Law, License, Hypocrisy

Beheading of John the Baptist: 2 Thes 2.1-3, 14-17 and Matt 23.23-26
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

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NB. I liked this homily at 5am this morning. Now, I dunno...it seems a little confused to me. Too many peices competing for too little space and time. (Fr. Philip @ 12.20pm)

Always in our struggles for holiness we are tempted to weigh too heavily on the side of the Law or on the side of License; we become unbalanced, top-heavy or bottom-heavy, and we either fall over or become immobile. The most obvious indication that we’ve given to much time and energy to one or the other—Law or License—is the presence of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is evidence for all to see that we have succumb to the temptation to take the quick and easy way out of our spiritual struggle and simply elect to either idolize the Law or idolize License. Hypocrisy is not about failing to live up the standards you truly believe in. Hypocrisy is the failure to apply to yourself the standards you apply to everyone else.

Jesus blasts the Pharisees as hypocrites because they pay very careful attention to the minutiae of the Law while ignoring the more difficult, the “weightier,” things of the Law. He accuses them of straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel, of being self-indulgent pirates. Blind to their own hypocrisy—as we often are—they cannot be reliable spiritual guides for others. The Pharisees have become top-heavy with the Law and they tumble easily at the word of a righteous man.

The Thessalonians seem to be dealing with another problem: a lack of direction, a failure in local leadership, and perhaps, some hypocrisy resulting from a bottom-heavy preference for the rule of License. Paul has to warn this Christian community not to jump at very “spirit” that claims authority to reveal secrets or get all wound up over some new letter or new gospel that shows up at their assemblies.

License rules here b/c the community is ignoring or even rebelling against legitimate ecclesial authority. Either some the Thessalonians themselves or recent converts from other places are trying to grab power and influence by appealing to new revelations about Christ, new revelations about salvation. Using false letters and false spirits, they want to undermine authentic apostolic authority with appeals to that same apostolic authority in order to set themselves up as apostolic authorities! Hypocrites!

So, where’s the balance for us btw Law and License? The balance is Freedom. And it’s expression is found in this letter from Paul: brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught; stand firm against false teaching, that is, teachings that clearly contradict the story of our salvation history; stand firm against attempts by apostolic posers to lay claim to Christ’s authority and lead us over a spiritual cliff; hold fast to the truth of the faith as spirits of dissent, disappointment, and anger wash over the church; hold fast to the beauty and goodness that the Father has revealed to us in His Son and in one another. Open your hearts to be fortified against the picayune naggings of legalistic bookkeeping spirits whom you imagine tally your sins and crank out a lengthy bills. Open your minds to be fortified against the corrosive waves of libertine spirits whom you know snatch at your reason and dissolve it in pretty of vats of sophist potions and stir it with the soft-headed rhetoric of relativism.

Freedom—the balance btw Law and License—is the gift of the ability to follow Christ to the Father and become perfect in His love. We are freed from sin, not freed to sin. When we preach the truth of the faith—even when we fail to live up to that truth—we hold fast and stand firm, avoiding hypocrisy.

To preach anything else but the truth of the faith is an exercise in self-indulgent pirating—stealing from the blind their chance to see, stealing from the deaf their chance to hear.

Idols eating dirt

St. Augustine: I John 4.7-16 and Matthew 23.8-12
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

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We’ve all had friends who work themselves into a sweat trying not to conform, trying not to be “normal.” One of my friends in my pre-Catholic days regularly outdid the most extravagant efforts of most pretentious bohemians. I won’t go into details…suffice it to say that her non-conformity involved multiple piercings, odd hair colors, lots of black clothing, and the imprudent use of peacock feathers. ‘Nuff said. When I would gently prod her about the extremes of her attention-seeking public theatre, she would defend herself by saying something like, “I hate those little 100% cotton suburban robots and their Mary Kay face paint and their stupid little lives. I can’t be them!” I never failed to point out that despite her protests to the contrary she spent a great deal of time letting these suburban robots master her life. They controlled her by example, an anti-example, perhaps, but she looked to them for instruction on how NOT to live and therefore gave them total control over how she actually lived. They were for her idols to both worship and destroy.

This is the problem Jesus tackles. Don’t call anyone on earth your Master or Teacher and don’t be called Master or Teacher. This isn’t about titles of respect, honorifics. It’s about who you will look to for instruction. Who you will follow. Who you will obey. And it’s about how others will come to follow you. How others will come to obey you. You will look to the Christ for instruction. You will follow and obey Jesus. And if you will lead, you will serve. Not dominate. Not control. But serve.

Those who put themselves on altars—or allow themselves to be put there by their followers—always find themselves eating dirt in the end. Why? Idols are caricatures. Bad imitations. And worse examples. The Psalms tell us that those who make idols and worship them end up just like them: with eyes that cannot see, noses that cannot breathe, hearts that do not beat. And since it is the job of an idol to fall, idol worshippers end up in the dirt with their god. Whether our idols are religious leaders, politicians, Hollywood stars, athletes, or the people we hate to love, they will fall; they will fail and we along with them.

If you would lead, you will serve. And you will do so in humility, in the full knowledge that everything you have, everything you are is a gift from the Father to you for you to give to others for His glory. We are given our lives by the Father through His Only-Begotten Son. As John says in the epistle: “In this is love”—the gift of our very existence is an act of love—“not that we have loved God”—not that we have done anything to merit this gift of existence—“but that he loved us”—but that He willed that we exist, that He loved us into life. And gave us each gifts of service so that “his love is brought to perfection in us.”

Lead us by serving us. Teach us in word and deed. Show us the humility that the gifts of God require for their perfection in you. Love us b/c the Father is love. And loved us on a cross to His only Son’s death. Make no idols to self-sufficiency or secular power or professional achievement or athletic prowess or intellectual ability; make no idols to poetic genius or scientific invention or musical virtuosity or artistic skill or technical know-how. Do not make idols of the Father’s gifts. Rather perfect those gifts in service. Call no one and no thing Master or Teacher but Christ. And do not be called Master or Teacher but servant—well-gifted by the Father, fully humbled, and worked into a sweat, ready to serve.

Rattle them bones

20th Week OT: Ezekiel 37.1-14 and Matthew 22.34-40
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

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Prophesy over these bones! Prophesy to the spirit, prophesy, son of man! The people of God have been saying, “Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, and we are cut off.” The people of God have been saying, “Our Church is in ruins, our priests are lost, and we aimlessly wander a new desert without certain Truth, without sure teaching, without good Christian example.” Therefore, prophesy over these bones! Prophesy to the spirit, prophesy, son of man and say over these bones, “Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! Thus says the Lord: I will bring spirit into you, that you may come to life[…]O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them[…]I have promised, and I will do it, says the Lord.”

And surely He did: the birth, life, suffering, death, and resurrection of His Only Son for our redemption fulfilled this promise, bringing His people back to Him, making us a nation of prophets, priests, and kings, making us a holy family, participants in His Divine Life through His Son. And yet, with Ezekiel, we can walk the plains of the Church and see in every direction dry bones, members of the Body dying and drying out, worrying themselves raw with scandal, dissension, contests over how we will pray together, pitched battles over who and what counts as “Catholic,” and who has power and who doesn’t and on and on. Sometimes my own hands ache with anxious twisting and I think my bones will dry out worrying. Surely, our hope is lost, and we are cut off.

Thus says the Lord, “O my people[…]I will put my spirit in you that you may live!” And that spirit, the Holy Spirit, is the love that the Father and the Son have for one another, the love that breathed the Word over the void: “Let there be Light!”; the Word spoken to Moses and Aaron and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the Word spoken to the prophets—“Thus says the Lord!”; the Word spoken to Mary by an angel; the Word conceived in her womb and given to the world; the Word that knocked Paul off his horse; the Word that silenced the naysayers who ridiculed Jesus; the Word that healed the blind, the lame, the deaf, the demonically possessed, and brought the exiles home; the Word that defies Roman law, suffers Roman violence, dies on a Roman cross, and bleeds for the salvation of Rome and Jerusalem and Athens; the Word that breathes its last across the world, rips the temple veil, and re-creates the whole of creation—a New Man, a New Covenant, a new image and a new likeness.

If we will participate in this creating and recreating Word, this breath of God and the love of the Blessed Trinity, we will hear this commandment with ears eager to obey, eager to listen: You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, your soul and your mind. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. You shall. Not a suggestion. Not a wistful hope. You shall. That’s an imperative. A command. And it means that we hold in our hearts, our souls, our minds the whole of the law and the prophets, the salvation history of a holy people—not drying bones and wasting flesh, not hearts flabby with worry or stretched thin by anger, not minds clouded with alien philosophies and speculative theological junk, but hearts and minds eternally abandoned to God, just thrown away to His will.

Can these bones come to life? Ezekiel answers, “Lord, you alone know that.” We can answer, “Yes! Even dry bones have hope in Christ’s love. Our dry bones can love since Christ has loved us first.”

Sonship of Jesus, Queenship of Mary

Queenship of Mary: Isaiah 9.1-6 and Luke 1.26-38
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

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One week from her assumption into glory, we celebrate the Blessed Mother’s crowning as the Queen of Heaven. Why? Why do we call her “Queen of Heaven” and why do we celebrate the event?

Every liturgical celebration of the Blessed Mother is always a celebration of her Son first. I mean, we celebrate our Mother’s conception, her birth, her life, her motherhood, her suffering and her assumption into glory always in reference to her mission and ministry in bearing the Word into the world, in giving birth to the Christ for the salvation of all creation. As the handmaid of the Lord, we honor her as the Blessed Virgin. As Jesus’ mother we honor her as our Mother in faith. With Christ her Son, the King, we honor her as Queen. She is Handmaid, Mother, and Queen because Jesus is Lord, Son, and King.

