? Will you suffer to be with him at the cross? To be with him on the cross? Will you hear this difficult teaching: “Where I am, there also will my servant be.”

The Greek converts to Judaism come to Jesus seeking an audience. They approach Philip and say, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” Philip and Andrew go to Jesus with the request and Jesus, in a moment of bleak clarity, knows. Knowing all along that his life will end in pain and blood, Jesus whispers what has shouted in his heart since his baptism: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” His voice a sigh, resigned and determined, he warns Philip and Andrew that to follow him to glory requires that they do what he does. Surrender. Suffer. Die. Rise again.

Will we hear this difficult teaching? Are we prepared to hear it? We are prepared to hear that we are loved. We are prepared to hear that we are forgiven. Are we prepared to hear that we must surrender, suffer, and die to be with him forever? This is a road that we watch him travel every Lent, every Holy Week. We watch him, in the last days before Golgotha. We watch him take our licks, bleed our blood, cry out our pain. We watch his flesh tear against the nails and this blood seep out of his wounds. We hear his last words. And feel the ground shake.

Yes, we travel with him in our way. But does it seem second-hand to you? Does it seem that we suffer and die with him three or four steps away? Behind the barricade, across the street, and around the corner? We can’t be there, literally. Not historically speaking, we can’t. We can enact, of course. Dramatize. We can recreate in gesture, symbol, word. Third person participation in a First Person act of vicarious sacrifice. It tastes of plastic, made up and weak.

Does it have to? No, it doesn’t. The chances that any of us here will find ourselves scourged and nailed to a cross for the faith are right at zero. This is a fact of historical circumstance; it is where we are in time and the place we live. We might suffer humiliation in the media or a kind of death in scandal. We might even act in such a way that we find ourselves jailed for our beliefs. I suppose we could find ourselves martyred in the right part of the world: Islamic Africa, communist Asia, killed just for being the voice of Christ, a witness to his freedom.

But I don’t think we have to be jailed, beaten, and killed to find a way to surrender, suffering, death, and resurrection. Will you hear this difficult teaching: “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.” If you cling desperately to who you are right now, with no other purpose, no end beyond living the next minute, the next hour, you will lose the life you have been given. Why? Your life has purpose, meaning—to live with God in holiness now and in beatitude forever! If you turn that goal into mere existence, dumb living, then the point of your being here is murdered. If you hate the life the world tells you to live—the life of momentary pleasure, easy sin, temporary happiness—then you will see beyond the illusion of the Lie and serve what is permanent and life-giving, liberating and eternal. You will serve him, the one who has given your life to our Father.

To do this, to serve him, you must give yourself to Christ. Surrender completely. No reservations. Nothing held back. This means that what God wants for you must become your first concern. His will for you must come before your politics, your “needs,” your self-control, your anger, your grudges, your debts, your hatreds, your loves, anything and everything must be heard and seen through the Father’s will for you. We must be subject to the Father. Perfected in obedience. And nearly ready to explode with the need to serve! We must be ready at any moment, at every hour to repeat Christ’s prayer: “It was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name in me.”

That’s surrender. What of suffering? We suffer well if we feel our pain with a purpose. Having surrendered everything to Christ, even our pain, everything of ours now belongs to Christ and perfects his work in us. We can experience pain like an animal. Or we can suffer, experience pain with a purpose, use it to perfect our obedience, our permanent openness to hearing the Father’s will for us. There is a stark, white clarity to suffering; a way that it has of focusing the spirit, tightening the will. Put it to work serving others. Give it to Christ for them. To what he did and suffer for them.

That’s suffering, what of dying and rising again? Not yet. Two more weeks. Death and resurrection in two more weeks.

Until then, remember: you are the seed of His glory. And you have some hard questions to answer before and during Holy Week: will you die today? Will you surrender to Christ and follow him? Will you suffer to be with him at the cross? To be with him on the cross?

Will you hear this difficult teaching: “Where I am, there also will my servant be.”

Heretic. Blasphemer. Criminal. Rebel.

4th Week of Lent (F): Wisdom 2.1, 12-22; John 7.1-2, 10, 25-30
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation

Hear it!
How would you like to drive up to Plano, get out of your car at Central Market, and have the folks in the store point at you and yell, “Hey! Isn’t he, isn’t she the one they are trying to kill?” Now, me personally, I would forget the glories of bulk couscous and organic coffee beans and head back to the car! What could be more disconcerting, more disturbing than to find yourself among your own people and marked for death, truly reviled, and hunted? Of course, not everyone was out to kill Jesus for his alleged blasphemies, not the small people or the pushed-aside, but those in charge, those with the political and religious power had labeled him a cancer, a riotous tumor to be found, diagnosed, and cut out of the body of the State and the Temple.

Why? Heretic. Blasphemer. Criminal. Rebel. Take your pick. The problem, essentially, is that the Son of God has come and he is sweeping through history, grabbing the threads of creation, tying and untying the knots of everything that was, everything that is, and everything that will be. He is binding and loosing whatever is loose and bound, and quaking the foundations of the Way Things Are Done. But perhaps most importantly, Jesus’ public ministry points to the consummation of the people’s grandest story, their most fundamental cultural narrative: the prophetic birth of the Messiah, the coming of the Christ among them. Anxiety rules because God is about to make good on His promise to give them a Victim whose sacrifice will split the Temple veil and bring them back, again, out of exile, out of sin, and make them into a nation of priests, a prophetic family, and heirs to His kingdom.

For them and for us, to reject Jesus, to reject Christ’s ministry as our redeeming sacrifice is to reject a history of generous covenant with the Father, to reject a history of prophetic witness to His law given for us, and to reject in history His revelation, His manifest goodness and beauty.

To deny Jesus now, to deny Christ’s ministry as our redeeming sacrifice, is to deny the truth that we are forgiven our rebellions, to deny the truth that we are reconciled among ourselves—that we are a Church, a single Body in Christ—; it is to deny the truth that we are saved, once for all, by his sacrifice on the altar of the cross.

To fear Jesus now, to fear Christ’s ministry as our redeeming sacrifice, is to fear freedom from the slavery of sin, to fear a future set right for holiness; it is to fear the guarantee of our own divinity, our final Beauty, in Him.

To reject, to deny, to fear Jesus is to reject, deny, and fear our history, who we are now, and who God will make us to be forever. Jesus said to the trembling crowd, “You know me and also know where I am from.” He then claims to be from the Father, the one whom they do not know. And they try to arrest him…out of fear, denial, rejection. But his suffering was not due; his time of betrayal and pain was not yet.

His sacrifice and our redemption will wait two more weeks, two more weeks for us to witness his power, his glory.

It is two weeks before iron bites wood through his flesh and blood and we are free…forever free.

