You know what has happened!

Easter Sunday 2006: Acts 10.34, 37-43; 1 Cor 5.6-8; John 20.1-9
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, University of Dallas

(NB. The bracketed words are responses from the congregation.)

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Are you here this morning, Church? [Yes] Royal Priests! [Yes] People of God! [Yes] Holy Nation! [Yes] Pilgrim Church! [Yes] Sons and Daughters of the Most High! [Yes], Brothers and Sisters [Yes], then you know what has happened! Christ Jesus the Lord is risen from the tomb! [Amen]

He was sold in betrayal by a friend for the price of a murdered slave! [Amen] He was denied by His best friends when He needed them most! [Amen] He was falsely accused of blasphemy by His own people, found guilty on perjured testimony, and given to Pilate for judgment! [Amen] He was bartered for a murderer with a riotous mob and given to Roman soldiers to be scourged! [Amen] He was crowned with thorns, robed in purple, mocked and spat upon, and hailed as the King of the Jews! [Amen] And, finally, in the place of Skulls, He was nailed hands and feet to the Cross to die forsaken! [Amen]

But you know what has happened! Christ Jesus the Lord is risen from the tomb! The stone is rolled away. His burial cloth thrown to the ground. The tomb is empty.

You know what has happened! But do you know what it means? The disciples, seeing the rolled-away stone, the empty tomb and the burial cloth did not yet understand. And it is no simple matter to say “yes” when asked: do you believe in 2006 that a man who hung on a cross, who was dead and buried for three days, has somehow sprung to live and walked away from his grave? How do you say “yes” to that absurdity? How does anyone in their right mind say to “yes” to that!? I say, it is precisely b/c you are in your Right Mind, your righteous mind, that you say YES to the Rolled Away Stone [Yes], that you say YES to the Empty Tomb [Yes], and that you say AMEN to what you know has happened: Christ Jesus the Lord is risen from the dead! [Amen]

We are not here this morning to celebrate a vegetative regeneration myth. Jesus was not raised from the tomb b/c a god of a myth must rise from the dead so the flowers and grains of the Earth might rise in spring. No. We are not here this morning to celebrate the defeat of our subconscious’ death wish. Jesus was not raised from the tomb because our neurosises need fuel for another year. No. We are not here this morning to celebrate the triumph of an archetypal Hero over an archetypal Death. Jesus was not raised from the tomb because we need a Jungian happy-ending to our quest. No. We are not here this morning to celebrate the triumph of empowered self-esteem over the oppressive, patriarchal structures of organized religion. No. Jesus was not raised from the tomb because our pet-ideologies would be empty without some revolutionary symbol of victory. No.

We are here this morning to celebrate the triumph of New Life over Death, Creation over Chaos, the Goodness of Being over the Evil of Nothingness, the triumph of Freedom over Sin. The tomb is empty because God raised His murdered Son from an ignoble death to New Life. The tomb is empty because the living do not live in the grave! The living have no need of burial clothes! The living say YES to the Father [Yes] and Amen to a glorious life lived in the sure faith of the Resurrection! [Amen]

It is easy to say YES and AMEN on Easter Sunday. The account of the Empty Tomb is still fresh in our hearts and minds. The courage of Mary Magdala’s witness to the cowardly disciples still stirs in us. But let’s be honest: the long 50 day march to Pentecost will see our fervor fade, our energy wane, and the alleluia’s of this Easter morning will droop with these lilies. We will find ourselves before long in the Upper Room cowering with the remnant of Jesus’ once mighty band, wondering what idiocy possessed us to witness to the ridiculous notion that a dead man rose to life and starting popping up all over the city and chatting with people. We hope for the coming of the Holy Spirit to put us back in our right mind, but we have fifty days of Easter to live faithfully. How?

If Palm Sunday is about welcoming the soon-to-be tortured and executed Lord into our lives and Good Friday is about witnessing His suffering for our sakes and Easter Sunday is about celebrating the New Life of the Empty Tomb, then our fifty days to the coming of the Holy Spirit needs to be about gratitude, about giving thanks. We have immediate access to the abundant blessings of the Father through gratitude. Gratitude does two things for us spiritually: first, gratitude is a confession that everything we are and everything we have comes from the Father—we are completely dependent on Him; and second, when we gratefully accept the gifts we are given by God, we become willing beneficiaries of His abundant goodness.

