22nd Week OT: The old is good. Old is endurance, survival, true-tested, lived through and beyond, and wised-up in practice. Haven’t we all heard the voice of the Lord urging us to take up an old life, a life of survival and testing? Aren’t we dared to contest against the world by joining the world in its decadence and attempting to transform it from its belly out? Um, no to both. We are urged by Christ to a new life in him and we are dared to contest against our disordered passions and witness to the world from within the world as Christs. So, what use then is the old to our lives in the new if the old (and all the old gives us) is not what we are called to, dared to? Jesus says, “…no one who has been drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’”
Do you think that the old opposes the new? Or maybe the other way around? Antiquity vs. novelty? Institution vs. revolution? No, no, no. Without the old there is no new. Without the old there is no nothing! Jesus teaches this point to the Pharisees when he tells them that his disciples will not fast while he is with them. Fasting will come later when he is left them. He says, “No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one. Otherwise, he will tear the new and the piece from it will not match the old cloak.” In other words, we do not destroy the new to repair the old nor do we disfigure the old with the new. The old is good. The new is waiting to be old and getting better. Together the old and new in you make you exactly who you are in Christ right now. You are your history, your present-promise, and everything you will become. You are old; you are new; and you are Next—whoever you are given to be by God forever!
In his letter to the Colossians, Paul tells us what it means for Christ to be in the image and likeness of his Father. He is the firstborn of all creation. He is before all things. Head of the Body, the Church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead and all things will be reconciled for him through him. We, you and I, are baptized into and made partakers of, added as players in the Easter Mystery of Christ. We are Christs, created and re-created in the imago Dei and who he is is who you are right this second—imperfectly Christ as just a “me” but more so and more so and more so as a “we.” Christ is not a new piece sewn to you. He is not new wine poured into your old wineskin. Nor is Christ the old cloak on which you are sown as a new piece. He is not the old wineskin into which you, the wine, are poured. Christ is old and new. He is Wisdom from the beginning and Mercy at the last. He was born before all creation. He is Head of his Body, the Church. And all things—All Things—all-created-things will be reconciled in him at last.
The fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Christ. The fullness of God—old and new—is pleased to seduce us, pleased to lure us to Him. We are stained (at once) a brilliant white and a sturdy red. And as we live and move and have our being in Him, we are his bait--preachers of his Good News!
St Gregory the Great: 2 Cor 4.1-2, 5-7 and Luke 22.24-30Jesus, bringing the useless argument of apostolic superiority to a clashing close, reminds his bickering friends who he is: “I am among you as the one who serves.” Wiser than all those sent with tongues on fire; holier than all those raptured in righteousness; more glorious than all the choirs of celestial intelligences; and in possession of a perfected heavenly reflection of the Face of God, His divine light, glory that outshines the Queen of Heaven, his own mother, Jesus the Christ is “among us as the one who serves.”
Remember: in the desert before his Emptying on the Cross, Jesus is offered everything any of us would want and take if offered—wealth, power, celebrity, worship. Jesus puts the Tempter behind him to stare at his back-side. Knowing that he can be wealthy, powerful, popular, and worshipped; and knowing that his suffering and death is a matter of his free choice, Jesus says “No” to the Devil and “Yes” to us, to our eternal lives. He served us then, he serves us now. If you will follow him, if you will be his friend, his preacher, you too have to say and mean, “I am among you as the one who serves.”
Perhaps I am just a jaded academic or a calloused cynic. I am not scandalized by the apostles jockeying for position. Good leaders are always necessary to maintain a connection to our history and show a way forward into what’s coming for us. Charitably, we can assume that all this apostolic politicking is about finding the Right Guy for the job and not just politicking for the sake of prestige and power. Jesus warns his friends about the way the Gentile kings lord their power over their subjects, saying “those in authority over them are addressed as “Benefactors’”—a title for the Greek kings. Jesus’ understanding of authority and power for his friends and for the Church they will build is quite different: to rule is to serve. He teaches his disciples: “...let the greatest among you be as the youngest, and the leader as the servant. For who is greater: the one seated at table or the one who serves? Is it not the one seated at table?” Can’t you hear the disciple’s brain-gears trying to grind this one out! You can almost smell the brain-oil burning as they try to crank this logic through! Then, just as they are finding convenient ways around this inconvenient little instruction, Jesus drops this bomb: “I am among you as the one who serves.” Eyes wide. Mouths drop. BOOM! Apostolic brains all over the walls and ceiling.