Signs and wonders, signs and wonders

4th Week of Lent (M): Isa 65.17-21; John 4.43-54
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

Hear it!
Why do we flock to churches where an image of the Blessed Mother is allegedly weeping? Why do we thrill over stories out of New Orleans that entire churches were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, yet the statues of Our Lady of Prompt Succor were spared? And more recently, our Catholic papers and blogsites were loaded with reports that a consecrated host in this very diocese was found bleeding in a glass of water.

Signs and wonders, signs and wonders. Why do we thrill at these reports? Why do seek to be shown that which we already know to be true? When Jesus says in this morning’s gospel, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe,” are we the “you people” he’s talking about? I can confess here and now that there are times when I find myself seeking signs and wonders, wanting something unusual, something otherworldly as a sign of God’s presence, as a signal that He is working in my life. In some ways this desire grows out of our very natural desire to be with God, to seek Him out and dwell with Him forever. But we cannot get away from Jesus’ exasperation: you will not believe unless I show you something miraculous, something wondrous. You can almost hear him sigh.

You can hear the impatience of the anxious father, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” Jesus is worried that the people of Israel aren’t hearing his word, that they aren’t hearing him as The Word, and thus clamoring for signs and wonders as proof that he is who he says he is. The father is worried about his dying child. Despite his fretting about the people’s need for miracles to prove his identity, Jesus heals the official’s child and the word of this miracle spreads.

If Jesus is worried that his miracles are a distraction from his gospel, why does he heal the dying child? Why reinforce this faithless clamoring for signs and wonders by performing more signs and wonders? Could Jesus look into the eyes of the terrified father and deny him? Could he sit there with this man and tell him, “I will not heal your child b/c all these signs and wonders are distracting you from believing in me”? No, of course not. Notice carefully that the father believes Jesus’ word before the miracle is confirmed. This man begs Jesus for the life of his child not for a sign that Jesus is God. And this is why Jesus gives him his miracle.

When we thrill at reports that consecrated hosts are bleeding, or that rosaries are turning to gold in the presence of a Marian apparitation, what are we asking of God? What need are we confessing when our hearts leap at news of the allegedly miraculous? Are we running after supernatural confirmation in order to ease some lingering doubts? Are we hoping to soothe some fear, some worry by investing our trust in a remote possibility, some off-chance wonder?

We do not have to run after signs and wonders—not the kind reported in the tabloids anyway—b/c, first, the greatest sign, the grandest wonder we have as Catholics will occur on that altar in the next ten minutes: the sacrifice of the Mass; second, we don’t have to run after signs and wonders b/c we ourselves are signs and wonders, we ourselves constitute revelations of God to one another. Incomplete individually, yes. More perfect together, absolutely. We are here this morning at the prompting of the Holy Spirit and gathered in Christ name, that’s hope, that’s faith!

Thrill then at being here in the presence of Christ as a sign of God’s love, as a wonder who unveils his mercy, who reveals all the possibilities of his fatherly grace to everyone you meet today. That’s what we do as a people of the Cross and the Empty Tomb.

It's time to bathe...

4th Sunday of Lent 2006: 2 Chr 36.14-16, 19-23; Eph 2.4-10; Jn 3.14-21
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul’s Hospital, Dallas, TX & Church of the Incarnation, Irving, TX

Hear it!
I’ve been feeling rather proud of myself this last week! I got up early everyday and said my rosary. Spent thirty minutes in front of the Blessed Sacrament on my knees. Prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet and the Forty Days Prayer for Lent. I did all this before breakfast, without food, in our unheated chapel at the priory. I don’t mean to boast, but you know, I feel really, really holy, like I’ve really managed to get God to love me a little more, maybe I got a little closer to convincing Him to let me into Heaven. One morning, one of the other brothers just popped into the chapel for a second. Just bopped through like a rabbit and grabbed one of those missalette things and ran off. Guess he’s not interested in saving his soul. Well, I tell you, not to boast, of course, I’m determined to earn some Heaven Points today. I’m saying the rosary two more times, praying the Stations, and doing a few prostrations before the Blessed Sacrament! That should top off my grace account for the day.

Man, you know, working for redemption ain’t easy! But at least I’m working, right? At least I know that God loves me when I’m working for His love. I’m not like those other friars in my priory—I can fast more often, kneel longer, pray louder (and in Latin!), I adore the Blessed Sacrament instead of the TV, spend time with the Blessed Mother instead of the computer, and I know I’m holier because my habit is cleaner, and I iron it too! Jesus loves me best and most because I deserve it. You know, I’ve earned it.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you’re absolutely sure that you’re holier than the guy kneeling next to you at Mass? That you are most certainly better loved by God, closer to redemption and better insured against Hell? Look right now at the people around you. Can you tell who God doesn’t love as much as He loves you? Who isn’t as close to Heaven as your hard work has gotten you? They’re just spiritually lazy, right? Don’t you have a solemn duty to let them know that they’re being spiritually lazy, that they need to work a little harder for their grace points? Don’t you, as one more loved by God, have a duty to monitor their spiritual progress and correct their faults so that they will earn as many points as possible? Don’t you have a responsibility to save them, to save them from themselves for Christ?

No. You don’t. And do you know why? Of course you do! Grace ain’t earned. God’s love cannot be worked for. Our salvation was accomplished 2,000 years ago on the Cross and out of the Tomb, and no amount of kneeling, fasting, praying, boasting of holiness, monitoring our brothers and sisters, correcting others’ faults, or walking the Stations during Lent will get us one more ounce of redemptive grace, not one step closer to the Father’s mercy. Listen to Paul again: “[…] by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.” His love for us is not our handiwork. We are the Father’s handiwork. We do not conjure His love. We can stand in awe. We can offer thanks. We can bend the knee in adoration. We can even fall flat on our faces in righteous humility. But we cannot earn, buy, beg, steal, or in any shape, form, or fashion bank God’s love.

You’re probably thinking: “OK, Father, why are you on about this again!? Didn’t you just prattle on about this recently?” I’m on about this again because I think we all need to be reminded, especially in Lent, that God loves us and that our redemption, the healing of the Original Wound, is done and nothing we can do now will make redemption more available or freer or easier to get. Lent brings us to a powerful recognition of our mortality, a kind of panic about the years left to us and the weight of the years behind us. Lent dangles before our eyes our lives of sin: our disobediences, our many failures to love. It is uniquely a season for us to pull out of our souls all the festering junk that poisons us and set it ablaze in the desert. That vulnerability, that nakedness can leave us open to alien notions about grace, ideas foreign to our tradition. Our bishops know this well, so we have today, in the middle of Lent, John’s gospel on Christ’s love for us. How fitting!