We deny ourselves the benefits of the Resurrection by living lives of entitlement (I am deserving w/o costs!), by living lives of victimization (My problems are someone’s fault!), by living lives of denial (That’s not me!), and by living our lives wallowing in hurt (I will never forgive!). Do not deny yourselves the benefits of the Resurrection.

Practice Easter Gratitude instead! Pray daily to the Father, our Abundant Provider and generous Lord: In You I live and move and have my being. Everything I am and everything I have is Your blessing. This day I offer it all to Your service. Thank you, Lord, for this season of my life, for the gifts You have given me, for those I love and who love me in return. Thank You, Lord, for Your creation, for Your revelation in scripture, for our salvation in Christ Jesus, for the holiness I await in the coming of the Holy Spirit, and for the Church that will rise from the tongues of fire. Make gratitude my constant prayer, Father, so that I may live as a Living Blessing for others. Pray for these in name of our Easter Lord, Jesus Christ!

The tomb is empty, brothers and sisters! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Are you here this morning, Church? [Yes] Royal Priests! [Yes] People of God! [Yes] Holy Nation! [Yes] Pilgrim Church! [Yes] Sons and Daughters of the Most High! [Yes], Brothers and Sisters [Yes], then you know what has happened! Christ Jesus the Lord is risen from the tomb! [Amen]

Rejoice! He is dead

Good Friday 2005: Is 52.13-53.12; Heb 4.14-16, 5.7-9; Jn 18.1-19.42
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation, University of Dallas

Hear it!
Why do we do this every year? Why do we celebrate betrayal, abandonment, and brutality. Why do we attend this Good Friday’s party of violence?

Our celebration of Christ’s Passion on Good Friday is as perverse an event as any we might conjure. Or, it would be if we were to settle for watching from the crowd, coolly watching events as they unfold. It is not enough to observe. Not enough to stand behind the crowd not caring. Our apathy, our lack of passion for Christ’s suffering and death for us, that will make today’s celebration truly perverse.

Rejoice then with each rip in His flesh. Rejoice with each drop of blood. Rejoice at the anguish of his betrayal, at the sting of his abandonment. Rejoice that He freely accepted this pain for you, instead of you. Rejoice! Or, cry. Or laugh. Or love Him more. But do not fall into the loneliness of not caring—that Pit is a Darkness older than humanity, and It is desperately hungry for your soul.

By the cross we are redeemed, by Christ’s willing sacrifice of himself we are saved from the Pit that would eat us for eternity. Christ freely choose to make his pain and death redemptive for us, to give his pain as our pain so that we might know the way to the Father. Without it we are lost and alone—forever.

Walk up and venerate the cross, the altar of Christ’s sacrifice for us, and offer your joy, your anger, your hatred, your love, your gratitude…offer something passionate to Christ and know that the loneliness you fear is dispelled. Who can be truly alone who lives in the presence of a Loving God? And that is what our redemption is about: living now with God in a friendship that takes us to a life with Him forever.

Walk up, touch the tool of your redemption, give yourself passionately to him. And rejoice! Give thanks!

Our Savior is dead.

Speak kindly of Judas

Wednesday of Holy Week 2006: Isa 50.4-9; Matthew 26.14-25
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

Hear it!
I will speak kindly of Judas. It is fashionable among the most fashionable to look at Judas and see a man too much maligned for his careful act of deceit and betrayal. Aren’t we being just a little too hard on the poor man? He was under a lot of stress! The agony of being the one of the Twelve who would betray his Master and friend must have been horrible to bear. The sweaty nights tossing in his bed, worrying about the small band’s money problems. The constant gnawing bite of ulcers, watching Jesus provoke the authorities. The pounding headaches from anxiety as his Master and friend claims, near-suicidally, in the middle of thronging crowds, that he is the Son of God! The insults, the arguments with the priests and scribes, even that day when the crowd starting throwing stones and they had to run for their lives! Too much, too much. You can see why he did what he did. All was lost anyway. Jesus’ end was inevitable.

Some suggest that Judas was predestined to hand Jesus over. Others will claim that Jesus asked Judas to betray him in order to fulfill the prophecies that prefigure his sacrifice on the cross. Still others will claim that Judas is an existential figure, a man persecuted by history for making a choice and playing out the consequences of that choice with a focused integrity. Maybe, maybe, maybe. What we know is that Judas went to the chief priests. Offered his friend’s freedom, his life, to those who would see him dead. Negotiated a price for his friend’s betrayal, thirty pieces of silver, the fine for murdering a slave. And then continued living, working, ministering with his friend, looking for an opportunity to hand him over.