Mary no more needs our honor than the Father needs our praise. Our desire to praise the Father is His gift to us for our growth in holiness. We have nothing to contribute to His perfection; we have nothing that He lacks b/c He lacks nothing. We honor Mary, a creature like us, though lifted above us, for her fidelity to the will of the Father in becoming the Mother of His Word. But our praise adds nothing to her glory, nothing to her honor in heaven. To praise Mary is to ignite in us the desire to imitate her fidelity, to follow the path she has blazed for us to her Son. As a people who once walked in darkness, we have seen a great light and that Great Light is the Prince of Peace.

Following our Mother in faith to the Great Light, Jesus Christ, is first a matter of surrender, surrendering our will to the Will of He created us in His image and likeness, surrendering who we pretend to be without Him so that we become who we are made to be with Him. The creation-rattling fiat of a Jewish peasant girl is exactly how we come to the Father: “May it be done to me according to your word.” Mary is Queen of Heaven b/c she was first the Handmaid of the Lord.

In the encyclical establishing this memorial, Ad caeli Reginam, Pope Pius XII wrote: “We are instituting a feast so that all may recognize more clearly and venerate more devoutly the merciful and maternal sway of the Mother of God. We are convinced that this feast will help to preserve, strengthen and prolong that peace among nations which daily is almost destroyed by recurring crises”(ACR 51). Right now, this is the greatest reason to honor our Mother, to offer her praise for her fiat. Can we watch the evening news without wondering if we will destroy ourselves in waves of avarice and hatred, endless repetitions of domination and vengeance, and the idolatrous worship of violence, of terror and war?

Celebrating our Mother, honoring her sacrifice, praising her gift of her life for her Son—these will get us moving on the way to peace, but it is when we follow her in her surrender to the Father’s will that we achieve the true peace of Christ, the perfect peace of absolute freedom in righteousness.

Mary brought into the world the One who broke the slavers’ yoke, the taskmasters’ rod. We start this day by honoring her surrender as a handmaid and her exaltation as Queen. Can we live the day and end it doing more than giving her honor? Can we repeat, loud and clear: “I am the servant of the Lord! Let it be done to me according to His Word!”

Living wisely on the Bread of Heaven

20th Sunday OT: Prov 9.1-6; Ephesians 5.15-20; and John 6.51-58
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Paul Hospital, Dallas, TX

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What does it mean for a Christian to live foolishly? It could mean living outside the church’s care, outside the historic embrace of the living tradition that guards and hands on the priceless arts of our faith’s lived-wisdom—the stories, the teachings, the creeds that we use to become saints. Living foolishly could mean buying tickets on one of the many inevitable cultural train wrecks that will litter our social landscape soon enough—the dilution of personal responsibility in a culture crazy for genetic causes; the multiplication of atomistic souls perpetually jacked into IPods, laptops, and cell phones; the ease with which death comes to be a reasonable reaction to daily inconveniences. Living foolishly could be something as “old-fashioned” as living in sin, living in defiance of the Father’s will for our lives, denying divine providence; or maybe something like living a life of unhealthy risk, constant stress and trauma, living outside rational deliberation, on the edge of chance and chaos.

We can live foolishly a hundred different ways, a thousand! But only one way to live offers us wisdom. Paul writes, “Watch carefully how you live, not as foolish persons but as wise[…]do not continue in ignorance, but try to understand what is the will of the Lord.” Living in ignorance of the Lord’s will for your life is what it means to live foolishly, to live without wisdom, without His guidance and care. A fool believes he wisely maps his life by considering all contingencies, covering all possibilities, insuring against all inevitabilities, but leaving the Father’s will off the map the fool guarantees that the biggest possible picture, the grandest scale of his life-campaign is missed entirely. Without God, without His grace we are nothing. Literally, “no thing;” we are not.

And here is where the arts of our faith’s lived-wisdom, handed on to us, are the most help. If you are Catholic, you simply cannot plead ignorance of the spiritual life. You cannot say with any integrity, with any expectation of being seriously believed: “I didn’t know about the life of wisdom! I didn’t know I had access to the treasures of our tradition!” If you make it to weekly Mass, you already have access to the priceless pearl of the Father’s revelation in the proclamation and preaching of the Word. You already have ready access to a communal life of prayer that lifts up praise and thanksgiving to God and petitions the Father with the indomitable intercession of the community of saints. You already have access to the living bread, the flesh and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, given in sacrifice for us all and eaten at his command for our growth in holiness. You already have an open door to heaven, a cleared path to your final union with God, a greased shoot straight up to the Throne!

Living foolishly with this much wisdom just hanging around is near suicidal!

When you attend Mass, properly disposed, you eat and drink of the Lord’s body and blood, taking into your body and bloody the substance of the One who suffered, died, and rose again for our everlasting healing. True food, true drink he remains in us and we in him and we come, at our end, to Life because of Him. The foolish call what we do today—this sacrifice, this familial meal of his body and blood—they call it a “mere symbol” or a “simple memorial” without objective effect, without salvific consequences. Jesus says, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life[…]the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.”

My life, your life is caused—granted, given, gifted—by the life of Christ in this sacrifice of the Mass—not mere symbol, not simple remembrance, but Real Presence and efficacious sacrifice—the folding of history by the power of the Holy Spirit so that Then touches Now and the one death for many on the cross is Here for our thanksgiving and praise. We do not sacrifice Christ again—over and over each Mass—but re-present, make present again his single sacrifice of the cross, our only means of salvation.

The will of the Father for us, our life in wisdom, is that we live together praising his Name, eating at His table, forgiving one another, outdoing one another in charitable acts, teaching and preaching the truth of the faith in love, witnessing to His mercy by seeking justice, and, quoting Paul, by “singing and playing to the Lord in our hearts, giving thanks always and for everything” in the name of Jesus our Risen Lord!

Yoked to Love

St. John Eudes: Ephesians 3.14-19 and Matthew 11.25-30
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

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We have two priestly prayers. Two prayers to the Father offered for the benefit of others by Paul the Apostle and Christ our only High Priest. Mediating between God’s people and God Himself, these two priests stand at the limit of their worlds, holding each fully, giving testimony to what will be out of what already is.

Paul, in his ministry as apostle, uses his prayer to draw the Ephesian church into the fullest possible in-dwelling of the Spirit, casting his people confidently and freely into the hands of Christ, calling upon them the sure knowledge of Christ’s love for them and looking well past the immediate moment toward their final end in a love that outshines, extravagantly exceeds mere knowing. They are, and we are, to be filled with the fullness of God!

Christ, in his ministry as Messiah and High Priest, uses his prayer to publicly praise his Father for the unique revelation of His power and mercy to the poor in spirit; speaking over the heads of the wise and learned, the Father opens the veil to show His face to the childlike—He “hands over” to His Son “all things” and Jesus announces that no one may come to know the Father except through the exclusive, the final revelation of His Anointed One, the Christ. And lest this appear to be a onerous condition, an illiberal prerequisite, Christ turns his prayer to the people and eases any anxiety about the weight of his singular Messianic revelation: “…my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” Why? B/c he’s done all the heavy lifting in the work of our redemption.

Paul prays that the Ephesians will be given the strength to understand the “breadth and length and height and depth” of Christ’s love. He prays that, in essence, that their Spirit-gifted understanding may be so complete, so completely absorbing that what is left of the human heart and the human mind is God. God alone. Love alone. Deus caritas est. God is love. This revelation of divine charity, the Father’s love for His children, is made singularly by His Christ, only by the Son, for the ultimate purpose of accomplishing in us our redemption. Along the way, we learn from his teaching and his example what it means to put on Christ’s yoke, to be guided in the rows of righteousness, to be lead into all the possibilities of peace and humility.

These priestly prayers put us squarely before the Father—ready or not!—to be taught the “hidden things.” If we come as the wise and learned to take on the yoke, that is, if we come to the field filled with information, stuffed with worldly wisdom, Christ’s yoke will only feel that much heavier. The childlike, the poor in spirit, come with a docility that radiates a readiness to be taught, an admission of holy ignorance yearning to be cured. (I can witness to the fact that this is not an attitude academics take on easily!) But it is exactly this meekness that imitates the Christ in his acceptance of the Father’s will for his life. Obedience makes his sacrifice on the cross possible and makes it efficacious. An unwilling sacrifice blesses nothing.

Ask yourself: what conditions have you placed on your acceptance of Christ’s yoke? What prerequisites must Jesus fulfill before you assent to his teaching?

What can be lighter than a meek heart yoked to Love?

The Popular Kids

St. Jane Francis de Chantal: Prov 31.10-13, 19-20, 30-31; Mark 3.31-35
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, Serra Club Mass

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I won’t ask how many of you were popular in high school! I was fortunate enough to find myself slugging through high school at a time in our culture when we were all challenged to perfect postmodern irony—the glib rejoinder to hard reality, the smart-alecky twist to every serious situation. We were also challenged to match pink/green/blue/yellow plaid pants with burgundy and purple Izod button-downs…but that’s a different homily! My point is that I was reasonably popular in high school b/c I was gifted by my parents with a sense of humor, a sharp enough tongue, and something like the ability to seem set back from it all, away, removed somehow from the fray, being at once engaged and separated. At the risk of sounding too therapy-ish, I wanted to be a cool kid but being a cool kid meant being distant, untouchable. To be included was to be self-excluded, and ironically, welcomed.