Any time we spend with God alone leaves us naked in His glory and every blemish, every smudge, every little imperfection in us shines like a beacon. God does not love us despite our blemishes and little imperfections—as if we will live with Him forever stained with sin. No! It is because He loves us first and always that He opens a way to cleanliness for us and then He leaves us to wash. We do not earn the invitation to bathe. But we must bathe to enter His house.

Whoever believes in him will be saved. Whoever refuses to believe in him is already condemned.

I said to you earlier that no amount of fasting, prayer, or kneeling, none of these, will get you one more ounce of God’s love. This is true. It is true because you have every once of God’s love right now. He sent His only Son to die for us. He loves us as Love Himself, caritas per se. There is no love for Him to hold back. No love held back for Him to reward those who work harder. Deus caritas est. God is Love. And God is a person, Jesus Christ.

Our Holy Father, Benedict, in his first encyclical, teaches us, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” Perhaps too boldly, I want to elaborate on our Holy Father’s teaching: being a Christian is not the result of righteous work or well-earned grace, but the result of “bumping into” the love that is God, the person of Jesus Christ, the Christ who freely accepted his death on a cross for us, and in so doing, makes it possible for us to live with him everyday of our lives and with him always in glory.

Pray. Fast. Kneel. Fraternally correct. Prostrate. Confess. Do penance. It is Lent! Be repentant, absolutely! But know that your spiritual athleticism will not save you. If you pray, fast, kneel, and do penance to earn God’s love, you will not grow in holiness. If you pray, fast, kneel and do penance because God loves you, in the full knowledge that your redemption is accomplished, then your work will be a blessing and holiness will prosper. The temptation of this wonderful penitential season is to fall into the Devil’s trap of believing that the Father expects us to earn His approval, His love. This is evil. The truth is that we are loved now, always. And we are loved sacrificially.

By grace we have been saved, raised up with him. By the light of this truth may our works be clearly seen as done in Him, with Him, and through Him.

Brothers and sisters, it’s time to bathe!

Love grows through love.*

3rd Week of Lent 2006 (F): Hosea 14:2-10; Mark 12.28-34
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory and Church of the Incarnation

Hear it!
Think back to about three weeks ago when we started this desert trek. Back to when we were told to never forget that we are ash and to ash we will inevitably return. Remember packing for the trip, loading up our need for righteousness, our longing for forgiveness, for mercy, packing all the essentials for desert living, for living alone with God for forty days. Remember your urgent need to be done with worry, your rush and scurry, your hassled spirit and serious heart. Remember the temptations—the voices of skimpy charity, spare hope, and mean faith—those temptations that panic at your resolve to walk a clear path to God alone, and in their panic they sweeten their tune, sharpen their logic of scarce grace and argue persuasively for despairing impatience and the quick-easy immediacy of self-righteousness.

(Isn’t it so much easier to give up on God and find the salvation we long for in our own honorable work, our own well-designed world?)

Remember ash and longing and the dry burn of Lent; remember the lure of effortless annihilation, simply falling quietly into nothing and being done with it all. Remember the original rumor, the one first heard in a lush garden, the hissed promise of self-made divinity: “You can be a god without God.” That’s a different sort of nothing: a darker loneliness.

If you have remembered all of this, let me ask you: do you remember that this time away, this time in seasonal exile is about love? Do you recall why we do this every year, why we set aside the forty days before Easter to fast and pray and be alone with God? We do it because, as Jesus teaches the scribe today, “The Lord our God is Lord alone!” And because He alone is our God, we will love Him singularly, extraordinarily—Him alone. And we will love Him with everything that gives us life. We will love Him as His image and likeness, as His created revelations of truth, goodness, and beauty.

And because we will love Him first and most, we are able to love one another. It follows then that our most obvious failures to love one another betray, first and most, our failure to love Him. Our Holy Father, Benedict, writes in his letter on God, Deus caritas est, “I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own”(n 14). Jesus’ commandment to the scribe to love his neighbor as he loves himself is grown root and branch out of his first commandment to love God alone. And both the first and second commandment to love are deeply planted and richly nourished in the ancient revelation: “He is One and there is no other than He!”

Lent is our seasonal exile. A time away to be alone with God who is Love. It is desert and wasteland and trial and temptation. It is also rich, fertile ground for our growth in holiness if we remember that we are His and His alone. We will not be God without Him and we cannot be nothing with Him.

Three weeks in and we hear Jesus say, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.”

*Pope Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, n. 18.

Leave it there!

1st Week of Lent 2006 (F): Ezekiel 18.21-28; Matthew 5.20-26
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving and Church of the Incarnation, Univ. of Dallas

Hear it!
I’ve decided to spend the rest of Lent in the desert west of San Antonio. I’m leaving right after Mass. Nothing but me, the sand, the hot wind, and a few lizards. I’ve packed the absolute essentials for desert survival: nonperishable food, lots of water, light but durable clothing, portable shelter…my laptop and printer, my cell phone, a small TV with satellite feed and TIVO, a microwave oven, an electric razor, a minifridge, portable air conditioning unit, a CD player, two trunks of books, a full set of vestments and Mass kit, twelve pairs of shoes, a cappuccino machine, and a table-top Kitchen-Aid mixer.

I’m also bringing a thirst for God, a hunger for righteousness, a longing need for love and hope, a contrite heart, several wounds that I won’t let heal, a couple of well-nursed grudges, some petty competitiveness, three sins that even God can’t forgive, a quiet self-loathing rooted in a fear of the flesh, several strange obsessions with rules and ritual observances, self-righteousness, pride, an envy of others’ gifts, a couple of huge decisions that I have to make soon, an unwillingness to say thank you to God, and a sure sense that I deserve more than I’m getting. With all of that and that minifridge on my back, I should be dead within a week!

No, I’m not going to the desert west of San Antonio. And, no, I’m not carrying any of that stuff around. But I am wondering how tempted we are to treat out Lenten retreat just this way. Are you tempted to bring into this time of survival in the desert alone with God all of the extraneous things of your life, all of the excesses of stuff, excesses of anxiety, hurry, plotting and planning, hurts, fears, lapses in holiness? You are? Good!

In some sense, I think this is the right way to do Lent! Bring all of this along. Bring your doubts, your panic, your rushing around, all your future preparations, all the sins you can’t or won’t let go of. Bring it all to the desert of Lent! But leave it there. Take it all into the desert and leave it there. Leave it all to the fired wilderness, the scouring sand, and burning wind. You are here among the cacti and lizards for forty days to survive alone with the Father, to be set ablaze with the austerity of a simple need—a need for Him alone.