But I said I would speak kindly of Judas. We all should. Why? Judas is so repugnant to us, so vile a man, and deserving of our contempt that, if we believe, truly believe, what Jesus died in order to teach us, we must find it in our hearts not only to forgive him his violence against Christ, but we must see clearly, staring back at us from the contorted face of the Messiah’s betrayer, our own face, creased with disobedience, etched with rebellion, scarred again and again with battles against killing temptation, the struggles to find, grasp, and cling to God.

If the Christ is the best face we could wear, turned to the Father in beatitude, then Judas is the face we could wear in those moments of despairing loneliness, dark, dark distress at the impossibilities of ever finding the light again. His is the face we put on when that small devilish whisper almost causally speaks ruin to us: “This cannot be forgiven. Not even God loves you that much.” What aren’t we capable of then? What act of betrayal, deceit, selfishness, or violence is beyond us when we believe we are unlovable?

Speak kindly of Judas not to excuse his sin, not to make right what is always wrong. But perhaps as an act of caution against what we hope is impossible for us. He is our anti-exemplar, the model of what happens in the ruin of despair, the wreck we make of ourselves when we kill tomorrow’s hope with yesterday’s hatred or today’s passing anxiety.

Sometime today, ask in prayer, “Surely, it is not I, Lord?” Wait for an answer and then, with whatever answer you receive, speak kindly of Judas.

Who is this?

The Procession
Palm Sunday 2006: John 12.12-16
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation

Jesus rides his donkey into the Jerusalem crowds. Most cheer. Most wave their palm branches. Most call his name. But some, shaken by the adulation and the apparent fulfillment of ancient prophecy in their own day, ask anxiously, “Who is this?”

He is the one prepared for burial by the woman at Bethany. He is the one sold by his disciple and friend, bought for the price of a murdered slave—thirty pieces of silver. His is the blood of the new covenant, the new wine shed for the forgiveness of our sins. He is the one betrayed, arrested, falsely accused, interrogated by Pilate, and, finally, sentenced to death by the same crowd that cheered him earlier. Whipped, mocked, spat upon, and stripped naked, he is the One nailed to the cross, pierced by a spear, the one who died so that we might live.

Who is this? We know already what the Roman soldier shouted aloud: “Truly, this is the Son of God!”

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At the Mass
Palm Sunday 2006: Is 50.4-7; Phil 2.6-11; Mark 14.1-15.47
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation

Though we welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem with singing and waving palm branches, we will spend this week celebrating his betrayal and execution. What a truly perverse thing to celebrate! If we are tempted to move too quickly from our Lenten self-examination and denial to the joy and exultation of Easter, we have this holy week to contemplate the most difficult of Jesus’ teachings: the nature of his vicarious suffering.

Take these rather dark questions with you into Holy Week, pray with them, wrestle with them, and come back on Easter Sunday to hear again the answers our Teacher gave us through His death and resurrection:

How am I like the woman of Bethany? How do I honor his sacrifice? How do I show respect for his suffering for me?

How am I like Peter and Judas? In what ways do I deny Jesus under the pressure of ridicule from friends, family, colleagues? How do I betray him for worldly approval?

How am I like the High Priest and the Sanhedrin? In what ways do I envy Jesus and seek to discredit him? How do I seek false testimony against the Church’s ancient witness about who Jesus truly is?

How am I like the crowd that frees Barabbas? In what ways do I “hand Jesus over” to popular opinion? To the masters of my culture? To the mainstream media? To the rulers of this world?

How am I like the Roman soldiers? In what ways do I just “do my job” in the face of injustice, oppression, and falsehood?

How am I like Christ? In what ways do I suffer for others? How is it that the way I deal with pain and death can be healing for others? Am I ready to die so that my worst enemy might live?

Finally, How am I like the centurion? Can I show up here on Easter Sunday, and answer the question “who is this?” with the awesome confidence of the centurion: “Truly, this is the Son of God!”

Almost against hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will you hear a difficult teaching?

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


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

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

You are the seed of His glory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heretic. Blasphemer. Criminal. Rebel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signs and wonders, signs and wonders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's time to bathe...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brothers and sisters, it’s time to bathe!

Love grows through love.*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave it there!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pagan babbling, Christian prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the Devil in the Desert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So tell me, little ones, what tempts you?

Here I am

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

Hear it!

A homily in three parts:

I. Psalm 51

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

II. Isaiah

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

III. Matthew

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

The pride of dust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember, brothers and sisters: dust is never proud.