Son of God, Son of Man; King of kings, Prince of princes; The Messiah, The Anointed Savior, The Christ. And do not forget: The Suffering Servant. On a donkey. Accused with lies. Bound in mocking purple. Beaten. Crowned with wooden nails. And nailed to a cross of wood. Broken. Bled. Speared and finally, dead. If you will lead Christ’s people as his disciple, if you will serve the table of the Lord as our slave, you will follow him…not only behind him on Palm Sunday, collecting your share of accolades. But beside him on Good Friday as well, gripping your iron nails. Not only with him on Easter morning, rising from the grave but with him in hell the night before, freeing Nothing’s captives.
Paul writes to the Corinthians: “…we do not preach ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your slaves for the sake of Jesus.” This is the only homily any of us need preach, whether from the pulpit or the chalkboard, the boardroom or the cash register, from the kitchen, the car, or on the computer: Jesus Christ is Lord! And we are his students. We cannot be discouraged “since we have this ministry [of preaching and leading] through the mercy shown us.”
Christ has conferred a kingdom on us! Therefore, we are to serve as slaves to the least of his.
22nd Sunday OT: Sir 3.17-20, 28-29; Heb 12.18-19, 22-24; Luke 14.1, 7-14Now, some of you may be thinking, “Prosperity!? What abundance? I’m not prosperous. I got debt; I work paycheck to paycheck; my family is barely scraping by!” As a working-class Mississippi boy who spent way too many years in college racking up student loans in order to get a job that earns me less than a Wal-Mart assistant manager—I hear you, loud and clear! We are not all given treasure as our gift. Not all of us have a ready cash-flow or asset liquidity. But let me quickly point out how quickly we all jumped to the conclusion that prosperity is about money, that our wealth is about a financial portfolio. I would guess that well-over 90% of Catholics in this country aren’t wealthy. And yet, they are required, like you and me, to be generous to those who do without. Prosperity is wealth but not all wealth is treasure and not all treasure is silver and gold and green.
Sirach points to wealth. The mind of a sage. An ear attentive to wisdom. The psalmist sings of wealth as well. The rejoicing of the just and their exultation of the Lord. Bountiful rain and a restored land. Hebrews tells us that those who have approached Mt Zion are wealthy in their experience of the divine. They have seen the city of the living God; seen countless angels partying at the throne of God; watched the assembly of the firstborn; and laid eyes on Jesus, “the mediator of a new covenant.” And! And! we all have an engraved invitation, carved into the flesh of Christ himself, an invitation to the wedding and the wedding feast. Christ is our living invite and our way to the party. Is there any gold or talent or any amount of time, any portfolio or estate worth as much as a place at The Table? Prosperity in Christ Jesus is eternal life; this is our inheritance as adopted heirs of the Father. So, how do we share ALL of our gifts so that we are not bumped, with great embarrassment, to the bottom of the table?
There are the usual ways of charity: donating money and goods to the needy; spending some time doing local service work; help a volunteer group raise funds for travel on a mission trip; go on a mission-trip yourself and work directly with the poor. All perfectly acceptable and much appreciated ways of spreading your prosperity in Christ. Are there other ways? Oh, yes. What about your witness? Your testimony about who Christ is to you, what he has done for you? What about the light of Christ beaming out of your skin? Do you radiate the love of God? This sort of charity—talking about Christ to others—is the sort of charity that makes Catholics extremely nervous! All that “testimony talk” sounds very evangelical Protestant, kinda Baptist, and very personal. It does, I know.
We have managed in this country to submerge our lives in faith into a kind of private vault, locking away the very center of our lives as Christians so that we can function politely in a largely secular culture. Our nation’s anti-Christian cultural elites are so obsessed with not being bothered by our faith, that, at their insistence, we have carefully crafted safe places where our faith might shine out but not shine on them. Church, for example. Maybe the Union Mission downtown. Never the office or our public schools. Never the ballot box or the statehouse. Never, in other words, anywhere the light might actually touch them. We have, I think, become used to this arrangement and we have, as a result of this familiarity, made our witness something to be ashamed of right when it is most needed.