This is the time to run after righteousness. A righteousness that surpasses that of the scribes and the Pharisees. Run after the righteousness of a heart scrubbed raw by humility. Not a heart stressed to failure by meticulous rule-following or showy acts of religiousy compliance. Or a heart murdered by useless anxiety, self-pitying guilt, or a deep love for unhappiness. Jesus dares us to a righteousness, a justice of the spirit that settles us firmly into the peace of our Father’s rule.

You are dared by Christ to surrender, to just give up, give up everything that bends your back, hardens your heart, darkens your spirit. You are dared to walk into the desert naked and alone, and find there the peace of His kingdom, the rule of His eternal favor. And find Him there rejoicing at your freely offered sacrifice of a heart burned bare, your heart set ablaze by a longing, an aching need for His mercy.

Pagan babbling, Christian prayer

1st Week of Lent 2006 (T): Isa 55.10-11; Matthew 6.7-15
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

Hear it!
Do you babble like the pagans or do you pray as Christ taught us to pray? To babble like a pagan is to rattle off memorized lines like a fifth grader streaking through a recitation of a bad poem for an English class. To babble is to believe that those memorized lines of bad poetry are magically effective, some sort of voodoo that gives one control of God. Pagan babbling is also almost always about “just getting it done,” a formal “doing one’s duty,” pro forma obligation fulfillment so that the goodies may now start to fall from heaven. Christians cannot pray this way because there is nothing magical, merely formal, or hurried about how we talk to our Father.

We do not pray to change God’s mind. We do not pray in order to negotiate with God. Our prayers are not spells that if perfectly performed guarantee perfect results. For us, to pray is to ask God for good things, to offer Him praise and thanksgiving, to intercede for others with Him, to bless and adore Him, and to be still, quiet in His presence, waiting on His fertile Word.

St. Gregory of Nyssa says of prayer, “Prayer is intimacy with God […]For the effect of prayer is union with God[…]” What we do in prayer is bring ourselves as a living sacrifice to the Lord. We give ourselves up so that we might be made holy in Him. We turn our hearts over to Him so that we will be made proper instruments of His living Word. We surrender our will, humble ourselves in a pure act of creaturely awe. Prayer is the perfect answer to the Lord’s gratuitous summons to live with Him now, to participate fully in His divine nature forever. We cannot babble nonsense because we pray His Word for us, in us, through us.

God speaks to Isaiah, telling him that like giving seed to one who sows seed and bread to one who eats bread, the Lord will give His Word to those who will speak His Word so that that Word will not return to Him as wasted sound, mere breath but that it will do His will, doing all those things that the Lord wills it to do. In other words, we are given prayer so that we might know and do God’s will. The words we speak in prayer, if we pray in His Spirit, are, in fact, The Word—not just any old words, but The Word given to us, planted in our hearts to produce excellent fruit, to spread like abundant vines, and to be shared copiously with any and all.

Christ the Word made flesh teaches us to pray, a particular prayer and a model of praying. He teaches us to call God our Father, the One Who made us from nothing. We bless His Name, so that we can be living witnesses to His blessings. We pray that His kingdom will come for us and through us, working in the world as agents of His Spirit, members of His body to do what His Word asks of us. We pray for what we need not because He doesn’t know our needs, but because by asking for what we need we are truly humbled—not degraded—but made better aware of our dependency on Him for everything we need. We ask to be forgiven in the same way that we forgive. A daring prayer! And we ask for protection against temptation and evil.

None of this is babble. It is the Word given to us so that our words glorify Him, so that our hearts and minds are shown His love for us, so that we are made ready for our lives with Him now and in glory forever.

With the Devil in the Desert

1st Sunday of Lent 2006: Gen 9.8-15; 1 Peter 3.18-22; Mark 1.12-15
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, University of Dallas

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I find him sitting with his back against a rock, staring at the heat waving above the dry-cracked river bed. He smells of hot cedar smoke, burnt bees’ wax, and drying sweat. When my shadow touches his bare feet, he moves them away and turns as if to look at me, then stops and stares again at the blistering sand. I wave my hand to greet him, my shadow again touching his feet and legs. This time he doesn’t move. It’s always the same with him. He knows I’m here. Right here with him. But he stubbornly ignores me or moves away at my dark touch. I take a deep breath, gather my silk robes around my legs to sit, and as I fall into place in front of him, he sighs and begins to pray aloud. Scratchy, mumbling nonsense. Groveling little bits of spontaneous poetry and half-remembered words and phrases stolen from thin, crumbling scrolls. I just listen and wait. Most days we sit together in silence like this, waiting on one another.

When the sun touches the tallest mountain, he stops muttering. The dry burn of the desert wind eases a bit. There’s a promise of wet air, of moisture from somewhere out of the north. I clear my throat. I see a small smile on his lips. Just as I open my mouth to argue again, wild beasts begin to gather near us. This happens every night about this time. And I am surprised again, always surprised, by the fierce brilliance of the crown of angels that seems to float miles away behind his head. Tensed to fight, they just hold there radiating His glory—a sky crowded with angelic mirrors flashing His beauty. How very servile of them to pose so. How very grand it all is. A perfect waste of power.

I catch him watching me watch his ministers. You see, he knows that I know that he won’t call them. He could. No doubt. But he won’t. It’s a matter to pride with him. That’s my secret weapon: his pride. He’s the favored Son. I’m the fallen Daystar. He’s the Anointed One. I’m the Marked One. He is Righteousness and I am Rebellion. And I’m here, again, to show him the error of his Way, to offer him something far better than a life wasted on dumb humility, unrequited love, and pointless sacrifice. I am here to tempt him away from his self-destructive path, away from the terrible, bloody death that those dirty little apes he loves so much will give him. I will show him riches, power, and his own pride. I will tempt him to resist me on his own, without those shiny angels coming to his rescue!

I gather myself for the show, for the theatre of the absurd that will surely wake him up to his desperate folly. But before I can collect myself fully, he starts to chuckle. Just a small laugh at first. Then he burst out with a deep guffaw! A belly laugh from the Son of God. I just stare at him. Surely the heat has driven him mad. He stops. And he opens his eyes, looking at me, through me, right to the center of the goodness that is my very existence. I fumble for an excuse, some reason to protest the invasion of my privacy, but I can only stare back at the fullness of beauty, goodness, and truth that He Is.

Without moving he says, “Perdition, you are here again to lie to me, to put between me and our Father a temptation. Do it then.” I swallow hard and plead, “My Lord, can’t you see that the course laid out for you is disastrous? Can’t you see the possibilities for us, the potential of our rule if you would turn to me for help? Can’t you see your ignominious end? The scandal of it!” He chuckles again, “You are worried about scandal? Try another one, Deceiver. Put yourself behind me so that I may go forward. You are dust and wind.” He gently waves his hand toward the cooling desert. I grow angry at his dismissal, “Wow! You really are stupidity itself, aren’t you. Wasted power, wasted opportunities.”

