Why do we love God?

2nd Sunday of Lent

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

    God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham goes up the mountain and begins the sacrifice. He's willingly, obediently about to kill his only son b/c God has ordered him to do so. We can stop here and ask: does Abraham love God more than he loves Isaac? No, he doesn't. But his obedience to God shows that he loves God first; he loves God before he loves Isaac, therefore, Abraham loves Isaac b/c he loves God first. At the very last second, an angel stays Abraham's knife and God provides a substitute sacrifice in the form of a ram. What we love most can only be loved through the love God has for us b/c He is love itself. That God loves us is never in question. He is love. Love is who He is and what He does. No question. But there is a question about God and love that we must ask, and ask daily: do I love God? If so, what purpose does my love for God serve? On Mt. Tabor – in the presence of Peter, James, and John – the transfigured Christ tells us why we love. We love God for the same reason He loves us: so that we may be made holy. And in holiness we live out sacrificial love.

So, how do we help God make us holy? That is, what do we do/think/say/feel on a day to day basis that assists God's love for us so that we are actually growing in holiness? Loving God, yourself, your family and friends, your neighbors, and even loving your enemies is easy in the abstract. It is far more difficult to get out there and perform loving acts; to perform forgiveness; to show mercy; to treat everyone you meet – at church, at the bank, at the office, in traffic – to treat everyone you meet as another soul deeply in love with God and eternally loved by God. This is why the Church has always bound faith and works together: our loving works demonstrate our trust in God and our trust in God is made real in our loving works. When we fail to love, we confess these failures as sins in thought, word, and deed. So, how do we help God make us holy? Well, first, we understand that loving God and those He loves is not simply an abstract, intellectual exercise; next, we understand that love is a behavior – like driving or walking or getting dressed. To love is to see, hear, think about, and treat yourself and everyone else the way God Himself treats us all. With kindness, compassion, dignity, patience, and forgiveness. Do this and you grow in holiness. You become more like Christ – set apart. You are transfigured.

Becoming more like Christ is we have vowed to do. But we need to hear this: loving God, self, and everyone else – becoming more like Christ – is dangerous. Dangerous how? Besides Jesus' promises of persecution, trial, and death for those who follow him, we can point to the forty days he spent in the desert being tempted by Satan. We too are tempted to play the Devil's Games with sin and death. The Devil always takes God's gifts and tweaks them ever-so-slightly and then presents them to us infected with his poison. God's love and His command to us to love is no different. With God's love and His command to love comes His truth and His command to obey the truth. Love and truth cannot be separated. When we love intensely, we dwell intensely in the truth. And when we tell the Truth we always express love. The Devil plays on our desire to love by pointing out all the ways we appear to fail at love. He accuses the Church of not loving women b/c we truthfully name artificial contraception, abortion, and sterilization evil. He accuses us of hatred b/c we truthfully call sex outside of a sacramental marriage evil. He accuses us of not loving orphans b/c we cannot place them in homes with two fathers or two mothers. He accuses us of not loving non-Christians b/c we truthfully teach that Christ is the only name under heaven through which all are saved. What Satan is tempting us to do, want us to do, is sever truth from love and then love without truth. This we cannot do b/c our Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. We follow him so that we may be transfigured.

Satan and the world he rules teaches that “Love” is to be practiced without Truth. Love w/o truth is nothing more than tolerance or indifference, an emotion that feels good to emote but ultimately leaves those who live it living a lie. Godly love is always true. Never a lie. True love is always gives the glory to God. Never to man. Love always carries us to goodness; never to evil. Love always binds us in obedience; it never frees us to be disobedient. Godly love always heals, always cleans, sometimes hurts, sometimes cuts away. Love never winks at sin, shrugs at injustice, or ignores the poor. Love always looks to Christ, his church, and his Mother. Love never uses the bottom-line, the convenient, the practical, or the efficient to destroy God’s creatures, especially His unborn children. Love always encourages spiritual growth from faithful experience. Love never gives license to novelty for novelty’s sake nor does love trust innovation for the sake of excitement. Love can be a terrible whirlwind, a bone-shattering blow, a heart-ripping loss. But love always builds up in perfection, grows in wisdom and kindness; love attracts questions about eternal things, and discourages attachment to impermanent things. The love that Satan and the world he rules wants to settle for is a passion for indifference, permissiveness, choice w/o consequence, and, ultimately, death.