Among the first hints from Jesus that his gospel will not be limited to the Jews is this short passage from Mark. Teaching a small circle of disciples, Jesus is interrupted by the circle with the news that Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters are outside asking after him. Rather than jumping up to welcome his family into the circle, Jesus takes this awkward moment to demonstrate a key point of his gospel message: salvation is no longer about who your family is, no longer about one’s tribe, no longer about connections, money, race, gender, or social class. Salvation is about hearing the Word and doing the will of God.

He asks the circle: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” I wonder if we can hear that question w/o irony nowadays—I mean, can we hear that question w/o hearing an inflection, a rhetorical lilt? We can speculate that Jesus has just completed a homily on what it means to be a hearer of the Word and a doer of the Father’s will. To hear the Word and then do the will of the Father is to become a member of God’s house, a householder in His tribe, a beloved son or daughter in His family.

The question about who his mother and brothers are isn’t a glib question masquerading as a “moral lesson.” It is a test question, a convenient chance to say, “Well, just as I was saying a few minutes ago, brothers and sisters, who indeed are my mother, my brothers and my sisters?” Like any good teacher, he jumps at a chance to make a concrete point: “Here you all are! Right here! Because whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

It is the will of God that we be happy. That we be happy in Him. That we find our end, our reach, our peace, our life in His Way. Created by Him to be seduced by His love for us, we are prodded, quite nearly dragged to Him by desire—an erotic pressure, a craving barrenness for His love. We are most perfect as ourselves when we hear His Word—the Word of scripture, the Word of creation, and His unique and final Word, Jesus Christ—when we hear this Word and do His will for us.

There is no irony in our faith, no glib condescension, or knowing winking at ill-kept secrets. Who are the popular kids? Who’s in? Who gets to sit in the inner circle and catch the fireside teachings of the Messiah? Whoever does the will of the Father. And here you all are—the Lord’s mothers, fathers, his brothers and sisters. Here you all are!

The BVM: Witness, Apostle, Preacher, Queen

The Assumption of Mary: Rev 11.19, 12.1-6, 10; I Cor 15.20-27; Luke 1.39-56
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Mary the Virgin Church,

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The small metal crucifix I wore on the outside of my shirt drew stares. It was something foreign, inexplicable, vaguely pagan to my Baptist classmates. The bent catechism given to me by my grandmother, a life-long Methodist, was ever ready in my back pocket, a easy reach and whip of the wrist to answer the ridicule and the curiosity of my friends. Once, during a debate with my best friend about the necessity of baptism for salvation, the catechism became a weapon. When I tried to show my friend the relevant passages in the catechism about baptism, she grabbed it from me and whacked me upside the head with it!

After some few days of silence on the subject, we resumed our debate. But as a high school convert who knew little to nothing about the faith, my witness was weak, sputtering, mostly protests against anti-Catholic stereotypes and bigoted myths. The experience of being Catholic in community would come some fifteen years later. After a long, difficult stint in the Episcopal Church and after years of studying the various “-ism’s” of postmodernism in an English PhD program, at 35 I answered a call, heard as a teenager, to serve the Body of Christ as a priest. But I still needed to learn how to witness to the faith, how to be an apostle worthy of the message. School is still in session.

The assumption of our Blessed Mother into heaven is a promise kept, a vow made good by our Father. Marking this day not only reminds us of the promise of the resurrection, the promise of eternal life, it also brings us back to our baptisms and gives us a few thumps on the head to remind us that we have vowed to be witnesses to the gospel, apostles of the Word—to be those who go out and give testimony in word and deed to the power, to the mercy, to the love of Christ.

The assumption of Mary into heaven is a consequence of her obedience, her YES, her faithfulness. Elizabeth says to Mary, “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” What is the engine of our witness, what pushes us out there to speak the Truth in Love? We believe what the Lord has spoken to us will be fulfilled. If we don’t believe this, we need to shut up.

If we are not witnessing to the Word, giving testimony to the power of Christ’s love and mercy, then what are we witnessing to? What is it that sits on your heart, dwells at the center of your soul, driving you to your chosen end? There is a supermarket of attractive alternatives out there. Have no fear that you will bored with the options.

On aisle two for Catholics frightened by orthodoxy we have a wide selection of Gnostic heresies, Greek inspired mystery cults updated for the postmodern Catholic soul—cryptic, kabbalahistic devices to plumb the wells of egotistical fantasy and distract the heart with sweet affirmations and pretty lies. On aisle six we have cases and cases of discounted secularism for those Catholics embarrassed by the transcendent—boxes of materialist dogmatism, doctrinaire scientism, and rigid moral relativism. Buy two and get a case of Political Correctness free! Then in the meat section we have for those Catholics tempted by worldly triumphalism fatty slabs of nationalism, militarism, partisanship, shelves loaded with the bloody idols of violence and death and oppression, plenty of raw hatred and scraps of vengeance for sale. Finally, on the candy aisle we have religious syncretism for those Catholics who think they are excluded by Tradition and Scripture—colorful bags of chocolate covered faux Native American rituals, creamy blends of Buddhist-Christian prayer wheels, honey-roasted Jesus avatars and bodhisattvas, and nutty Mother Goddess womanrites with glow in the dark Gaia rosaries! OK, a bit of fun…but these are the eclectic fascisms of hearts that remain unconvinced by God’s truth, unawed by His Beauty, and chilled by His Goodness.

What does your heart desire? What do you want? To what do you witness?

Elizabeth greets Mary, calling her blessed b/c she heard the Word spoken to her, believed that the Lord’s promise would be fulfilled, and in radical trust, gave herself to the keeping and birthing of the Word for the world. She is the Lord’s mother in history and our mother in faith. She is also an apostle of the gospel, a preacher of the Word, and in her maternal care for our Lord, a prophet—one chosen by God to show His people how to live in righteousness with the advent of His Kingdom. She is a sign of the Church and for the Church, a blessed creature given to a life of showing her Son to the world. She is who we should be now and who we will be eventually if we believe on our Father’s Word, witness to His healing mercy, and flourish in His grace to our perfection.

And I ask again: what does your heart desire? What do you want? To what do you witness? In her Magnificat-hymn, her homily of praise and thanksgiving to God, Our Blessed Mother witnesses to the crowding generations who will call her blessed, holding up for us the great things done for her by the Almighty; she witnesses to the mercy that flows from a proper awe of His glory, the strength of his justice; she witnesses to His love of the poor and His contempt of the proud and the mighty; she witnesses to His care of the hungry, His help for His promised people, and His ageless fidelity to Abraham and all his children. Our Blessed Mother’s heart desires the Spirit of the Lord; she finds food for her deepest hunger in His service, and with gratitude pours out a lasting witness, a testimony for the generations: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord!”

Perhaps the Assumption is not so much about what we have always known and always believed—that God took Mary body and soul into heaven—perhaps the Assumption is more about what we often need some goading to do: to believe that the Word of the Lord to us will be fulfilled, to believe His promises, and in this belief, this trust, offer our promised witness, honor our baptismal vows to be Christs in the world! If our Blessed Mother is who we should be now and who we will be eventually, then we will be prepared—intellectually, physically, spiritually, sacramentally—well-prepared to stand in the public square facing down the temptations of materialism, Gnosticism, relativism, violent nationalism, all the temptations that Good Catholics wrestle with, and we will proclaim the greatness of the Lord, rejoice in our Savior, bless His Holy Name, and refuse, always refuse, to offer worship to the idols of the culture.

What does your heart desire? What do you want? To what do you witness?

What do you need from the Lord to fulfill your promise to give Him witness? What strength do you need to weaken the temptations of a culture seemingly bent on social suicide? What gift can God give you to move you to offer Him praise and thanksgiving without ceasing? What do you need to bear His Word?

What will get you ready to be Christ for others?

Knackered and needing a nap

19th Sunday OT: I Kings 19.4-8; Ephesians 4.30-5.2; John 6.41-51
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation and St. Paul’s Hospital

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As the Brits say, “I’m knackered.” I’m tired. Done in. I bet you’re tired too, aren’t you? I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted by many things these days—constant attacks on the Church from anti-Catholic bigots in the media, in the government, even in the Church Herself! I’m worn bare by our own steady and often petty in-house bickering over questions of authority, liturgy, morality, Catholic identity, and on and on, ad nauseum. I’m weak and weary from wondering why some Catholic theologians refuse to teach the faith of the apostles; why some bishops and priests seem hell-bent on ruining the Church in one exorbitantly expensive zipper scandal after another; why some unsettled lay folks work so hard to turn the Roman Catholic Church into the largest liberal Protestant denomination in the US. I am worn out by the narcissistic guerilla tactics of self-appointed prophets and priests and delusional neo-pagans playing at being Catholic priestesses while the three-ring circus of 24/7 media coverage gives their self-serving twaddle all the light and sound any egomaniac would empty her trustfund to pay for….I’m knackered….and I bet you are too.

I think we need a nap. Something cozy with tea and a good book. Maybe some lulling classical Spanish guitar music or some traditional Japanese flute. A hammock or a daybed with cool sheets. Tinkling chimes fluttering in the wind, randomly ringing the day through…a light rain splatters the grass, cooling the air…ah, much better.