Here’s my challenge to you: think long and hard about your witness: how do you share—out there—who Christ is to you and what he has done for you? How do you spread the wealth of God’s love, His mercy and care, His universal invitation through Christ to come party with Him forever? The public credibility of the gospel depends on Christ’s ministers—you and me and all of us together!—it depends on us sharing the prosperity, the abundance of the Good News preached by Christ Jesus to every man, woman, and child; Jew and Greek; slave and freeman; the gospel preached to everyone with him when he was among us. We must complete the preaching; we must make the teaching whole where we are, and show others the Way. There is no greater work of charity to be done.
Now, let me highlight the trap that lies in wait for those who will be witnesses in this world. As Christians, we do not possess the truth. We are possessed by the Truth. Our preaching and teaching cannot be about lording the correctness of the faith over those who do not share our faith. Truth is truth and truth wins out every time. We cannot be so arrogant as to believe that All of Truth is speakable, pronounceable by a human tongue, especially our flawed tongues! We know what we know, but there is infinitely more that we do not know. In front of this Mystery, we can only stand in silence with humility, trusting that as we grow in perfection God’s revelation will unfold for us. That there is no single owner of the Truth does not mean that there are multiple owners of the Truth. The truth of our faith rests in the Church, the whole Body of Christ; and this truth serves as our well of witness, our river of fresh understanding and utility. When we ourselves become poor and lame and crippled and blind, those possessed by the truth of our faith bring us to the table. So we must be very, very careful to invite to the Lord’s table the poor and lame and crippled and blind among us. Think! How long before I need such an invitation?
From the Word, a final word: You have not approached that which cannot be touched, therefore, My child, conduct your affairs with humility. Go and take the lowest place at the banquet table because he who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. Learn from me, your shepherd, for I am meek and humble of heart. Spread your gifts. Sow your wealth. Be prosperous so that others might survive. Your harvest is mine, therefore, invite to my table those who cannot repay you. And when you do, know that I will repay you at the resurrection of the righteous.
St. Monica: 1 Thes 1.1-5, 8-10 and Matthew 23.13-22Could we ask for a starker contrast to this scene than the one we read about in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians? Here Paul gives thanks to God for the “work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope” of those chosen to lead the church in Thessalonia. Paul notes that though the gospel came to this thriving church through apostolic preaching and work, it also arrived “in power and in the Holy Spirit and with much conviction.” In other words, the gospel arrived as testimony in human word and deed, full and bright; AND the gospel arrived as the passionate love of God, the Holy Spirit snatching up cold-hard hearts, whacking open locked minds, and punting comfortable tushies up and down the beaches of the
And what difference does any of this make in how the contrasting modes of spiritual leadership handle their responsibility to mediate the divine to the people in their charge? Here’s the difference between the
What are we to do? Obviously, we’re not to look the scribes and Pharisees for spiritual leadership! And we are to watch carefully our own legalistic tendencies—so easy and neat, aren’t they? So simple, uncomplicated and clean. I think Paul hits the right note on our jobs in the spirit of Love: “…to serve the living and true God and to await His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, Jesus…” To serve and to wait. To serve only is busy work done to stay busy. To wait only is a lethal quietism, a posion against lived-charity. Our ministry is service and waiting. More precisely, our service is service to God insofar as we do it while waiting on the coming of His Son, Christ Jesus. And it is the waiting, the anticipation of his coming again that pushes us to witness our lived-faith and to serve the least of His.
You can be a lock or a key. Show your joy in Christ: unlock the Kingdom!