Will you be made holy? Let's ask that differently: do you will to be made holy? If you will to become a transfigured instrument for God’s Word, you will love as He loves you. You will speak the truth and only the truth; you will spread goodness and only goodness; you will honor beauty and only beauty; you will correct error, confront sin, expose lies, forgive all offenses; and you will build up his Body with works of mercy and open the doors of your faith to the stranger. And you will remember – if you will to be made holy – that you are not alone. God is with us, and who can stand against Him?

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God loves those who hate us

1st Week of Lent (S)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great, Irving

That we may be children of our heavenly Father, we must love our enemies, pray for them, especially those who persecute us. If there's a teaching in scripture that is more contrary to our animal instinct for self-preservation than this one, I'm not sure what it is. Loving family and friends comes easily. We can even manage to love God and ourselves without too much difficulty. But loving and praying for those who would see us destroyed is not only contrary to our survival it is downright suicidal. If our enemies defeat us b/c they are stronger, smarter, and more numerous, well, that's unfortunate for us but we can at least grasp the idea that we lost b/c our enemies were stronger, smarter, and more numerous. What is beyond comprehension is the idea that we would lose b/c we were too busy loving and praying to fight with all our strength! That's not a battle, it's a retreat, a surrender. And it's suicide. Jesus must be winking at the disciples when he teaches them to love and pray for their enemies. He must've spoken this nonsense in a sarcastic tone. As strange as it might be to hear: no, he's deadly serious and there was no winking. We defeat our enemies by wielding a weapon called Truth. “[The Father] makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” God loves those who hate us. And we must be perfect as He is perfect. 

If we will be the children of our heavenly Father, we must be perfect as He is perfect. God is perfect in His love. He is Love. Love is Who He is and What He does. In every thought we think, every word we speak, and every deed we do, we too must be thinkers, speakers, and doers of love. If we pick and choose whom to love, sort through the options and select this one or that to love but not that one or this one, then we do not love as God loves. The sun shines on both the good and the bad; the rain falls on our friends and our enemies. Jesus asks us, “. . . if you love those who love you, what compensation will you have? Do not [traitors] do the same? And if you greet your brothers and sisters only, what is unusual about that?” In other words, how does loving only those who love you make you a child of the Father? What truth are you living when you only pray for those who pray for you? “Do not the pagans do the same?” Why imitate those who would see us destroyed? Yes, we might die if we love them, but it would not be by suicide.

The key to understanding this difficult teaching is to understand that Jesus is pointing us to our lives beyond this one. Though our mortal lives are immensely important, they are not ultimately important; that is, in the Father's plan for our salvation it is more important that we practice love than it is to merely survive. It is essential to our eternal survival that we practice the love He gives us by loving those He Himself loves. Our enemies hate us. We can fight them with our own hatred, and we might even mortally defeat them. But in fighting them with hatred, we are immortally defeated. We become our own enemy, haters of self and God. Jesus understands our natural instinct for survival, but he pushes us to think and feel beyond the limits of this mortal life and live in the perfection of his Father's love right now. We trust in the loving-goodness of our God. And this is our fundamental strength, our deadliest weapon against the hatred of our enemies. If we bombard them with prayer, then both we and they win the battle against our mutual enemy – Sin and the death it brings.