Waking from my nap, I read Paul’s letter to the Ephesians again and blush in embarrassment: “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God…all bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice.” Like a prophetic voice in my stubborn ear, Paul says exactly what I need to hear, what we need to hear in these tumultuous times: when we entertain and nourish bitterness, fury, anger, contention, malice, and scorn we grieve the Holy Spirit, the spirit with which we were sealed for the day of our redemption. In other words, we violate, do injury to the love of God for us, the love that engineered and accomplished our redemption. Paul says, “…be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving of one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.”

Easily said, St. Paul. But the Spirit of Bitter Contention and Rebellion is just waiting behind our crystal wind chimes to whammy us again with anxiety and fear and wrath. We say with Elijah, “This is enough, O Lord!” How do we recover the peace of Christ, the assurance of his love, the promise of his mercy? How do we live day to day with the seduction of wrath born in disappointment? With the temptation of contentiousness born in self-righteousness? How do we flourish as holy men and women when the delicious lure of morose delectation, our love for the deserved misery of others calls to us so sweetly? What help is there for us!?

Exhausted and despairing in the desert Elijah surrenders to his weakness and cries out: “This is enough, O Lord! Take my life…!” Worn out, he takes a nap. And wakes to find food and water. An angel appears and orders him to eat and drink. He does. And naps again. A second time he wakes, finds food and water. The angel orders him, “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!” He obeys. And walks forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God. With angelic prompting and solid food, Elijah defeated his weakness—his exhaustion and despair—and made good on his promised pilgrimage to God.

What help is there for us as a Church when tempted by the spirits of contention, rebellion, wrathful condemnation, and bitter rebuke? What food and drink is there to relieve our exhaustion, nourish our souls, raise our spirits, and calm the dangerous waters for our safe passing? Jesus says, “I am the bread that came down from heaven […] Amen, amen I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life […] I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

Our help, our binding assistance, the support we need and seek is the Eucharist—the sacrifice of the Mass, the supper of God’s family. We will find in the local worship of the universal church the abiding presence of Christ—in his temple, in his people, in his priest, and, uniquely, in his Blessed Sacrament. He is not here to loiter or fuss about or merely occupy a beautiful space. He is here to possess our hearts. To own our minds. Ready as food and drink for our bodies, nourishment for the pilgrimage to God that we promised to take at our baptisms. He is here as his Father’s promise fulfilled to make us His children, co-heirs to the kingdom, adopted sons and daughters of the Most High. He is here to make us the living bread, the living flesh and blood of Christ so that we then can live day-to-day as sacrificial offerings to God.

We must first sacrifice our bitterness, our bile, our anger and shouting, our scorn and wrathful condemnation. We must make these holy by surrendering them to God’s transforming love, His enduring compassion. He will give back to us His joy, His delight in us, His ever ready forgiveness, and His peaceful voice speaking an empowering Word of truth. Jesus says, “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.” We shall all be taught by God!

That we must be ready to remove from us the soul-killing voices of dissention, rebellion, bitterness, and contention does not mean that we must be ready to ignore or even coddle the Spirits of Deceit and Disobedience. Nothing about growing up to be Christs for others requires us to tolerate false teaching, listen to phony myths, or watch anti-Catholic bigots (both in and outside the Church) dismantle the Body given to us by Christ. Charity without Truth is not love; it’s merely lazy toleration. But Truth without Charity is mere accuracy, just fact—cold, hollow.

If we will imitate Christ as Paul exhorts us to do we will confront false teaching, phony myths and anti-Catholic bigotry with the Truth in Love—not sugarcoating the Truth of the faith with pretty platitudes or accommodating rhetoric nor failing to treat God’s children with respect, the dignity due them as the images and likenesses of God. We can witness to the faith, be apostles to the truth of our Catholic tradition without the exhausting work of putting on the spiky skins of bitterness, anger, and contention. We can make this pilgrimage promised so long ago with the food and drink of Christ Himself—our Eucharist, our sacrifice, our blessed supper and Who we will be in the end.

There is manna in the desert of our disappointments. There is cool drink in the dry wells of our bitterness: “I am the living bread come down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever!”

Accept the loss of all things

St. Clare: Philippians 3.8-14 and Matthew 19.27-29
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

PODCAST!
There is so much that pins us to this life. So much that grabs at our ankles and drag us back to love the temporary: the fleeting moments, the impermanent things. Chained to these things by a confused and confusing love for the immediate relief of desire, we can fail to look past what merely helps us survive in this world and fail to see the world of the eternal: the enduring moment, the permanent life of glory with God. So Jesus tells his disciples: “Everyone who has given up [everything] for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more, and will inherit eternal life.” Anyone who puts Him first, makes Him central, gives to Him the highest place of honor in their lives, and comes to understand that everything they do, say, think, pray, and feel, that everything they are is given purpose and power in His name—they, all of them, will look past the temporary into the eternal and see the face of God.

We must be careful though! We are tempted here to think of the world as a place of dark doing’s, a place of temptation and corruption. We might come to think that to be the best Catholics we must deny our bodies, despise the flesh, punish sin, constantly weep for God’s mercy, and find the Devil hiding in every human heart. Though surely there are times to deny the body and weep for God’s mercy, we are new creatures remade for joy and rejoicing! Of course, the human world can be dark, tempting, and corrupting, but it is also revealing of holiness. Like us, the world is not simply fallen—it is redeemed for a purpose.

Created by God for our prudent use, the world is not a prison nor is it a trap for our dirty bodies and ugly passions. All creation reveals the workings of the Blessed Trinity, shows us incompletely bright flashes of the divine, revealing God’s company among us. But the creature is not and can never be the Creator and we must never fail to understand that nothing here, nothing created can ever relieve the relentless hunger for God, the nagging need for the waters of the Holy Spirit.

Paul writes to the Philippians: “I consider everything as a loss b/c of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things, and I consider them so much rubbish…” And b/c he has made Christ the center of his life, he has come to righteousness, a relationship with God that can only come through faith in Christ, that is, by trusting Jesus first among the people, things, and ideas of this world.

Ask yourselves: what do I trust more than God? Who do I trust more than God? What causes me anxiety? What do I cling to for security, for safety? My money, my house, my identity, my politics, my theology, my piety? What would it mean for me to lose everything? Think of Paul and ask: could I consider everything lost b/c of Christ so much rubbish? Am I prepared to share his sufferings? Conform my life to his righteousness? Can I forget what lies behind, strain forward to what lies ahead, and pursue the goal of obeying God’s upward calling?

We are chained to the passing and blind to the eternal only b/c we chose to be. There are no chains and our blindness is long healed.

The Canaanite Woman: Agent of Change?

18th Week OT: Jeremiah 31.1-7 and Matthew 15.21-28
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

PODCAST!
Is the Canaanite woman a revolutionary? A paradigm-breaking agent for radical change in the Church? Yes, I believe she is.

Walking along with his disciples, Jesus is confronted by this Gentile, this unclean woman who pleads for his attention and his help with her demon possessed daughter. The disciples, annoyed by the interruption and likely frightened by the prospect of becoming unclean themselves, beg Jesus to dismiss her, to put her in her place by sending her away. Jesus speaks to the woman, telling her exactly what the disciples expect him to say, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” You can almost see Jesus cocking his eye toward his students, watching for their predictable reaction to his expected rebuke of the woman’s insolence. Undeterred, the woman simply pleads for help—a raw outpouring of humility and need, of despair and want: “Lord, help me.”

For some this passage is about the man Jesus being confronted by his cultural and social limitations: the woman teaches Jesus a lesson—her professed need and desperate faith changes his mind about his mission; or it is about Jesus challenging the social structures of the Jewish culture, “crossing boundaries” and “engaging difference” in order to show his disciples that the gospel is really about radical inclusivity and acceptance.

It is not surprising that this passage read in this way was used to defend the “ordinations” of twelve women on a boat in Pennsylvania: if the Canaanite woman could open Jesus’ mind to be more inclusive of difference, then surely the Church can change its mind about ordaining women to the priesthood!

So, is the Canaanite woman an agent of change? A paradigm-breaking revolutionary? Yes, she is. But not in the way the standard feminist interpretation wants us to buy.

A mother with a demon possessed daughter, the woman pleads with Jesus for his help: “Lord, help me.” Jesus, again with an eye on his disciples, predictably replies that the children’s food is not for the dogs, that is, the gospel is for the Jews not the Gentiles. And the woman—desperate and determined—retorts: “Even the dogs get the scrapes from the table.” Now, at this point Jesus could rebuke her for daring to tell him his business, sending her away as the disciples wished. But instead he decides to show this despairing mother the fruit of her trust in him: “O woman, great is your faith!” And her daughter was healed.

The Canaanite woman is a exemplar of radical change, a paradigm-breaker precisely b/c she has faith in Jesus; she trusts that he is who he says he is; and she is willing to submit humbly to his authority as Lord. Her open confession of faith—in fact, her preaching of the Word!—stands as a witness for the disciples about who Jesus is and what it is that they have been charged with doing: publicly proclaiming that Jesus is Lord—openly confessing a great faith in a powerful King and compassionate Father.

She shows the disciples that in faith the dogs can become the children of the Lord.

Priesthood: to do or to be?

St John Vianney: Ezekiel 3.17-21 and Matthew 9.35-10.1
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, Serra Club

PODCAST!
Our teacher, a twenty-something yuppie, asked me in class about my career plans. I answered, “I’m going to be a Catholic priest.” He gave me a blank stare, snickered, and then became openly hostile, grilling me aggressively about my vocation. When he insisted that I prove God’s existence by rubbing some of my Lourdes water on his tennis elbow, I ended the harassment with my own openly hostile stare.