Hey! There's nothing in the gospel about having to climb any stairs to the Narrow Gate!Someone asked Jesus, “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” Notice, please, that Jesus doesn’t answer the question directly. Instead he instructs, then warns, then prophesies. First, the instruction: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate…” Then the warning: “…many, I tell you, will attempt to enter [the narrow gate]...” And finally the prophecy: “...but [they] will not be strong enough [to enter].” Unlike most of what we hear preached in our Catholic parishes these days and taught in our Catholic seminaries, this teaching is unambiguously exclusive, clearly it is not the all-inclusive, gates-wide-open-garden-banquet that we’ve been taught to believe represents salvation through Christ. Jesus couldn’t be more straightforward, more plain spoken: after the master of the house has locked the door, those standing outside will knock and plead, “Lord, open the door for us.” And the master will say, “I do not know where you are from.” And those outside will remind him that they ate and drank with him, listening to his teachings. The master will respond, “I do not know where you are from. Depart from me, all you evildoers!” Much wailing and gnashing of teeth follows. Now, is this the nonjudgmental, all-inclusive, diversity and difference welcoming Jesus we’ve come to know and ignore? I don’t think so.
Our Lord is not a way to God among various but equally valid ways to God. Our Lord is not a truth among numerous but perfectly legitimate truths. Our Lord is not a life among different but equivalently honorable lives. Jesus says, “I am THE Way, THE Truth, and THE Life, and no one come to the Father, except through me. Christ is the Narrow Gate of salvation; he is the door to perfect freedom, perfect joy, perfect life, and that door opens for anyone, anyone at all—no one is excluded by Christ from the invitation to eternal life through Christ Jesus. Every human person, everyone, all of us are invited to knock on the gate in humility, to show him that we have been of service to the least of God’s children, and that we have put ourselves last in the kingdom by training our hearts and minds, by teaching our hands and feet through the daily exercise of righteousness—our workout routine in God’s Gym!
You might be confused now. Didn’t I say earlier that the teaching in this gospel is unambiguously exclusive? And didn’t I just say that Christ invitation to the gate and the party beyond it is all—inclusive! No one is left out. Exactly right. Christ leaves no one out of his invitation to follow him. No one. Jesus says, “And people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the
I said earlier that the Gate’s size is inversely proportionate to the size of the pride/humility of the person seeking to get through. How do we shrink our pride and swell our humility? The letter to the Hebrews tell us that the discipline of the Lord brings “the peaceful fruits of righteousness to those who are trained by it.” OK. What is this discipline? “Discipline” is an ordered form of learning, an organized means of attaining knowledge and/or enlightenment. Most anything can be a discipline: exercising, dieting, reading/writing, study, prayer. The key to discipline is that it is done in an orderly way under some authority—a teacher, a coach, a supervisor, a spiritual director. We are not to disdain the “discipline of the Lord,” meaning we are not to deride or disrespect the orderly authority of Christ in teaching us his truth. From Hebrews we learn that his discipline is our faithful way of enduring trial, our obedient means of suffering well under testing. This endurance, this suffering is a witness; this is testimony under duress and evidence for the Kingdom!
To repeat: Hebrews tell us that the discipline of the Lord brings “the peaceful fruits of righteousness to those who are trained by it.” Here’s your question for today: are you trained by the Lord’s discipline? Do you find yourself scourged by the love of the Father? He acknowledges you, so he treats you like a son; yes, even the women he treats like sons—as ones who will inherit His kingdom! Do you find pain or joy in your trials? Do you find peace or turmoil in obeying Christ? Do your hands droop and your knees grow weak thinking about the gospel-task in front of you? Do you give God thanks for your difficulties or do you complain? If you are made lame in your trials, it is better to make straight paths for your feet so that they may be healed and not disjointed. IOW, clear the path ahead of you by blasting it with gratitude to God! Yes, give God thanks for your diseases, your failures, your trials and persecutions, your disjointed bones and tired flesh. Thank Him and be disciplined. Be disciplined by the love that calls you to holiness, always calls to you to come to Him, and to pass through the narrow gate; you, shrunken in pride but swollen with humility; you, son of God, you, last of the least.
St. Bartholomew (Nathanael): Rev 21.9-14 and John 1.45-51Leather cords coil around the wrists. Bloody-sticky, the torn, pinched skin, caked with sand and hair, looks ready to pop, ready to turn itself inside-out in wet surrender. Fingers no longer move, blue-black, clogged and swollen with long-dead blood. He can hear the air split around each studded cord. . .and rattle in its descent, like market-day jewelry or a tent’s bead curtain, sharp and bronze. A biting stone, blade-edged to scrape the bone, to flay away the flesh and rend the spirit.