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The only sign we need

1^st Week of Lent (W)

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

Jesus seems irritated. Maybe “frustrated” is a better word. Apparently, the crowd is clamoring after signs to prove that he is who and what he says he is. We don't know if the crowd is genuinely interested in his claims, or if they are just idly curious or bored. We can assume that they don't believe him. That's usually the case when proof is demanded. Evidence will support or refute his claim. Evidence will settle the issue. But how often is evidence presented; the claim obviously supported; and still acceptance of the claim is not forthcoming? If my mind is made up on some hot button issue (gun control, abortion, capital punishment, the identity of the Messiah), how likely is it that evidence and good argumentation will change my mind? Ideally, my mind is properly ordered to the true, good, and beautiful and can be persuaded to see the true, good, and beautiful wherever it is revealed. But we know all too well that once entrenched into a pattern of thinking, changing one's mind is difficult if not outright impossible. There's always a way to read the evidence to fit my intellectual habits. The crowd wants signs so that they can judge for themselves whether or not Jesus is telling the truth. Unfortunately, signs are not going to help them. Nor will they help us.

Signs won't help us b/c we already believe. Or we say we do. We have already accepted Jesus' claim to be the Messiah and have ordered our lives around being his followers. We aren't always and everywhere perfect followers, but we have fundamentally taken on the mind of Christ and vowed to be Christs in the world. Signs, for us, are pointless. They add nothing to who and what we are. Apparitions, locutions, weeping statues are all well and good, but they are not signs – for us – of Jesus' identity and purpose. If we believe that Jesus is the Messiah and we follow him, then we have a task to complete that's bigger than seeking after signs. We are charged with becoming the signs that the crowd seeks. You and I have agreed to be the signs of God's power in the world. That's His choice and ours. He loves the world through us and in the world we are loved by Him. Thus, we, the Church, are the sacrament by which those in the world encounter divine love. Lenten challenge: go be a sign of divine love. Show the world -- in word and deed -- that Jesus is the Messiah. He died for sinners so that we might live. His empty tomb is the only sign we need.

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Things fall apart

5^th Sunday OT

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

We think of “healing” as returning a sick or broken body back to its natural state. Kill the virus. Bandage the wound. Reset the bone. Remove the tumor. We can also think of “healing” as reestablishing the balance btw mind and body. Express the disordered emotions. Work through disappointments, betrayals, and losses. Conquer demons. Find some peace. The kind of healing Jesus does this morning is really something altogether different. Yes, he physically heals Simon's mother-in-law. And all the others who come to him. But he does more than reset their broken bodies. More than give them back their health. He sets them free. Free from sin, free from death – free from the inevitabilities of mortality. By healing these people, Jesus sets in motion a wave of spiritual remediation that reconnects his Father's children to the Holy Family and brings them into an inheritance that started building at the first Word of creation. He makes them sons and daughters of the Most High. So, to be healed by Christ is to be made whole and entire a perfected creature of the Father.

Job tells us what it's like to be imperfect creatures of the Father. We are miserable drudges. Restless hirelings and overworked slaves. Our days fly by and our nights are troubled. You can almost hear the despair in his voice: “Remember that my life is like the wind; I shall not see happiness again.” Of course, Job's unhappiness is not his fault. He's done nothing to deserve this misery. His friends interrogate him aggressively about any possible transgressions he's made against God's law. There are none. He's been abundantly blessed with a large family, material wealth, good health, and he's accounted righteous among his peers. Yet, he's tortured physically, mentally, and spiritually. He only learns “the why” of his ordeal at its end. He is a creature – a made thing – living in a mortal world subject to failure and death. Everything he has and is is of the world. All of it subject to failure and death. Nothing of the world is permanent. Nothing in the world is exempt from passing away. Health. Wealth. Family. Friends. All of it – himself included – is temporary. At the end, Job is taught: “Things fall apart.” Only God and those who belong to God endure. Jesus heals to make us possessions of God.

We should pray that we never need Job's lesson to learn the truth of our creatureliness. 21^st century middle-class, American comfort can hypnotize us with the illusion of constancy, order, and progress. Things are tidy and always improving. And even when there are setbacks in our orderly progress, we're confident that some hard work and time will see things set right. We can turn to God for help. A good thing. We can turn to one another. Another good thing. But whether we turn to God and/or one another, things fall apart. Belonging to God in no way exempts us from the mortalities of the world. Job was as righteous as a righteous man could be. All those people Jesus healed – what had they done to deserve their diseases and broken bodies? Who deserves abject poverty, systemic violence, political oppression, or natural disaster? No one. But no one is protected from the consequences of being human. What Christ offers in his healing touch is a hope beyond the ravages of mortality. An assurance that this world is not our telos, our end. We are not abandoned, left to fend for ourselves. Created with a purpose, we have more than eating, sleeping, working, and reproducing to look forward to. When our mortality fails, Christ's healing immortality steps in to reveal the Biggest Possible Picture of God's plan for our salvation. That plan needs our cooperation. It requires our freely given assent for fruition. If you will be healed into the Holy Family, you will receive Christ and preach Christ and bear witness to your healing. In word and deed, you will proclaim your healed up wounds, your scars, and you will give God the glory.   