Jesus tells his disciples to pray for more laborers for the field after he notes with pity, with compassion the sorry spiritual state of those gathered in the crowd. Looking out over them he sees diseased, abandoned, troubled souls who need the cure and healing of their Father’s mercy. They are sheep without a shepherd, a nation without a purpose. And so, Jesus provides both shepherds and a purpose.

Notice the pattern: Jesus goes around teaching and preaching, curing every disease. He sees the need of the crowd, is moved by compassion, orders his students to pray for vocations, gives them his authority over unclean spirits and then they go around teaching and preaching, curing every disease. In receiving Christ’s authority, the disciples become Christ’s priests; they minister to God’s people in persona Christi Capitis—in the person of Christ the Head of the Church. In effect, they are Christs!

We cannot forget this when we promote vocations to the priesthood nor can we ever allow those ordained to the priesthood to forget this. The temptation to reduce the ordained priesthood to an ecclesial function, a job with a skill-set is not easily resisted these days. Our American penchant for pragmatism and egalitarianism moves us very easily to the conclusion that “being a priest” is merely “acting as a priest.” In other words, “I am a priest b/c I function as a priest.” If my function is my identity, then anyone capable of functioning as a priest can be a priest. Questions of a legitimate call to service, proper spiritual disposition, gender, marital status, willingness to submit to ecclesial authority—all of these are irrelevant. The only question that matters is: can he/she do the job?

But is this the pattern we find in Matthew’s gospel? No. Jesus did not call the crowd to be laborers for the harvest. He called The Twelve. Jesus was not moved by political indignation at the treatment of marginalized groups He was moved by compassion for troubled souls. Jesus did not empower his disciples to challenge entrenched structures of social oppression and economic injustice. He gave them the authority to heal, the power to make the troubled whole again.

I am absolutely confident that no member of the Serra Club would treat a young man called to priesthood or anyone called to religious life the way my teacher treated me! But the temptation to clerical functionalism is more subtle, more seductive. It seems right to our hard-working, middle-class ears. It seems right to us when we ask one another: “What do you do?” rather than “Who are you?” It seems right to assume that the job the priest does—pastor, campus minister, professor—is who he is.

So, I will end with this question: do we truly understand what we are promoting when we promote vocations to the priesthood?

Field, pearl, treasure

Blessed Jane Aza: Jeremiah 15.10, 16-21; Matthew 13.44-46
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

HEAR IT!
The gospel has a price. No, I don’t mean that we ought to be charged admission to hear the gospel read and preached. What I mean is that though our redemption is freely given, a gift from God for His greater glory, the call to serve the Lord as apostolic witnesses to His truth and mercy comes with consequences and tasty temptations.

Jesus tells his disciples what will happen to them when they go out into the world to preach: rejection, persecution, violence, death, and the occasional, glorious conversion. Though they will be strengthened by his Holy Spirit, they will also be dogged step by step by forces contrary to the Word, forces dedicated to the slavery of the human heart and mind. These forces will flash meaty temptations to distract and to discourage the vigorous delivery of the gospel These forces will exact a price for the apostles’ obedient focus and their zealous hearts.

But Jesus also tells the disciples that the kingdom of heaven is worth the work, more than worth the price. Buried in a field the kingdom is a treasure worth the price of the whole field. The kingdom is a pearl worth one’s entire fortune. The question now is: you have the field with its treasure and the pearl worth your fortune, what do you do with them? I think our answer to this question shines a bright light on two temptations we face as a Church right now. The temptation to assimilate and the temptation is isolate.

Jesus charged his disciples with the task of preaching his Word. He did not charge them with the task of preaching the gospel of popular culture nor did he charge them with the task of hoarding the Word. He did not tell them to blend in and tell pleasing stories. Nor did he tell them to build walled cities and keep the gospel-treasure a secret.

We are tempted in our anxiety to isolate, to hold-up in safe and solid walls of familiar routine and rote formula. The treasure is too precious to tarnish with exposure and so it must be well-guarded. And here we succumb to disobedience. Go out and preach, Jesus says. Go out and preach. We are also tempted in our desire for popular approval to assimilate, to dissolve into our culture by dropping the difficult teachings of Christ. Surely it is easier to simply wave over potentially divisive teachings like his claim to be our only Messiah than it is to preach the uniqueness of the salvation he offers us. Both of these temptations are red meat for the beasts of our arrogance, our laziness, our pride, and our self-righteousness.

The treasure we have given our souls to possess is kept rich, plentiful, well-stocked, and desirable in the sharing of it, in the giving of it away. To hoard it for ourselves in our anxiety or to destroy it in our need for cultural approval is joyless, empty waste. When we hoard the gospel we cannot be heard behind our walls. When we prostitute the gospel to the our culture we have nothing worth saying.


God says to Jeremiah: “If you repent…if you bring forth the precious without the vile, you shall be my mouthpiece. Then it shall be they who turn to you; and you shall not turn to them.”

ad majorem Dei gloriam

St. Ignatius of Loyola: I Cor 10.31-11.1 and Luke 14.25-33
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

HEAR IT!
You can only witness faithfully to what is first in your life. So, you had better think before you sign on to be a student of the Master of Charity. You had better consider carefully the price of his education.

In the last few weeks, Jesus graduated his friends from disciples to apostles, making missionaries out of students. In the commencement address on graduation day Jesus exhorts them to go out into the world relying solely on the abundant goodwill of those to whom they will witness, taking no second cloak, no sandals, no money. He warns them carefully that their witness will not be always be heard as faithful testimony. Sometimes it will be heard as blasphemy, sometimes as sedition, and sometimes as an inconvenient truth. Regardless of how their witness is heard, Jesus tells them that they are to give glory to God first and only and speak as ones who have seen and heard. And this simple act of fidelity is guaranteed to get them all killed. And it does.

If you will apply for this program in the School of Wisdom and Love, Professor Jesus has some words of advice for you at the beginning of this school year: if you will not put aside your parents, your siblings, your children, even your own life, you cannot be admitted. This program of conversion and witness requires dedicated focus, undivided loyalty. If you will not carry your own cross and walk gladly to your own execution, then you do not meet the perquisites for admission. If you will not calculate the cost of your discipleship, you are not ready for these final exams. You pay tuition in blood, sweat, and tears. There is no financial aid.

Now, all that seems just a little dramatic for us sitting here in Irving, TX in 2006. No one is ever going to ask any of us here to put aside a husband or wife, or abandon our children, or to take up a cross and hang for our witness. Our situation is more subtle, and therefore, far, far more dangerous.

Here’s the point for us in our postmodern comforts: if you will do this Christian thing, if you will move from being a student to being a missionary and move with any sort of integrity, any sort of fidelity to Christ, you will do so for one reason only: ad majorem dei gloriam, for the greater glory of God…and for that reason alone. You will not do this for the love of husband or wife or children or mother or father. You will not do this to avoid trials, to avoid persecutions. To put anything before the glory of God, to put anything before your witness to the truth of the faith—a science, a philosophy, an ideology, a family—is to ruin everything you are, everything you are as his disciple.

You can only be a faithful witness to what is first in your life. If that is Christ, the Glory of the Father, then everything else—family, friends, career, your cross, everything else makes perfect sense in your discipleship. Our families do not save us. Our friends do not save us. Our careers do not save us. Our degrees do not save us. Our ideological commitments do not save us. Our charitable works do not save us. We are saved in the single historical act of self-sacrifice of Christ on the cross. We are saved in this witness of love and we are saved for the greater glory of God.

Be imitators of Christ: you can only witness faithfully to what is first in your life.

Stop blaming the dirt!

16th Week OT (Fri): Jer 3.14-17; Matthew 13.18-23
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX


Brothers and sisters, it’s time we stopped blaming the dirt! It’s time we stopped shaming the soil! For too long we have shunned the sandy soil, the thorny thickets, and the rocky rolling hills. It has become too easy, too simple to explain away our failures as the Lord’s Farmers by saying, “It’s not me, Lord, it’s the dirt!” It’s easy to blame the dirt. Easy to point a finger at the soil and say, “Too rocky!” Or, “Not rich enough!” Or, “Too many thorns!” The dirt just is. It’s just there waiting to do whatever it is by it’s nature capable of doing—being rocky, being sandy, being thorny. So, let’s hear no more whining about Bad Ground, or Poor Soil.

Who’s to blame when the seed doesn’t sprout or doesn’t hold root or fails to blossom? Read the Gospel! The Evil One steals the tender sprout from the row. It is the Devil who robs the first budding of faith from one who receives the seed—from one who hears the Word—but doesn’t understand it. Tribulations yank the joyful, sprouted plant from its rocky ground. It is the Big Test, the Trial of living the Word in a hostile world that weeds this rootless hearer, this believer without a firm foundation. Anxiety and the temptations of Mammon choke the tiny leaves of the seed planted among the thorns. It is the failure to trust God and serve Him first and only that saps vital nutrients from the believer, kills his blossom, and withers his spiritual fruit.

But, again, it is not the fault of the dirt. Soil can be rocky, sandy, thorny. The hearer of the Word may be ignorant, shallow, skeptical. Soil can be dry, acidic, hard packed. The hearer of the Word may be despairing, hard-hearted, stubborn. Where the seed falls is where the seed falls. Where the Word is heard is where the Word is heard. He is heard. Planted. He is seen. Planted. But it is not enough to broadcast seed and make wishes on stars for a good harvest. It is not enough to broadcast the Word and cross our fingers for jam-packed churches.