Nathanael says to Jesus, “How do you know me?” Jesus answers, “Before Philip called you—‘Come and see!’—I saw you under the fig tree.”
The first bronze barb strikes his sagging flesh just above the shoulder. The second strikes just next to the first and the remaining seven bite in line across his back. Pulling the leather cords unzips his skin, opening his flesh like ripping silk. Before he falls again to his knees, the nine scores leach out blood in perfectly straight rivulets. Falling, he smears his blood against one of those who try to hold him up and bent-over. We hear a faint, breathless profession, just a word or two as history.
Nathanael says, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.” Jesus answers him, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than this.”
Squinting his eyes against stinging sweat and cloying blood, he sees bits of meat—no longer wildly flayed pieces but filleted cutlets—neatly squared portions of his body stacked at the feet of those who fear him for loving Christ. His nine-barbed scourge hangs in the crook of tree branch, dripping small drops to the roots in the earth. His tongue swells to push against his teeth. And he no longer screams, watching his testimony in flesh and blood dissected. He will see greater things than these.
Philip finds Nathanael and preaches to him: “We have found the one about whom Moses wrote in the law…Jesus, from
And why does Nathanael believe? Because Jesus does a magic trick by telling him where he has been? No. Like all of those in the gospels who come across the Christ, all of those who approach him in some need, with longing, Nathanael sees with eyes wide-open the glory of the Word given meat and bone standing before him. He sees all of his deficiencies turned to excesses; all of this problems resolved into gifts; all of his sins washed clean and forgotten. He sees standing before him the Son of God and the Son of Man come to give himself for us all. There is nothing else for Nathanael to say, nothing else for any of us to say but, “Jesus, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel!”
How much do you love your skin? Is it worth a single witness? Just one chance to say out loud to an unsuspecting disciple of the Lord, “Come and see…”?
20th Sunday in OT: Jer 38.4-10; Heb 12.1-4; Luke 12.49-53
Homily for Exposition & Adoration
from Pope Benedict XVI's Sacramentum caritatis (66): During the early phases of the reform [of Vatican Two], the inherent relationship between Mass and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament was not always perceived with sufficient clarity. For example, an objection that was widespread at the time argued that the eucharistic bread was given to us not to be looked at, but to be eaten. In the light of the Church's experience of prayer, however, this was seen to be a false dichotomy. As Saint Augustine put it: "nemo autem illam carnem manducat, nisi prius adoraverit; peccemus non adorando – no one eats that flesh without first adoring it; we should sin were we not to adore it." (191) In the Eucharist, the Son of God comes to meet us and desires to become one with us; eucharistic adoration is simply the natural consequence of the eucharistic celebration, which is itself the Church's supreme act of adoration. (192) Receiving the Eucharist means adoring him whom we receive. Only in this way do we become one with him, and are given, as it were, a foretaste of the beauty of the heavenly liturgy. The act of adoration outside Mass prolongs and intensifies all that takes place during the liturgical celebration itself. Indeed, "only in adoration can a profound and genuine reception mature. And it is precisely this personal encounter with the Lord that then strengthens the social mission contained in the Eucharist, which seeks to break down not only the walls that separate the Lord and ourselves, but also and especially the walls that separate us from one another."
Our adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is not something we just do b/c we have time to kill in the retreat schedule, or b/c it’s now the trendy thing to do! As our Holy Father makes plain in this exhortation: (reread underlined section). Precisely, precisely…at that point where you and I encounter Christ in our adoration and communion, precisely at that moment we are offered a grace: the chance to serve Christ, to honor his work and Word, to lift him up in praise and thanksgiving, a chance to be of godly use to someone else. Rather than taking us away from the messy work of Christian service, our adoration of the Blessed Sacrament pokes and prods, and pushes us out, out there to get sweaty in taking care of the needs of others. Think about it: does Christ need our adoration? No. God has no need of our praise, but our desire to praise Him is His gift to us. And our desire to praise him together in the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is His gift to us and then we are held responsible for becoming gifts to others. Ask yourself: how will I take this time in the presence of the Lord and then give it away?