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Don't be a tool

St. Anthony, Abbot

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

Our translation says that the Pharisees “watch Jesus closely.” Other translations say it better: they “spy on him.” In order to spy, one must watch. But not all watching is spying. Spying implies skulking for nefarious reasons. The Pharisees were colluding with the Herodians – supporters of the Roman puppet king – to put Jesus to death. More is at stake here than one man's withered hand. This gospel scene is about the force of the Law; the need for mercy; the realities of divine healing; and – most of all – the depths to which some will fall in the acquisition and maintenance of political power. Jesus' ministry is an existential threat to the power and popularity of the Pharisees and the stability of Herod's rule. At stake is the whole structure of a volatile state consumed by rivalries, betrayals, and the potential for violent revolution. So, the Pharisees spy on Jesus. They need him silenced. They need him dead. To achieve this goal, the Pharisees set aside the truth. They turn away from the Law. They lie, cheat, and set traps. All in pursuit of power. Jesus counters their plot with divine healing and mercy.

The Pharisees believe they are doing what's necessary to keep their people and themselves safe. Jesus' ministry is a radical reinterpretation of the Law. Jesus calls it the “fulfillment of the Law.” But to the power brokers of the day, his apparent violations of the Law are dangerous sparks aimed at an open powder keg. Their machinations seem justified b/c they are motivated by a desire for peace and stability. Getting Jesus out of the way – by whatever means necessary – is a Good. What the man's healing shows them – and us – is that lies cannot create truth. Cheating cannot create justice. That compromise, confusion, and political calculation cannot give us peace. And finally, that whatever is broken, sick, cast out, and impoverished can be made whole by the Word of God alone. The Pharisees believe they can control the world by using the tools of the world. But the world makes them its tool. In the end, God reveals who the Master Craftsman really is, using all of them to free us from sin and death. Keep your hearts and minds squarely focused on Christ – his truth, goodness, and beauty. Leave the tool-using and spying to the Pharisees. Nothing created can bring us peace.

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Renovation Update

That wall behind the crucifix was supposed to be finished on Dec 23rd. Didn't happen. But they are almost done. 

The acoustics in the chapel are MUCH better with the tile floors. We actually sound good singing the Office. The choirs stalls will make it even better!

Consider helping us out. We need about $90,000. We have around $8,000 with pledges for more to come in the next few weeks. 

We're looking into putting name plates on the stalls for donors. 

https://www.opdallas.com/renovate

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Becoming the Christ Child

Nativity of the Lord (Day)

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

On “the Twenty-fifth Day of December...in the 149th Olympiad; in the year 752 since the foundation of the City of Rome; in the 42nd year of the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus, the whole world being at peace, Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father...was conceived by the Holy Spirit...born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah, and was made man...” On that same day in the same year, in virtue of Christ's birth, life, death, and resurrection, you and I were given – freely given – the gift of our salvation: to become Christs in the flesh, to be made sons of God, heirs to the Kingdom; priests, prophets, and kings to bear witness to His glory in the world. We are rescued, healed, ransomed, adopted, and saved. But by far the greater gift, the greatest grace is our freedom to become Him whom we love – the Son born of Mary in Bethlehem. That son, her son, the Son of God. The Son of God and the Son of Man, the Savior, the Messiah. His name is Christ Jesus, the one sent to save us from sin and death by offering us a share in his divine nature, participation in the divine love that is the Blessed Trinity. This gift of eternal life came wrapped in the flesh of a child born in a stable, adored by shepherds and kings alike.