The point of this parable is that it is our job, our mission and ministry to make sure that we ourselves are properly tilled, properly weeded, properly watered and mulched so that when we walk into the fields of the Lord to do what he told us to do—to go make disciples—we are the richest soil we can be, we are producing the finest fruit we can produce, we are yielding a hundredfold and working hard on a thousandfold!

To be blunt: the ignorant, the shallow, the skeptical, the despairing, the hard-hearted, and the stubborn out there will not receive the seed, will not hear the Word if they look at us and see ignorance, shallowness, skepticism, despair, hard-heartedness, and stubbornness. Nor can they receive the seed, hear the Word if they see us coming at them with disobedience, infidelity, dishonesty, dissent, anger, and quarreling. And why should they? Who in their right mind wants to hear whining dissent or wounded bawling from those who are supposed to be flourishing in rich soil!?

I’ll end with this question: assuming that you (that we) are broadcasting the seed, spreading God’s Word, are we also preparing the soil to receive it—are we ourselves noticeably thriving in the rich soil of the Father’s will, producing good fruit for others, and tending His fields with fidelity?

What will we leave behind?

Saints Joachim and Ann: Sirach 44.1, 10-15; Matthew 13.16-17
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX


How does God prosper the Church? This is not a question about mere survival. It is a question about how the Church merits, receives, and uses God’s blessings for her inevitable perfection. So, how does God ensure that the Church will not only prevail but flourish, not only “win out in the end” but increase, thrive, boom?

First, we have to look at what the Church is not in order to understand the Church’s mechanism of survival and growth. Jesus did not leave us an institution grounded in prophecy and miracles. We honor God’s prophets and we accept the reality of miracles but we are not governed in our daily lives by the constraints of prophecy nor do we thrive together as Christians waiting breathlessly for the next miracle and the next miracle and the next miracle to confirm and reconfirm our faith.

Jesus did not leave us an institution grounded in scientific investigation or academic disciplines or psychological theories or private revelations. We are happy to learn from science, happy to take our places in the universities, happy to delve the human mind and human behavior and even happy to hold that individuals can receive special insights from God. But we do not flourish as Christians based on lab results or votes from college faculties or productive therapy sessions or instructions from apparitions.

Jesus gave us a Church grounded in faith, rooted in trust—a faith grounded in him, rooted in him as the Son of God, sent by God to be our Lord and Savior. That’s where we begin and end as a Church. We are his people, his body, his nation, his priesthood. And we thrive, we prosper when we remember, when we bring into this day a living faith, the trust of those who before us struggled, who won, who failed, who surrendered, who persevered, and who were graced, gifted by God to endure in His ways, live and die in His peace, and, finally, to join Him and become witnesses from eternity for us.

Sirach says that the godly are not forgotten. Their wealth, their heritage remains in their families. In God’s promises their progeny glory forever; the names of the godly live on and on. And perhaps most importantly for us as a Church: “At gatherings their wisdom is retold…” God prospers His Church by giving us the living witness of tradition, the canon of a breathing trust from our families—our Jewish family, our Greek family, our Roman family, all the families of the faithful whose memories, whose wealth of struggle and defeat and victory have added the historical treasury, the riches of our present trust, the legacy of wisdom and love that we know to be our unassailable Covenant with the Father.

Jesus tells his disciples that the prophets and the righteous do not see and hear what they see and hear. They hear a living Word and see a living Word. In the memory of his sacrifice for us—this eucharistic sacrifice—we hear and see a living Word and in our trust we pile onto the heaping horde of faithful riches our own gems, our own masterpieces of victory and defeat, ensuring that the families who follow us will flourish in the art of surrendering to God, prospering in His ways.

We cannot leave less than we’ve been given.

Hearing the Word spoken

7th Week of Easter 2006/Visitation of Mary: Romans 12.9-16 & Luke 1.39-56
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory


Carrying the Word in her body, Mary speaks the Word, praising the work of her Lord in human history, preaching, if you will, the greatness of our God, our Savior who favors the lowliest of His servants by choosing her to be His mother. She is the Blessed Mother of our Lord Jesus in the flesh and our Mother in the spirit—growing the Christ Child in her womb, giving him birth, and at the foot of the cross, accepting from her crucified Son the commission of mothering his Church to maturity.

Because she heard the Word spoken by the angel, Mary is filled with the Holy Spirit. Because they heard the Word spoken by Mary, Elizabeth and John are filled with the Holy Spirit. And because we have heard the Word spoken by John, Christ’s herald, and by Christ’s apostles and disciples and his prophets and witnesses, we too are filled with Holy Spirit. Blessed are we who believe that what is spoken to us by the Lord will be fulfilled.

Our Blessed Mother’s soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord because she surrendered her life to the Father’s will, surrendered not only her service and her affection but her flesh and blood, giving back to Him everything that He has given to her. She herself is a gift from the Lord who is given the Lord as a gift to give to us. And because of her surrender, because she heard the Word and gave herself to Him, we are free.

If we are to mature spiritually as individuals and as a Body we must hear the Word! Hear the Word spoken in our history, in our tradition, in our worship; hear the Word spoken by those given to us as leaders, teachers, and saints; and hear the Word spoken to us as His children, as His preachers, and as His friends. His Word to us, Christ Himself, is His greatness, His mercy, His strength, His abundance and His generosity. And Mary is how He chose to come to us. When we look to her, we see the Church grown up. When we look to her, we see His Word to us fulfilled, His promise of salvation kept.

All of this, however, is fairy tale and fable if we will not hear the Word spoken, surrender ourselves flesh, blood, and spirit, and bear His Word of Good News, giving birth to his greatness, his mercy, his strength, his abundance and his generosity, giving his gift to those who have not heard, those who have not been spoken to.

All of this is fairy tale and fable if we will not do as his mother did: hear His Word, surrender to His will, bear Him to the world, and, in the end, give Him to the crowd, give Him to the multitudes for their salvation.

Last will and testament

7th Week of Easter 2006: Acts 20.17-27 & John 17.1-11
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory


Paul tells the priests of the Ephesian church that he cannot consider his life of any importance until he finishes his course, the ministry he received from the Lord Jesus: to bear witness to the good news that God has asked us all to share in His divine life. To share in His divine life means to know the Father, the only true God, and the one whom He sent, Jesus Christ. Know Jesus, know the Father, know eternal life. And knowledge of eternal life, truly knowing in the Spirit, is what reels us in; it is what draws us across our years, through our troubles, around the devil’s obstacles, over the temptations of despair, and to the Father in glory. Jesus’ prayer for us is his bequeathal of our inheritance as children of God: now he will no longer be in the world, but we are in the world and he leaves to us everything he said and did, everything that needs to be said and done again. Can you count your life as important until you finish your ministry—given to you and accepted by you—your vow as His child to witness without ceasing to His love?

Are you ready for a revelation?

Ascension Sunday 2006: Acts 1.1-11; Eph 1.17-23; Mark 16.15-20
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Paul’s Hospital, Dallas, TX


Jesus left us on Good Friday, dying on the cross, praying to his Father for us, praying that we might be forgiven in our ignorance. His Father raised him up from the dead three days later, emptying the tomb, and Jesus, newly glorified, newly transfigured, again prayed for us, for our maturity in faith, for our mission as apostles, and for our unity as his body as we witness to the world.

Today, he ascends to the Father, bringing to an end forty days of appearances to his frightened and befuddled disciples, forty days of shoring up their strength, squashing their worrisome doubts, and proving again and again that he is who he says he is: the only Son of God, killed, resurrected, transfigured, and now ascended all for one purpose, all for one reason: so that you, that we, might be saved from the slavery to sin and live forever.

Are you ready for your revelation? Are you ready for your eyes to be opened? Are you ready to hear what the Lord would have of you?

Paul writes to the Ephesians: “Brothers and Sisters: May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, give you a Spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in the knowledge of him.” This seems a fairly innocuous prayer, something you might expect any priest to mutter over someone seeking a blessing; a small prayer of sending or maybe a prayer for discernment. Hardly. This is a prayer for salvation, a prayer for your eternal life with the Father. Paul is not just muttering a simple prayer here. He is pronouncing the descent of the Holy Spirit on his brothers and sisters, asking God the Father to split the heavens and show Himself to his children so that they might know Him and reveal Him to others.

Notice the order of the prayer: first, they require a spirit of wisdom; then, they require a spirit of revelation; and only then do they receive “knowledge of him.” What is a spirit of wisdom and a spirit of revelation? A spirit of This or That is always a share in, a participation in the thing itself. To be given a Spirit of Wisdom is to be bonded to wisdom, to be given a Spirit of Revelation is to be bonded to revelation. The idea here is that Paul is asking the Father to impart to, to gift the Ephesians with a glimpse of His Divine Nature, a peek, a BIG peek at His Face.

Wisdom is the gift of being able to arrange everything in your life—family, work, recreation, religious duty—everything in you life in light of, according to divine expectations, the will of the Father for you, and according to how the Father is perfecting your human nature in His grace with your cooperation. In other words, to possess a spirit of wisdom is to live aligned with God, seduced by His grace, and obedient to His Word. In this spirit of willful cooperation, full assent, and active participation, He will make Himself known to you, give you a Spirit of Revelation.