Assumption of the BVM: Rev 11.19; 12.1-6, 10; 1 Cor 15.20-27; Luke 1.39-56In a novel or movie or dream, there might be a world where Divine Love does not animate all life; does not lift up and bring forward His children; does not create and re-create in His image and likeness. A world not haunted by the spirit of holiness would be that sort of world where ignorance of living beyond life and death would be fundamental and the only way up and forward would be the promise of other creatures. That is dismal. And no way to live. But how precarious is it for us to live on promise in this real world of ours? Haven’t we all here surrendered our lives—body and soul—to what we hope is a Divine Lover? Haven’t we all here submitted ourselves to His obedience and service after just a promise? Yes, we have. And no, we haven’t. Yes, there is the promise but there is more than a promise. We have been shown the promise in action—twice.
This feast today is a feast of promise, sure; but it is also a feast of transfiguring revelation, of God’s promise to us shown to us in the raising of Mary to heaven, her resurrection to His promise of glory fulfilled. Paul says that “Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Christ is the first of those raised. Mary is the second. And the Church will be the third. Follow here: Christ, Mary, the Church. Christ is the Son of the Father. Mary is the mother of the Son. The Church is the body of Christ, his brothers and sister in faith. Therefore, Mary is the Mother of the Church, the body of Christ, and we are children of the Father. We inherited the Father’s promise of resurrection in Christ through Mary. And her assumption into heaven, her resurrection, is our sign of God’s promise done. Like her Son who was transfigured on Mt Tabor, our Blessed Mother’s assumption is a transfiguring revelation, that sort of unveiling of truth that both educates and changes, informs and transforms. We do not celebrate a pious legend today but a divine promise shown to us to have been fulfilled. This is the end of us all!
In her fiat to the archangel’s announcement of her pregnancy, Mary sings out her people’s salvation history, the theodicies of God’s love for us, His interventions and interuptions in our time and place. He shows us His love. And reminds us of His promise of mercy, the promise He made to Abraham and his children forever. Mary is answering with more than a hesitant “OK” or a bored, whispered “whatever.” She is saying yes to it all—everything of the Father’s plan for her, for us. She knows. She knows. And she says yes. So then, how precarious is it for us to live on a promise in this world of ours? Here’s how: if you aren’t living on the promise of the Father, then you are living in the ignorance of the Enemy, traveling a burnt and poisoned road, just waiting for the Bad Guys to hunt you down and spit you like a pig.
Solemnity of St. Dominic, Vespers: Philippians 1.3-8Lord, on this solemn feast of our Holy Father, Dominic, free us from the silent death of fear and worry and jail us in your saving Word. Bring to perfection the Good Work you have begun in us and take us with ready hands and hearts to serve those who are not yet skilled in your Love. Amen.
The Transfiguration: Daniel 7.9-10, 13-14; 2 Pet 1.16-19 & Luke 9.28-36Keep in mind: the life, ministry, suffering, and death of Jesus is a living revelation of the Father’s plan for the completion of human history. Christ, therefore, as a person, is the efficacious revelation of the persons of the Trinity in history; he is, in other words, a “divine showing” that accomplishes what he shows.
What does Jesus show the apostles on
Here we are in 2007. What does the Transfiguration mean now? It means exactly what it did 2,000 years ago…and more. Our Holy Father, Benedict, in his recent exhortation on the Eucharist, Sacramentum caritatis, makes an astonishing claim for the power of the Eucharist. He writes, “[In the Eucharist,]…we enter into the very dynamic of [Christ’] self-giving. Jesus ‘draws us into himself.’ The substantial conversion of bread and wine into his body and blood introduces within creation the principle of a radical change, a sort of ‘nuclear fission,’…which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be all in all”(SacC 11). Pope Benedict is teaching us here that the transfigurative power of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is not limited those present for the Mass or the Church as a whole or even to all Christians or religious believers. The transfigurative power of the Eucharist extends out in fission—radiating, exuding, emanating from the center of the sacrifical offering on the altar out to the “heart of all being,” the cosmic altar of creation itself. God will be all in all.