It is beyond strange – maybe even scandalous – that God chose to offer us a share in His divine life by taking on our human nature. He tried other ways – ritual sacrifice, the Law, the prophets – but none of these served His purpose fully: to bring us into a fundamental intimacy with Him. Human obstinance, vanity, pride, and an inordinate love of worldly things always kept us just far enough away to lose sight of our end. Maybe His older ways of saving us from ourselves were too literal, or maybe they were too difficult. Whatever the reason, we failed. Again and again, we wandered away from the covenant, finding ourselves lost in the wildernesses of the world. He used the nations to chastise us when we strayed. And He used us to show the nations His glory. Finally, at the appointed time, He took it upon Himself to fulfill the terms of the covenant that we ourselves could not or would not fulfill. The Christ Child in the stable in Bethlehem is His final means of bringing us into the Holy Family, of enticing us back into the intimacy of divine love. What the Law and the Prophets did not achieve, the infant Jesus commenced in the manger and the Christ completed on the Cross.

For 2,023 years the Church has marked the Incarnation as that singular moment in human history when the Son of God came to us like us and offered us the possibility of becoming perfectly human. From the year “752 since the foundation of the City of Rome; in the 42nd year of the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus,” all of humanity, every single human person, received and receives an invitation from their Creator to become Christ. To live and die as a witness to the Word of liberation from sin and death. To minister to those in need of hearing His Word spoken and to see His Word lived out. Each one of us is granted – by the Incarnation – a chance to not only grow in holiness but to become the means of salvation for another. Christmas is Santa Claus, presents, decorated trees, and glazed hams. But more fundamentally, Christmas is a renewal of our Yes to the Father's invitation to be a child of Christ, to become a Christ Child. “What came to be through [the Word] was life, and this life was the light of the human race.” Remember: you've said Yes. You are that light that shines in the darkness.   

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Bro, take the win!

3rd Week of Advent (T)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Albert the Great, Irving

Zechariah learns a hard but well-deserved lesson in prayer. You can pray for what you think you want. Get it. Question the veracity of the gift. Fail to be grateful. And. . .get your tongue glued to the floor of your mouth. What makes this lesson most-poignant is that Zechariah is a priest, praying in the Holy of Holies, in the presence of an archangel, who tells him that his long-prayed-for son is on his way, and he still has the audacity to bark out a dumb question like: “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” I'm reminded of a recent incident in my philosophy class when a seminarian correctly answered one of my questions. I congratulated him on being correct. But he continued to argue with me vigorously. One of his classmates shouted, “Bro, shut up and take the win!” Zechariah, bro, take the win. Now, we could excuse Zechariah's incredulity as a reaction to being addressed by an archangel, or excitement at learning he's finally going to be a father – at an advanced age. But it's a safe bet to take that the real problem here is his understanding of God's providence and the purpose of prayer. I'm betting that Zechariah thought of prayer as a sort of cosmic Amazon Wish List. Put your wants on a list and God will provide when you're ready to receive. That's not how this works. God provides and we receive. That's true. God provides what we need to return to Him freely in love. Not every want that crosses our mind. He gives what we need when we need it. Our job is to be always in a receptive mode. That mode is called gratitude. Whether we have actually been given what we need or not, we remain in gratitude. By remaining in gratitude, we remain open to receiving, always ready to get what we have been given. Zechariah muddles the recipe by adding a dash of doubtful curiosity to the mix. That's like adding cilantro and garlic to your brownie batter. Not good. The result is a dire punishment for a priest: if you're not going to use your gift of speech to give God thanks and praise, then you're not going to use it all. As you prepare to receive the gift of the Christ Child six days from now, contemplate how and why you pray. Are you praying with thanksgiving? Are you praying to add to the Wish List, or praying to receive whatever it is that God has to give you? Are you daring an angel to put you on mute by doubting that God knows what He's doing? By doubting that He can do what He wills? Last lesson from Zechariah's fumble: you and I don't have to understand what God is doing in and with our lives. We've already said Yes. Just give Him thanks and praise.

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