If to be given a spirit of this or that is to share in this or that fully, then to be given a Spirit of Revelation is to share in Revelation Himself. The Father has revealed Himself to us in scripture, a closed revelation; in created things, a revelation we continue to struggle to understand in our natural and human sciences; and, finally and uniquely, in His only Son, Jesus Christ. In granting us a Spirit of Revelation, the Father both shows us Who He Is and makes us Show-ers; meaning, in the act of revealing Himself, he makes us revealers as well, witnesses; we become a means of revealing Him, ways of showing others His divine nature. You and I are revelations of God to one another! Incomplete revelations, of course—no person has fully revealed God or can reveal God fully but Christ—so, of course, we’re incomplete revelations but we are uniquely revealing in our particular, perfecting natures.

How else can you do what Jesus has ordered you to do? Go to the whole world, proclaim my gospel to every creature, preach everywhere! How do we do this except as those possessed by the spirits of wisdom and revelation, sharers in the one purpose, the one way, the one truth, and the one life?

To know God is know the hope that belongs to His call to us to be His voices. If He calls us to witness, then our faithful witness cannot fail. Hope is our desire for God and an assurance from Him that we have Him now and that we will have Him forever. Hoping is not confident gambling; hoping is resting, relaxing, trusting in a God Who has never and will never fail us. Hope is just one of the riches of His glory, just one treasure we inherit as His holy ones, as His sons and daughters—it is the habit of doing good knowing that good will be multiplied; it becomes for us the habit of confidently expecting good things to come from our obedience, from our eager willingness to be signs of God’s presence in the world.

Are you ready for your revelation? Are you ready for your eyes to be opened? Are you ready to hear what the Lord would have of you?

Christ ascends to heaven forty days after his resurrection. The work of the Son in the flesh is done on earth and so he returns in the flesh to his Father and prepares to send the Holy Spirit, prepares to set his disciples on fire and give birth to the Church. He leaves them with the admonition to preach his Word universally and then promises to accompany them with wondrous signs, confirming their authenticity and authority as his voice in the world.

Go and proclaim the gospel. This is your charge as well. His ascension to the right hand of the Father marks the moment that you were ordered to an apostleship, given the command to be one who reveals God to the world. So, why are you sitting there looking at the sky? Why are you waiting to do what Christ would have you do? And if you are doing what Christ would have you do, are you ready to work harder, longer, and more sacrificially? Are you ready to be the star of this day’s paschal mystery? Are you ready to receive the power promised by Christ? The power to royally serve, the power to reveal Christ to those who have closed the eyes of their heart, the power to hope unconditionally—without looking to the sky for signs—to hope for his return to us in glory.

Are you ready for a revelation from God? Are you ready to be a revelation of God? If not, get ready: that rushing wind you hear and that distant rumbling you feel, that, brothers and sisters, is the promised coming of the Holy Spirit!—the guaranteed arrival of authority, power, and dominion; the promised breath of wisdom, our Advocate, the very fire of our witness.

The odor of sanctity? A perfectly cooked heart!

6th Week of Easter 2006 (F)/St. Philip Neri: Acts 18.9-18; John 16.20-23
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory


The Second Apostle of Rome and the saint of joy, Philip Neri, was a very odd man. Likely, he would find pictures of himself posted on today’s blogs with captions like “Another nutty priest being a hippy” or “Why won’t the bishops put a stop to this nonsense?” Philip had a certain way of bringing joy to stodgy hearts, crashing through reluctant spirits, and burning away pretension and guile. Story after story of this joyous priest emphasizes his joy in the Lord. My favorite: after his death, an autopsy revealed that he had died as a result of an enlarged heart—his heart had grown too big to be contained in his chest and it had broken free!

Will your heart grow too big for your ribs to contain? Will your joy in the Lord splash around in your soul until it sloshes over the sides and soaks those around you? Philip Neri often spoke of burning from within, a fire that had settled into his body and consumed him in the Lord’s love, a fire that passionately and patiently licked at his spirit until he could only burst out in sobbing ecstasy, pleading with Lord is give his fire of joy—just a little—to others.

What is this joy that so diligently and delightfully consumed Philip from the inside out? Aquinas teaches us that joy is the proper effect of charity, that is, joy follows love, joy is an act of love, the behavior one would expect from loving properly. The opposite of joy is sloth. Sloth is not just physical laziness as we tend to think, but, as Aquinas, paraphrasing John Damascene, argues, sloth “is an oppressive sorrow, which…so weighs upon man's mind, that he wants to do nothing”(ST II.II.35.1). Sloth is a sorrow, an aversion to the spiritual goods of love and joy, a sorrow that robs us of our passion for seeking, finding, and doing the good and from seeking, finding, and being with the Father—our final Good.

If sloth is an oppressive sorrow, then love is our liberating joy—we are freed from weeping and mourning our losses, our condition, our pasts, our pain; freed from our grief, our suffocating anguish and our frozen hearts unable to move in mercy for others. Jesus tells the disciples that they are mourning, weeping for his absence, enduring the pain of his murder on the cross, and the prospect that, despite his time with them after his death, he will ascend to the Father soon. Their sorrow makes sense—a woman in labor feels intense pain until the baby is born, then joy! The disciples’ sorrow will end: “…I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.”

What robs you of your joy? What is it in your life that prevents you from benefiting fully from the effects of the Father’s love for you? Sin, certainly. But what specifically? Do you nurse disappointment and grief? Do you wallow in being wounded? Have you become your wounds, living day-to-day as a sorrowful injury? Maybe it’s betrayal you nurture. Or has someone denied you something you feel entitled to? What do you mourn? Why do you weep? What are you getting out of your anguish, your anger, your grief?

Are you joyful? Will we open you up after death and find that your heart, having grown too large for your chest, has broken free and spilled its joy, its love into the world?

Pray that we find your heart nicely roasted, perfectly cooked in the fire of Christ’s joy.

Telling us what we need to remember

6Th Week of Easter 2006 (M): Acts 16.11-15, John 15.26-16.4
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX


I’m going to tell you a secret. I’m telling you this secret so that you will think I am important and you will admire me. No, that’s not right. I’m telling you this secret so that you will repeat it and look like an idiot in front of others. No. Got it! How’s this: I’m telling you this secret so that when our enemies come for you you will remember both the secret and my willingness to share it with you and both will comfort you and give you strength.

Jesus has been very busy these last few days, sharing secrets with the disciples, telling them important things so that they will know who and what he is and remember who and what he is after he is gone and the real trouble with the Powers That Be begins. Jesus tells the disciples that there is no greater love than to die for a friend. He tells them that no slave is greater than his master. He tells them everything the Father has told him so that they may know joy and know it completely. And now, this morning, he tells them that he will send from the Father an Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to testify to him and this Spirit of Truth will help his disciples to testify to him as well. Why? So that they may not fall away when they are booted out of the synagogues and killed as offerings to God.

Here’s what Jesus knows all too well: that the good news of salvation he preaches is possible only b/c he and the Father are one and b/c he will suffer, die, and rise again to bring that good news to its perfection. Those who fear this playing out of history fear him and his task b/c they do not know him nor do they know the Son. To bear witness to the Father and the Son with the spirited help of the Advocate is the principal job of those Jesus leaves behind And so, Jesus says to them: “I have told you this so that when your hour comes you may remember that I told you.”

All that the disciples remember of the Lord, everything he told them, taught them, showed them, everything he left with them is touched by the Spirit of Truth and is now our history, our back-story and the foundation stone of a faithful memory that not only comforts us in trial but pushes us out there to serve and witness, to be useful to our world as a people freed from sin and turned to love.

Watching this nation’s culture we are tempted to despair—our Enlightenment liberal democracy has become an Orwellian babysitter state! But here’s what we must remember: history trumps culture, salvation history trumps particular culture everytime; in other words, in the hearts and minds of the Christian witness living in the world, what matters is the memory passed on, the memory, the testimony of our creation, our fall, God’s faithfulness in calling us back to Him, our failures to hear his voice, His scandalous incarnation as Jesus Christ, and his even more scandalous death and resurrection for us.

This is what we must remember in a culture with a may-fly memory and an insatiable appetite for unruled passion: the Spirit of Truth is with us not to make us citizens better than most or enlightened souls suffering the flesh or self-righteous prigs driven to moralism; no, the Spirit of Truth is with us so that the history of our salvation, the memory of who and what is Jesus Christ is to us and for us might live in us and so that when we speak his word of mercy, his word of love, that Word crashes into the world as so obviously True and Right that no one may deny it.

Our witness to Christ in the world is our memory, handed on. And it cannot be a secret left untold.

Ridiculous Commandment

6th Sunday of Easter 2006
Acts 10.25-26, 34-35, 44-48; 1 John 4.7-10; John 15.9-17
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Paul’s Hospital, Dallas, TX


Jesus concludes this farewell in John with a simple enough admonition: “This I command you: love one another.” He has called his disciples friends and told them everything that he has heard from His Father. He’s told them that they are the chosen not the choosers. And he’s admonished them to bear fruit and ask of the Father what they need. Can’t you see the disciples sitting there with him, wide-eyed, expecting another astonishing revelation, some thundering pronouncement on the nature of divinity or redemption or the end times. And what does he say? He commands them to love one another! Uh? Love one another? Sure. Says you. You’re God. You are Love. Loving is what You do b/c Love is Who You Are. Not so easy for us poor creatures. Have you looked at these people you want us to love? Have you talked to them?! Do you know what you’re asking?

Ah. You see, there’s the problem: he isn’t asking us to love one another. He’s commanding us to love one another. And the difference between asking and commanding tells us all we need to know about the nature of Christian love, of charity in the Spirit.