I sputter for a while longer, hoping that my indignity at his rudeness will move him to talk to me again. Nothing. I conjure images of wealth—jewels, fine horses, palaces. Nothing. I conjure images of power—a throne for the worlds, slaves, armies. Nothing. Finally, I conjure images of personal dignity—his freedom from the trails ahead, the esteem of his rabbinical colleagues, the love of the crowds cheering him. Nothing. Again, nothing.

I gird my silk robes, bracing myself for one final assault on this mulish Nazarene. I shout at him: “You’re proud! It’s pride that makes you think you are better than my gifts, too good to pick up what I give you. Pride!” He shifts his feet under him, rises to stand before me. He looks over my head as if reading a text behind me, “You are nothing, brother. Shapes, shadows, quick glimpses, and shallow sighs.” My indignity is unmatchable! “I am Lucifer, Morning Light! I am First Chosen of the Angels! I know who I am!” His eyes move to focus on mine. He squints against a finally setting sun, “I will teach you who you are. Fallen creature. Sinner. Liar. Killer of Hope. Tempter. I know your true names: Perdition. Chaos. Betrayal. You cannot win with me because I am driven here by the Spirit of our Father to fast and pray and to prepare myself for what I am about.”

Panicked, I reach for what I have, anything at all, and say, “They won’t love you for your sacrifice, you know? They will not come to you after you are betrayed and convicted, and sent into the dead ground. They will deny you. They will run and hide and waste time pointing fingers and accusing one another. I will make sure that they forget you.” If anything he looked calmer, “Yes, I suppose you will. But they like me will have their forty days in the desert, their time and place apart to burn away the excess, to trim the burdensome and ridiculous, to pray and serve, and to remember that they are dust—dust given life by our Father’s breath and made holy in His love for them.”

What arrogance! The man is insane. I have to ask, “You came into this dead waste to pray and serve and to remember that you are dust? You? The favored Son? The Messiah? You fled to this place? Why? Why would you do such a stupid thing?” Again, he smiles slightly at me, at my vehemence, and says, “I will teach you again, Satan. I am in this desert for forty days to remember the journey of Moses and his people out of slavery. I am in this desert for forty days to teach those to come how to live with our Father. I am here to survive with Him alone, to live stripped of pretense, theatre, guile, and luxurious want. I am here so that those whom you will tempt tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will know that they need only to call upon the Father’s mercy, to repent, believe the gospel, and then know that they are free of you forever.” His eyes blaze for a moment, then calm again.

I give up! My time with him is up anyway. My time with him is wasted breath. You, you however, well, you’re just beginning, aren’t you? What, day five or six, now, of the forty? Come, let me show you to my favorite rock and the riches I can offer you. Let me show you my toys, my little inventions, and help you choose a Way more to my…I mean…your liking.

So tell me, little ones, what tempts you?

Here I am

1st Friday of Lent 2006: Is 58.1-9; Psalm 51.3-6, 18-19; Matt 9.14-25
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Serra Club & Church of the Incarnation, Univ. of Dallas

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A homily in three parts:

I. Psalm 51

We pray for mercy, God’s compassion. Relying on His goodness, we acknowledge our sins, the guilt of our disobedience, and beg His mercy. Asking for mercy, begging to be cleaned from our sins when we deserve punishment for them is audacious. Or is it? Audacity requires risk, a gamble of sorts. Audacity is a kind of daring against the probability of failure, a cheeky, swaggering bravery that risks one’s life, one’s reputation. We dare God’s mercy and ask for it with humble and contrite hearts. There is no audacity there. Without doubt, knowing with trembling hope that we will receive mercy, we ask nonetheless because asking is how we are changed, how we are perfected. Animal sacrifices are vain gestures, blood offerings poured over deaf stone. The Lord hears our sacrifice when the victim offered is our heart humbled, a heart that knows that He is our Only One, and when the victim is our contrite heart, repentant and turned to Him. We know that we will not be spurned. But we ask so that we will be changed. Ask, be changed, and hear the Lord eagerly say, “Here I am!”

II. Isaiah

Fasting simply to fast is pointless. Fasting with a quarrelsome heart, with selfish goals is not fasting. When we fast for reasons other than to glorify the Lord in our mortality, we fail to fast, fail to sacrifice. Oh, we may give up something, we may deny ourselves all kinds of things. But fasting is fasting only when we do it to glorify the Lord, when we do it to set aside a day and make that day acceptable to the Lord. And what makes a day acceptable to the Lord? A day acceptable to the Lord starts by making our righteous voices heard, heard on high. Without holding back, with full-throat, we are to cry out our sin. Bending our heads like reeds and putting on sackcloth and ashes is not what the Lord wants when we fast. What does He want? The fasting He will see and reward is the loosing of those unjustly held, “untying the thongs of the yoke” of those who are enslaved. Sharing what He has given us with those who have no homes, no clothes, and taking gentle care of our own. On this acceptable day, this day of righteous fasting, will we be healed, our wounds dressed and nursed, with our absolution going ahead of us to announce the mercy and love of the Lord. Fasting is holy service and not merely mortal deprivation. True fasting makes it possible for us to call out to the Lord for help and hear him say, nearly breathlessly, “Here I am!”

III. Matthew

What do you mourn? What have you lost and now long for? Who do you mourn? Who is it you have lost and now grieve for? To fast is to mourn, to lament passing life, impermanence and passing days into passing nights. Fasting brings to mind again the lack, the absence of what is necessary, what is needed for joy, for flourishing. So fasting is a kind of memory, a way to remember what is lost, who is lost. And a way to remember that who and what is lost is necessary, very much needed. Fasting is not always ash and tears and torn clothe. It is a way to recover, to regain. It is a way for us to cry out to the Lord, to wail his name in distress and hear him, gently, with confident comfort, say: “Here I am.”

The pride of dust

Ash Wednesday 2006: Joel 2.12-18; 2 Cor 5.20-6.2; Matt6.1-6, 16-18
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

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Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning. Rend your hearts! Not your garments.

Where do we begin this pilgrimage of forty days? How do we get this time away, this time apart from worldly obsession started?

What jumpstarts our Lenten pilgrimage is first an awareness of our dependence on God for absolutely everything. That we exist at all is contingent, totally conditioned on the goodness of God. Our lives are gratuitous, freely given, radically graced.

Begin this Lenten trek, then, in humility and give God thanks for your life.

If your Lenten pilgrimage is going to produce excellent spiritual fruit you cannot spend these forty days wallowing in sorrow, self-pity, and mortal deprivation. We deny ourselves always if we would grow in holiness, but this isn’t the kind of denial that looks like the public posturing of the Pharisees. Our Lenten denial is the self-emptying of Christ, that is, our best work at doing what Jesus did on the cross. Lenten denial is about making our gratuitous lives sacrificial. We sacrifice when we give something up and give it back to God.