In his second letter, Peter calls on his transfiguration revelation in support of the authority of his prophetic message: “We ourselves heard [God’s] voice come from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain.” This then, this direct revelation, this face-to-face promise of passion, death, and resurrection is no story. He writes: “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ…” They were eyewitnesses to the accomplishing revelation, the efficiaous sign of our Father’s re-creating love: Jesus glorified in brilliant light, raised up and dazzling white.
We do not live according to “cleverly devised myths,” but according to the witness of the apostles and the strength of our trust in the promises of a mighty God. Out there, there is no reason to be frightened or silent, instead be “a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts!” Tell everyone what you have seen.
*The figure in the pic above. . .I've been told that Jesus depicted with butterfly wings is a traditional representation of the Transfiguration. Anyone know anything more about this?
18th Sunday OT: Eccl 1.2, 2.21-23; Paul writes to the Colossians: “If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above…For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God…Put to death, then, the parts of you that are earthly: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the greed that is idolatry.” Do you hear Paul telling you to despise your life now? To turn away from your daily living—sleeping, eating, being friendly, raising kids?—is the great Apostle telling you to hate the body and its dirty but necessary functions? There is no salvation from the vanities of living in the hatred of life, in the despising of nature—all the good nouns and verbs of our Father’s Very Good Creation! We do not win a single race, not one contest against futility when we surrender one of our best means of knowing and loving God: knowing and loving His creatures, His creation.
Living among all the true, good, and beautiful things of our world, Paul warns us against the pride of believing that we rule here; that we hold the earth in its orbit and polish the glitter of the stars; that we breathe out the atmosphere, feed the trees, stoke the heat of summer and spring and make the leaves brown in autumn and the mist white in winter. We are warned against the greed of self-importance, the avarice of carving idols of our needs and wants and then shaping ourselves in the images and likenesses of what we unwisely think we most desire: full bellies, stuffed pockets, muddled minds, tranquilized hearts. Idol worshipers become their idols. And suffer their fate: the fires of the trash heap. This is foolishness! This is vanity!
In fact, it is worse than folly and vanity; it is deceit, lying. Paul writes: “[…]since you have taken off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed […] in the image of its creator […] Stop lying to one another […].” We say we are reborn in baptism. That we have died with Christ and risen again in new light and in his glory. Do we look reborn? Do we work and love and fight and have kids and battle disease and learn and grow and win and lose and eat and sleep—do you do all of your living and your dying…reborn in Christ? If not, then truly, for you, all things are vanity; all of your days are sorrow and grief. A great misfortune.
The German poet, Rainier Maria Rilke, writing in 1905 in his collection, The Book of Hours, his love-poems to God, talks to God about His people: “Lord, the great cities are lost and rotting./Their time is running out…./The people there live harsh and heavy,/crowded together, weary of their own routines. […] Their dying is long/and hard to finish: hard to surrender/what you never received./Their exit has no grace or mystery./It’s a little death, hanging dry and measly/like a fruit inside them that never ripened.” Lost. Rotting. Harsh. Heavy. Crowded. Long, hard death—a little death. Dry. Measly. Lives like fruit never ripened. Is this the limit of the bounty we are called to in Christ Jesus? Is this the scarce basket of harvest? Is this what we get for our faith in Him, our hope in His promises, our love for Him and one another? Won’t you be glad to die after this misadventure, this funny little tragedy you have lived? Stop lying to yourself! You have taken off your old self and put on Christ, so that “when Christ your life appears, then you will appear with him in glory. Put to death, then, the parts of you that are earthly”—your defiance of God’s will for you; your double-bound heart (whom do you serve?); your restless obsessions and compulsions; your need for vengeance, dominance, worldly success and admiration—any and every desire that is not a painful longing for God; take an axe to your idols—cultural celebrity, war at any cost, peace at any cost, your love of being owed something; burn the idols you have carved to your public image, to your duty and logic, to your safe loves and your tourist soul: “Jesus Christ” is the ONLY name given under God’s heaven for our salvation.