Jesus says to his disciples: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you.” How does the Father love the Son? The Father and the Son love one another absolutely, unconditionally, without prejudice or complaint. They are One in the love that is the Holy Spirit. And Jesus loves us in exactly this way: completely, categorically, without reservation or criticism. When we keep his commandments, we too remain in his love, we too are One with Him in the love that is the Holy Spirit. So, Jesus commands us to love one another, commands us to live day-to-day in the love of the Blessed Trinity.

Why? Why does Jesus command us to love one another? On the face of it, it is a ridiculous command. Love cannot be commanded. It can be encouraged or exhorted or reciprocated or found. But commanded? How can a passion be commanded? You either love or you don’t. Simply put: love can be commanded, ordered when we understand that love is also about acting, willing the good for another.

Love is not just a passion; it is also the movement of the body and soul toward goodness for another, a movement of the body and soul toward needing the best for others, wanting deeply what is right and true for your neighbors. If we limit love to the smallness of a cuddly tingling in our bellies, make it into little more than a physical reaction to physical attraction, we make it impossible to obey Christ; essentially, we make it impossible for us to know and live joy. Think about it: if love is only about the passion we have for those we find attractive, then we cannot love one another in the way that the Father loves the Son nor in the way that the Son loves us. We fail in joy.

Jesus tells his disciples outright: if you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love. He explains: “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” The commandment to love is a revelation, it reveals to us and for us the way to perfected joy, our means of achieving finished delight, total peace. To fail in joy, then, is spiritual suicide; it is the death of our peace, the impossibility of ever finding delight in the Lord—to fail in joy is to fail to love.

Ask yourself: how do I fail to love? When do I simply refuse to will the good, refuse to move body and soul toward others in mercy? When do I narrow my love to immediate family, friends and fail to emulate the Father’s love for His Son by failing to love effusively even the apparently unlovable? Who is it that I cannot love, will not love? Who is it that does not deserve my love? Who will I not love until he/she loves me first? Do I withhold my love in exchange for favors, good behavior, attention? Do I use my love as a weapon to hurt enemies and friends? Is my love a costume for show or a mask for the public or a flashy piece of glass pretending to be a diamond—dazzling and deceiving?

Ask yourself: did Jesus fail to love? Did he simply refuse to will the good, refuse to move his body and soul toward others in mercy? Did he narrow his love to just his immediate family, friends? Did he fail to emulate the Father’s love? Did he fail to love effusively even the apparently unlovable? Who is it that Christ cannot love, will not love? Who is it that does not deserve Jesus’ love? Who will Christ not love until he/she loves him first? Does Jesus withhold his love in exchange for favors, good behavior, attention? Does Jesus use his love as a weapon to hurt enemies and friends? Is Christ’s love a costume for show or a mask for the public? Is his love for us dazzling and deceiving?

We are commanded to love one another in the same way that the Father loves Jesus and in the same way that Jesus loves us. When we disobey this command, when we choose apathy, spiritual sloth, we choose the death of our joy; we kill deliberately our peace, our delight, and we rot the fruits of the Spirit. Rushing in to fill the vacuum left by dead and dying fruit: anxiety, anger, restlessness, dangerous curiosity/ears itching for spiritual novelty, despair, melancholy, loneliness, mistrust, desperation, pain, and a life in lived in constant emergency, constant distress.

If love brings perfect joy and you are not joyful in the Lord, then perhaps you need to think seriously about how you love or about how you fail to love. It is not too bold to claim that most, if not all, of our spiritual diseases can be diagnosed as failures to obey our Lord’s commandment to love one another. John writes to us in his letter this morning: “Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.” No love, no God, no joy, no peace.

The disease of spiritual apathy, to be without a passion for goodness, to be willfully despairing, this is the greatest gift we can give the Devil. He wants our disobedience, our rebellion against the Father’s love but what he wants more than our disobedience is our allegiance to the lie that our Father will not forgive us our violence against His mercy, our resistance to his love. The Devil yearns for our Yes to the proposition that this or that sin is too big, too deep, too horrible, too frequent to be forgiven, to be forgotten in love. Reach this point in your spiritual life and you have delighted the Devil; his joy, perverse and twisted though it is, is complete when you fail to love and when you come to believe that God is capable of failing in love. To believe that God will not, cannot forgive you is atheism.

Love one another because you are commanded to love. Love one another because you are made to love. Love one another because you are no longer slaves but friends. Love one another because Christ loved us in his suffering, his death, and his rising again. Love one another because to do anything less, anything smaller or meaner is to delight the Devil and forsake your soul.

Being pruned in truth

5th Sunday of Easter 2006: Acts 9.26-31; 1 John 3.18-24; John 15.1-8
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, University of Dallas


That summer I sat on a five-gallon pickle bucket all day everyday pruning tomato vines. The hothouses in the field lined up like barracks and buzzed in the heat. Each of the twelve houses, covered in thick plastic, fluttered as a huge fan pulled the air through, cooling the plants. I started at the first house nearest the road and worked slowly each week from the first house to the twelfth house, pruning the suckers that grow in the between the branches and the vine. Cutting the suckers away is a necessary step in the growth of the plant. Suckers drain moisture and nutrients from the vines. They look exactly like the productive branches; however, one bears fruit, the other doesn’t. Cutting the branch that bears no fruit makes the whole plant healthier.

Sweeping up the pruned suckers at the end of each day seemed like confession or bathing, an exercise in cleaning up, unloading, or perhaps a sacrament of clearing away, brushing out the debris, pushing along the stuff of distraction, diversion, and disease. Each day ended in fire—the dried suckers burning at the edge of the field, sending acrid smoke into the trees and making my eyes tear.

Jesus reveals to his disciples that he is the true vine and that his Father is the vine grower. His Father cuts away branches that do not bear fruit and prunes the ones that do. Then Jesus says to the disciples: “You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you.” Because I have revealed the Father to you, because I have taught you the way of salvation in mercy, because I have given you to one another as a Body, because I am the Word speaking the Word to you, because you have died with me and will suffer for me, because you will rise again with me and see the Father face-to-face, and because I am the way, the truth, and the life—because I have taught you, given you, shown you, lead you, and because I love you, you are pruned, cut, productively wounded and more than ready to bear the fruit of the Spirit that marks you as mine.

Are you pruned to produce the fruits of the Spirit that mark you as a child of Christ? In his letter to us this morning, John writes: “Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth[…]this is how we will know that we belong to the truth[…].” We know that we belong to the truth—to Christ the true vine—when we produce the good fruit of charity, when we not only talk about doing good for others, but when we actually do the good for others. To produce the good fruit of love is to fashion from the Word given you a life wholly surrendered to the service of the truth, to the service of Christ, the true vine. To keep his commandments of fidelity—to believe in his Name, Jesus Christ, and to love one another—this is what pleases him.

Are you wholly surrendered to the service of the truth? Being good postmodern folks, I bet most of us heard a little whisper in our hearts just then, the small voice of Pilate asking: what is truth? Aren’t we conditioned to ask these sorts of questions, trained to a certain skepticism about claims of this or that being true? We know that a truth demands our obedience, morally obligates us to believe, so, eyes askance and lips pursed, we ask what any sensible soul would: what is truth? In his letter this morning, John writes: “Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence in God and receive from Him whatever we ask[…].” The NRSV says that we have “boldness before God” because we believe and pray in obedience to His will for us. The disciples in Jerusalem did not believe that Saul was a son of the true vine. Only after he had spoken boldly, confidently, in the name of Jesus, teaching the faith in truth and love to the Hellenists, only then did they recognize him as a brother in Christ.

Truth, then, is a relationship, the way that we live and move in the love of Christ, the way we witness publicly to him. Truth is that love that the Father and the Son have for one another, the love of the Holy Spirit. John writes: “Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them, and the way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit he gave us.” Those who surrender their lives to the service of the truth—to the service of the love shared in the Blessed Trinity—are true branches, fruitful in charity, ready to be pruned.

What do you need God to prune? What suckers are sucking the life from your branches, depriving your good fruit of nourishment? What falsehoods have attached themselves to the truth? What lies scar your relationship with Christ? What sins block your roots from receiving the good food of the Spirit? What do you need God to prune?

Do you need God to prune away the false notion that there is another way to Him other than His Son, Jesus Christ? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that conscience decides truth rather than merely recognizes it? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that love is just a warm, fuzzy feeling that makes us cuddly to others? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that loving means unconditional acceptance and approval of any and everything any and everyone wants to believe or do? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that you can earn His love, work for His approval? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that He will condemn you in anger, in righteous fury, or disinterest? Do you need God to prune away the false notion that you can live fruitfully in love without truth?

We cannot bear the fruit of love without the vine of truth. Cut off from truth, our love withers. Cut off from the true vine, from the vine grower, we find ourselves in the fire at the edge of the field, burning, sending up acrid smoke and puffs of ash. Our assurance that we remain in Christ and he remains in us is our life in the Spirit, our participation in the life of the Body, the Church. How else do we maintain a fruitful confidence, a boldness before God that we are loved? With hearts schooled in the Word, hearts strictly poised for obedience, eager to hear and listen, we are one mind, one spirit surrendered to truth, given to the service of God for one another, and brought to perfection as disciples who greatly please our Teacher. Surely we can look around and see the drying suckers of falsehood pruned from our branches. Surely we can see the suckers that still need pruning. But more surely, most certainly, we know that so long as we remain in Christ—believe in his name and love one another—he will remain in us.

Boldly ask for what we need. Start with what needs pruning. Start with what clogs your roots, what prevents your growth in love and truth. And then in all humility ask to love more, to love larger, deeper, wider, longer, to love in greater truth, to bear much good fruit and to love, always to love, for His glory and His glory alone.