Therefore, turn your heart over to God. Give your life back to Him. Repent of your disobediences, rejoice in His always ready forgiveness, and then get busy doing His holy work among His people.

If your Lenten trek is going to be about little more than pious public display, don’t bother with Lent this year. Jesus teaches his disciples that performing righteous deeds for show—fasting, giving alms—will win you nothing from our heavenly Father. He calls those who strut around showing off their piety hypocrites. It’s a show, pure theater. Nothing but thin drama for public consumption. He says, “[…] when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you may not appear to be fasting[…].”

Jesus’ admonition here is about our tendency to think that we’re doing something substantial when really all we’re doing is something very superficial. Does that rosary around Madonna’s neck really mean she venerates the Blessed Mother? Does the cross of ashes most of us will wear today mean that we’re truly humble before the Lord? That we’re wholly given over to repentance, to a conversion of heart, and a life of holy service? If that cross of ashes is going to be a mark of pride for you today or a temptation to hypocrisy, wash it off immediately. If that cross of ash is going to be the sum total of your witness for Christ today, wash it off immediately. In fact, when you fast, wash your face.

Our Lord wants our contrite heart not our empty gesture. Our Lord wants our repentant lives not our public dramas of piety. When you pray, go to your room and close the door. When you fast, wash your face. When you give alms, do so in secret. Rend your hearts not your garments.

The Lenten pilgrimage we begin today is an excursion into mortality, a chance for us to face without fear our origin and our destiny in ash. It is our chance to practice the sacrificial life of Christ, giving ourselves to God by giving ourselves in humble service to one another. Lent is our forty day chance to pray, to give alms, to fast and to do it all with great joy, smiling all the while, never looking to see who’s noticing our sacrifice.

Remember, brothers and sisters: dust is never proud.

New and Improved with Fresh New Scent

8th Sunday OT: Hos 2.16-17, 21-22; 2 Cor 3.1-6; Mark 2.18-22
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, University of Dallas


Ladies and Gentlemen! Welcome one and all to the Newest, Happiest, Shiniest Show on Earth! Welcome one and all to the Latest, Trendiest, Freshest philosophies available on the planet. We offer you the most innovative, the most original, the most novel means to perfect happiness, total freedom, ultimate satisfaction, AND shiny and more manageable hair! Our colors are brighter, our aromas are sweeter, our textures softer, and our sound, WELL, our sound is louder, sharper, and clearer than ever! We work around the clock to insure that no opportunity to improve, to change, to revolutionize our finest products is ever missed. We have research facilities packed with the best-educated people in the universe, working 24/7 on ways to make your contentment a ready, easy, and inexpensive reality in a SNAP!

Ladies and Gentlemen, you are tired of being tired, run down from being run down? Are you exhausted by the work of enlightenment, holiness, and just plain ole Being Good? I have right here the Secrets of the Ancients! The Keys to Total Fulfillment! And the Elixir of Eternal Life! It’s new, it’s shiny, it’s the Latest Thing, and, boy, does it smell good! Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you:___________________! And it can be yours for the low, low one time price of your soul, or you can pay in installments over your lifetime with just one Big Sin a month. That’s right: just one Big Sin a month! How easy is that? All you need to do is surrender your reason to intellectual and media fashion; surrender your will to herd and flock morality; rent out your body to the cosmetic, diet, and pharmaceutical industries, and worship at the altar of celebrity politics, and VOILA!, you’re a vacuous, trend-following, bubble-headed neo-pagan just like the rest of us! Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Hell!

Hear the Lord this evening: I will lead you into the desert and speak to your heart. You will be espoused to me in fidelity, and you shall know the LORD. The letter of Christ is written not on tablets of stone but on your hearts of flesh. The letter of the Law brings death, but the Spirit gives new life. Therefore, He says, new wine needs to be poured into fresh wineskins.

Newer, shinier, and fresher, the Spirit of the Lord moves over His creation to renew, to polish, and to refresh. He moves over His creation to bring to life again the desire to seek after, to find, and to live the good life of holiness in Him. He speaks to our hearts with a voice spilling over with love and mercy, with a voice steeled against swift judgment and vengeance. His is an eternal voice, a Word spoken long ago and right now, at the beginning of all things and at their end. He renews life b/c He is Life. And He touches our place of covenant with Him, our hearts. He touches them as the One Who gives us tempo and blood, pulse and breath. We are espoused forever, espoused in right and justice, in love and in mercy. And we know the Lord!

The pimps of pop-culture and academic fashion need for you to believe just one thing in order to hook you, just one thing. They need for you to believe that YOU can make yourself new. They need for you to believe that you are deficient, incomplete, all so that you run to them—the purveyors of fashionable thought and ever-evolving philosophies. They feed on our anxiety, our firm suspicion that something isn’t right, something is missing and deeply wrong about our lives. We could be better, more productive, more energetic, more alive! Sure we could! But how? Building on these small worries, they create larger worries, bigger anxieties by constantly dragging in front of us the new and improved, the latest and brightest.

And we buy it. Over and over again, we buy it. And the more we buy it, the more they sell it and we become a culture more and more enslaved to the lie that I alone can make myself new; I alone can bring renewal to my sadly inadequately, shamefully deficient life. The fact that I alone, just like everyone else, have to sell my soul to celebrity and fashion in order to be this renewed individual is missed entirely, hidden in the sparkle, the electric rush of novelty. We cannot renew ourselves. Sure, we can shine ourselves up, trim down, brighten our teeth, wear new clothes, and get all our fat and sagging parts sucked thin and tightened up, but we cannot renew ourselves.

We cannot pour the new wine of our espoused spirits into the old wineskins of fashionable lies.

Though we cannot renew ourselves, we can be renewed. We can find ourselves remade, refashioned, and completely redone for the Kingdom. But this transformation is the work of God through His church not the work of the cultural prostitutes who would sell us anything to get their hands on our Everything—our souls, our reason for being here, our covenant with the Father. We are espoused, promised to God by God, in righteousness and justice, in love and mercy, so that we might know Him, so that we might have as the foundation, the rock bottom foundation, of our lives His fidelity, His faithfulness, and…Him—His presence among us, the Spirit of Life, the Bridegroom of this wedding feast. And it is in being with us that He renews us, in the sacraments, in the Word proclaimed and preached, in His creation, and in one another through charity and service, covenant and ministry.