God said to the fool: “You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” Who gets the house, the safety deposit box, the cars, the jewelry, the bonds and the stock; who gets the property, the art collection, the dogs; who gets the silver, the furs, the cash? Who gets the grain and those shiny new barns? Who gets the anxiety, the vanity, the worry and fret? Better yet: who wants to hope, to love, to trust? To live free in the spirit of re-creating life? Who wants the treasure of a perfect vision of God? Who wants to store up riches in Christ Jesus? To spend the merits of heaven on mercy for the world? Who wants to run after God while He chases after you?
“Christ is all and in all” and you must find your life in Christ. Otherwise, what is the point? Let me be more direct: otherwise, what is your point? What is the point of You? If you have been raised with Christ, then run after what true knowledge, true success, true treasure. You can stand in your yard and curse the heat, the humidity, the sweat and tears of dogging your days in vain labor. You can. Or, you can change that vanity into a Christ-purpose, a godly goal of making yourself into a preacher of the gospel right where God has put you. You can die and leave the world your heart—small and measly, an unripened fruit—and we can forget you in your stored-up miserliness—your name on all those barns becomes an address. Or, you can leave us your life, generously lived as Christ among us, an image of the Son worthy of his Father!
You and I, we are called to a glory greater than creation and it is unworthy of our baptismal vows, our love for God and one another, to carve idols, to wallow in despair, to shout vainly at vanity, and to store-up against God’s generosity. So, stop lying! You have put off the old self and put on the new. Therefore, tell the truth: show us Christ!
17th Week OT(F): Leviticus 23-27, 34-37 and Matthew 13.54-58Your first objection here might be: “But, Father, I don’t know any prophets. How can I reject familiar prophets if I don’t know any?” But you do know prophets! You’re sitting in a church full of prophets right now. Priests, prophets, and kings baptized into the ministry of Christ as The Priest, The Prophet, The King. Yes, clean, well-dressed, elegantly educated and fragranced prophets but prophets despite their lack of grubbiness and stench. Prophets tell us and show us how to live now as if we were in heaven already. Their job is to constantly point us to our End. To keep us focused on our goal, to thump and jab us along the Way to Christ, reminding us at each step, each breath, each bit forward or backward that God never leaves us alone, never abandons us to our own limited skills and desires; that He never stops lifting us up and urging us to turn to Him, to re-turn to Him. Prophets are nags. Yes. But necessary ones.
Your second objection might be: “But, Father, none of these people have ever said anything remotely prophetic.” Maybe so. But let me ask you this: do you hear/listen prophetically? I mean, we talk constantly in Church about “seeing with the eyes of faith;” about putting on faith-glasses and looking at the world through the gospel first. Are your ears tuned to a prophetic frequency? Could you hear one of these many prophets remind you to drop some piece of petty nonsense in favor of the kingdom? To take on a piece of difficult work for your spiritual satisfaction and the good of the Body? Could you hear a prophet here sing your praises, call you by name, and then give you a prophetic word to preach, a message to spread without prejudice? What stops your ears from hearing? What stops your heart and mind from listening?
When you prophesy, it is perfectly reasonable for one of us to ask you, “Where did you get all this?” This might sound like incredulity but the question is more about authority than disbelief. Who authored that prophecy? Do you speak out of a true sense of our Father’s justice—one consistent with divine revelation and the tradition’s familial understanding of what justice is? Is your voice free of mere secular politics? Do you speak from the Body to the Body, or are you standing outside shouting at us? Are you working with the Church or against it? Is your prophecy true; meaning, do your words to us convey the beauty and goodness of God as we know Him together? Truly, now, are you speaking prophetically from the tradition of prophets or are you babbling eccentrically from your fantasies? Are you speaking out of a need to fix us or control us or to make us into your private image of Church? Where did you get all this? Prayer, fasting, lectio divina, works of mercy? Or do you speak out of self-righteous anger, liberal bourgeois entitlement, or some alien political philosophy?
If you speak the Word powerfully, with a contrite heart and all humility, your tongue will whisper directly to the ears that need that Word most. That Word will remain forever spoken b/c you have given voice to that which will not pass away.