Standing in stark contrast to the gospel of self-renewal and suicidal individualism is the gospel of the renewing Spirit preached by Christ and his apostles, handed down in promise to their children, and given to us in the faithfulness of the Lord’s Church. You can nip, tuck, suck out, work off, rethink, revision, plan, work out, project, and self-actualize and still find yourself restless, bored, exhausted, hungry, empty, and weak. You can retreat, study, massage, align, and mediate and still find yourself craving, needing, searching and not finding. There is nothing to discover. No secret to reveal. No exercise program or diet to follow. There is God’s mercy, His invitation to us to share with Him His divine life. There was our first Yes and our everyday Yes, our first fast and our everyday fast.

There is the temporary and the eternal, the passing and the permanent. We are free to attach ourselves to fleeting illusion or graced presence, to the refundable moment or to the renewing foundation. We can listen to and heed the seductive voices of our culture’s carnival barkers, spending our divine gifts on ideas and movements and celebrities that will sour, dry up, and blow away like old wine. We can gather around and gawk at the shiny new toys, the bright new ideas and innovations, eagerly entertaining the temptations of alien philosophies, the spurious promises of faked prophecies, borrowed spiritualities, and tourist religions. Or we can remember who we are: espoused of God forever in love and mercy, in right and justice; ministers of the new covenant commended by the Spirit and given new life. We are disciples of Christ, new wine poured into fresh wineskins. Forever beloved. Always forgiven. And again and again made new. Always new.

Will you live your life commited to one faith and one Lord? Or will you live as a marketing stat, a poll demographic, a victim of novelty’s populist cult?

The Spirit alone give life.

Patience. Perseverance. Permanence.

7th Week OT(F): James 5.9-12; Mark 10.1-12
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory & Church of the Incarnation, Univ. of Dallas

Hear it!


The first few jobs I had after I left grad school had a theme: I kept families apart. My job was to keep husbands away from their wives, to keep children away from their mothers and fathers. I worked for Child and Family Services in the battered women’s shelter and in the treatment facility for children and teens who had been sexually abused by family members. My job as an employee of the county was to help these folks provide for themselves what they couldn’t, wouldn’t provide for themselves without help: stable, drug-free, abuse free family lives. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we didn’t. Whether we won or lost, I saw over and over again the hopeless choices people were making, sometimes forced to make, in the struggle to get along, to just make it. And it was almost always the case that what drove them to a debilitating despair was the false Spirit of Choices Without Consequences. What I saw acted out again and again was the farce of the human person believing that his or her choices were utterly free from prior commitment, utterly free from consequence, and utterly free from any sort of moral evaluation. Of course, this particular farce was written long ago and is, quite possibly, the longest running show in human history. And, if I had to guess, we’ve all played a part at one time or another, large or small.

Both James and Jesus direct their evangelical spirit to the question of forming lasting friendships, unbreakable familial and social bonds. And neither one of them say much that we want to hear. James tells us that we must look to the prophets who persevered in the face of constant hardship, working out of an enduring patience against opposition and oppression. Patience. He says that we call “blessed” those who managed to stick with it to the end, those who persevered like Job. Perseverance. Jesus tells us that marriage is more than a convenient social relationship based on mutual attraction for the other’s cool stuff. It is a permanent bond, two becoming one flesh, a bond made by God that cannot be put aside. Permanence.

There are two pieces of Good News today. The first is that the Lord is compassionate and merciful. The second is that our Yes and our No will mean precisely that when given in the spirit of patience, perseverance, and permanence that James and Jesus preach.

Against the vanities of the age, this age of disposal relationships, Instant Message Marriages, and quickie “hook-ups,” our Yes and No in Christ witnesses to the truth of the existence of the absolute, the universal, the enduring, the permanent, and the unambiguous. Our Yes and No in Christ stands as testimony to the possibilities and the power of surrender, sacrifice, and emptying out to be filled again with the Spirit. The mercy and compassion of God toward us and with us and through us transform our daily commitments into gifts of service, gifts of patience and, yes, oftentimes, into gifts of trial and grief. But it is precisely because we have said Yes and No in Christ that these trials will not always be trails and grief will not always be grief.

We have seen the purpose of the Lord: our life in the Kingdom right now and our life with Him eternally.

Sure, we have all played some role or another in the longest running farce in human history—the script plotted to make us believe that we can act without commitment, without consequence, free from all moral evaluation. Our Yes and No in Christ has closed that show. Demolished the theatre. We play on a new stage now in a play directed by the mercy and compassion of the Lord.

Risking against the impossible

7th Week OT (M): James 3.13-18; Mark 9.14-29
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

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Not a very impressive exorcism. Great show before the main event though: foaming at the mouth, gnashing of teeth, flailing about. But not a very impressive exorcism. A simple command made in faith through prayer, a few more jerks and shouts, and, “It came out.” Done. No twisty head, no spewing split-pea soup, no cryptic messages pressed against the flesh from inside the boy’s body, no rattling off quotes from long-forgotten texts in longer-forgotten languages. Not impressive at all. Boring, in fact.

I wonder why Jesus bothered. He had a great crowd gathered. According to Mark the crowd was growing by the second. Jesus has time for a few loud supplications to the Father, time for a couple of florid thanksgivings and elaborate praises. He even had time for a quick garment-rending and maybe a dramatic fall to his knees (if he hurried). He had more than enough time to tap up the drama, to milk the crowd, to show off and make a point. But he didn’t. Instead, upon seeing the rapidly growing crowd, he concluded the real drama of this scene and cast out the demon tormenting the boy. What was the real drama? The Father’s struggle with belief and unbelief.

You can almost see the distress on the father’s face. There’s torment there and love and a sort of dreadful hope, the kind of hope that one needs to feel in order to keep going, but at the same time the kind that is often broken against the impossible, too often made into a lie by the improbable. Just imagine that barely above a whisper, the father, with great reluctance and equally powerful expectation, says to Jesus, “If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” And then there is that long moment between giving his hope words, the long wait between expressing his trust in the power of a stranger and the stranger’s answer, “’If you can!’ Everything is possible to one who has faith.” Is it relief? Or joy? Or more desperation? The father cries out, “I do believe, help my unbelief!” Wise man. He understands that his unbelief is at the root of his often dashed hope. And he understands that it is his belief that will give that hope healing power.

“Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show his works by a good life in the humility that comes from wisdom.” James could be writing about the father of the demon possessed boy. The drama of his admission of faithfulness, of belief, to Jesus (I do believe!) and then his plea for help, his admission of faithlessness, of unbelief, (Help my unbelief!) is wisdom. This is an act of true humility, a confession of total trust now and a confession of debilitating doubt then, a historic doubt that daily killed his hope. The fruit of his righteous belief sows peace for himself and his son.

The boy’s father makes a humble admission in wisdom: “I trust you, heal my distrust.” And Jesus works with this prayer to cast out the demon. Like this father’s faith, our faith is never about quantity, about having “enough faith.” We don’t “have faith” in the way that we “have money.” Faith is the habit of trusting God to do what He says He will do. Our faith, our habit of trust in God, can be measured in depth, strength, endurance, or sincerity, but never quantity. Nor will we often find our faith on stage, at the center of a drama, and so publicly tested. But there is in us a virtue, a habit of being, that makes it possible for us to reach out to God and say without fear, “I believe, Lord!” and confess without fear, “Help my unbelief!” This is wisdom from above, full of mercy and good fruits.

The drama of our faith is the risk we take when we hope against the impossible.

I am doing something new...

7th Sunday OT: Isa 43.18-19, 21-22, 24-35; 2 Cor 1.18-22; Mark 2.1-12
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul’s Hospital and Church of the Incarnation

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The Lord is doing something new. Always new. And we, well, we keep doing the same old things over and over again. The Lord is bringing us fresh water, good food, cheerful company. And we, well, we bring flat sodas, stale bread, and stingy, griping hearts. The Lord laughs and we cry. The Lord forgives and we nurse our wounds. OK! We’re not that bad, but I’m making a point: it is Who God Is to bring in, to make welcome, to spread abundance, to forgive offenses, to make well, induce joy, persuade to repentance, and to reconcile. It is Who God Is to send out over and over and over again the summons for us to come back to Him, to return to His family, and rest in His abundant love and grace. Like the man paralyzed, we can be made sick by sin, paralyzed—spiritually—with fear, anxiety, self-loathing, and a nearly insatiable longing for forgiveness. And like the paralyzed man, we can be healed. But do we (do you?) want it? Do you want to be healed?

The Lord is doing something new. Always new. And we, well, we keep doing the same old things over and over again. The Lord is healing the sick—the leper, the man born blind, the man born deaf and unable to speak—; he’s tossing demons out of long-possessed souls, freeing them from the grip of the Evil One; he’s teaching his law of love and his law of mercy to his students and the crowds; and he’s standing there and here, hand out, waiting, waiting, waiting for them, for you, me, for us to take it and get well. To be reconciled, made whole again. Do we (do you?) want to be healed? What possesses us and prevents us from the simple act of reaching back, taking Jesus’ hand, and making all things right again?

The Lord is doing something new. Always new. And we, well, we keep doing the same old things over and over again. The paralyzed man, lowered from the ceiling, is not hoping to be given the freedom of his arms and legs again. There is no guesswork there at all. He knows his healing is in reach. He knows his freedom, his recovery is right there in the person of Jesus Christ. The wiping away of his sin, the washing clean of his spirit is just inches away. And he knows that he will rise, pick up his mat, and walk home. The scribes doubt; they fidget and worry, murmur and twitch about the alleged blasphemy, the seemingly outrageous claim of Jesus to heal by forgiving sins. But they end up astounded; they end up glorifying God, and saying with everyone else: “We have never seen anything like this.” Their doubt is banished by undeniable evidence. What prevents us (you?) from reaching back to Jesus for healing, for forgiveness?

The Lord is doing something new. Always new. And we, well, we keep doing the same old things over and over again. One very harmful “same old thing” that we keep doing over and over is believing that we can come to good spiritual health on our own. We can work at prayer hard enough, labor away at fasting and abstinence long enough, plug away at fighting temptation, engaging in spiritual warfare, and building up enough credit with God over time that we can cash it all in and buy some grace, purchase for ourselves a little piece of divine real estate. Maybe turn away the Lord’s anger with a neat little gift of holy work. Yea. Good luck with that.

Let’s be perfectly clear: the battle against sin and death is over. We won. There is no battle to fight. To war to wage. There is no work left to do. Jesus won the last battle on the Cross. Sin and death are dead. We are free. That we continue to sin results from the exercise of that freedom; its abuse. The right use of our freedom enslaves us to God’s will and yanks us gleefully to the Father to do His holy work for others. Our Father’s love cannot be earned; it cannot be bought; it cannot be begged or threatened or negotiated for. How can it? It is ours already. Freely given on the altar of the Cross. Freely given on this altar of sacrifice. Why would it ever occur to us (to you?) to kill ourselves working to pay of something that is not only free but ours (yours) already?!

The Lord is doing something new. Always new. And we, well, we keep doing the same old things over and over again. Another harmful “same old thing” we do is cling to our sins once they are absolved. We mull them over, worry about them, fret that maybe, just maybe the Lord missed one, or that I didn’t really feel sorry enough for that one, so it’s still there. Sins forgiven are sins forgotten. Let them go. No one cured of cancer fondly remembers the tumor. So, why do we cling to our sins once they are forgiven? There is a appropriate sense of guilt at work here. Good people feel guilty about sinning. Good, they should. It means they are fundamentally good people and not sociopaths. But completing the assigned penance is enough. You are forgiven. Now forget and rejoice in your victory! If you won’t hear me, hear what the Lord said to us through Isaiah: “You burdened me with your sins, and wearied me with your crimes. It is I, I, who wipe out, for my own sake, your offenses; your sins I remember no more.” Your sins I remember no more.

The Lord is doing something new. Always new. And we, well, we keep doing the same old things over and over again. OK. You’ve had some time to think about it: what prevent us (you?) from reaching back to Jesus, from laying claim to the freedom of the Cross, from going to confession? No doubt it’s different for everyone, but my guess is that it is b/c the sacrament of reconciliation not only requires confession of sins, contrition, and penance, it also requires repentance, conversion of heart and mind and the resolve to sin no more. Conversion is the hardest thing we do as Christians. Conversion means taking a hard look at our lives from God’s view. Making a clear, honest assessment of where we are with God, where we’re going, and saying with some integrity: “I’m stuck. And I’m stuck b/c my sin is weighing me down.” The grace to move toward the sacrament, the spiritual energy (if you will) is provided by the Holy Spirit. If you feel moved, prompted to confess—do it! The Holy Spirit is thumping you on the head and saying, “What are you waiting for? Your sins are forgiven. Go claim your victory in the sacrament! I have work for you to do and you’re just sitting there stuck.”

Our Lord’s invitation to live with Him forever is open-ended. Always there, always new and fresh. The victory against sin is won. That battle is over. We just have to claim the victory, reach back to Christ through his church, name our sins, ask for forgiveness and feel the freedom of a white-washed soul, a pristine spirit, ready for doing the Lord’s work in the world. The Lord is doing something new. Always new. And we, well, we keep doing the same old things over and over again. But we don’t have to—we are freed from destructive routine, habitual sin, malicious memories of our past, the compulsive need to earn mercy, and the reluctance to face our sin and ask for absolution.

We are free. We are healed.

Rise! Pick up your mat! And come home!