Do Christ's enemies hate you?

34th Week OT (W)

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

Jesus is an excellent teacher. But he's a terrible salesman. Instead of playing up the advantages and rewards of following him, he says, “They will seize and persecute you, they will hand you over to the synagogues and to prisons...You will be hated by all because of my name...they will put some of you to death.” WooHoo! Sign me up! NB. he says all this to the crowd, not just to his close knit circle of disciples. IOW, he's publicly telling everyone who's listening that joining him might land you in jail or the grave. He's a little vague on why this might happen – “because of my name.” Apparently, those who join up don't actually have to do much of anything to be hated, jailed, and possibly killed. Just being associated with him is enough. When all this happens – the hated, jailed, and possibly killed stuff – we're to allow him, Jesus, to give us the words of our defense. And our “adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute.” Again, he's little vague on how he'll defend us, thus adding to the less-than-attractive invitation to join his merry band. But join we have. So, our question this morning: do you follow Christ in such a way as to rile up his adversaries to hate, jail, and possibly kill you?

According to Open Doors, a watchdog group for Christian persecution, there are 350m Christians currently living in 50 countries that actively persecute followers of Christ. Of those 50, 35 are predominately Muslim countries. Other persecutors include paranoid dictators, communists/socialists, drug cartels, and religious nationalists. What they all have in common is that they see Christ as a threat to their power, wealth, and religious beliefs. As well they should. Because that is exactly what he is. A threat. Not a military threat, like an invading army. Or an economic threat, like global capitalism. But a spiritual threat. Christ threatens the spiritual foundations of their power, their control. He threatens their disordered passions and their nihilistic ideologies. Their subjugation of the the dignity of the human person and their utilitarian abuse of individuals and marginalized groups. The Gospel Jesus preaches is the Good News that we are free from sin. Free from fear. Free from the works of darkness that build up a culture of death and exploitation. When everything you are and everything you have is grounded in the miserable suffering of others, then the Good News is the worst news and you fight it tooth and claw. No wonder they hate Christ and his.

Back to our question: do you follow Christ in such a way as to rile up his adversaries to hate, jail, and possibly kill you? Given the global stats, we might be excused for failing to be persecuted. Might be. But we aren't. We are charged with being a thrown-wrench in the mechanics of the Enemy's power. This means telling the Truth. Diffusing Goodness. And celebrating Beauty. It means living openly as breathing sources of mercy. It means loving whatever persecutors we may have, and showing them that what God has freely given us is freely given to them as well. There can be no competition for the Father's infinite love. The race is run. It's won. And we are all victors in his victory.

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Spiritual athleticism is NOT the Way

St. Margaret of Scotland

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

I served the first three years of my priesthood right here at UD. 2005-2008. I was a campus minister and professor of English and theology. After three months of hearing confessions, I realized that some (maybe most?) Catholic UD students suffered from a form of Pelagianism. How so? They seemed to believe that God only loves them when they were sinless, thus making holiness possible w/o grace. IWO, in word and deed, they believed that grace was earned by being sinless. This is heresy. Plain and simple. Here's the truth: there is literally nothing you and I can do to beg, borrow, steal, or earn God's love. And there is literally nothing we can do to make God cease loving us. God is love. He is love by nature. Who He is is Love. God isn't someone above and beyond love Who loves. He isn't a super powerful human-like being Who loves this but not that. To be God is what it is to be love. We cannot beg, borrow, steal, or earn God's love b/c we cannot beg, borrow, steal, or earn God Himself. If God were to cease loving me, I would cease to exist. In fact, all of reality would cease to exist b/c God would cease to be love in failing to love me. So, how do you know – with absolute certainty – that God loves you? Easy. Do you exist? If you say, Yes, then God loves you. Freely, absolutely, unconditionally.

Now that that question is settled, we can move on to the more complicated question: do you love God? God loves b/c He is love. You and I are not love. We participate in His love (b/c we exist), but we are not love itself. IOW, we can sin. We can fail to love as we ought. This is where our problems start. One way of experiencing my sin is to feel or sense that God has stopped loving me. In the presence of Perfect Love, my imperfect love feels like divine abandonment. It feels like God has set me aside. Then, in my desolation, I start trying to earn back God's love with penances and prayers, sackcloth and ashes. We turn to moral perfectionism. Maybe if I am an absolutely morally Good Boy/Good Girl – forcing myself to commit no sins – God will love me again. We turn to liturgical athleticism. Maybe if I kneel longer, pray slower, add six more daily devotions, and wear three more scapulars, God will love me again. We start comparing ourselves to Those Other Sinners. Well, at least I am holier than him. He never goes to daily Mass! I do. Surely God loves me now. The Devil eggs us on in our vain efforts to win God back. Why? B/c all these efforts work to keep hidden from us the one truth we find hard to accept: God's love for us is absolute, free, and unconditional. Nothing can keep God from us. But we are more than expert at keeping ourselves from God. Our love for Him is almost always relative, bound, and conditional. So, Jesus says, “I have told you this so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete.” What did he tell us? God is love. He – Christ – is in God's love. And we remain in His love by following His commandments. What is his command? “Love one another as I have loved you.” And how does he love us? Freely, sacrificially. If you want a spiritual challenge, something to really put your faith to the test, forget the religious theatrics. Forget the idea that it's remotely possible for God to stop loving you. Drop the heresy that you and I can change God through pious deeds. Instead, go to your family and friends and ask for their forgiveness. Then, forgive them in turn. That's how you start and live your life in Christ.

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Don't give beer to snakes

St. Albert the Great

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

Albertus Magus is in trouble with the Prior. In a fit of experimental zeal, he's taken some of the brothers' beer and fed it to a snake. The inebriated serpent escapes Albert's cell and is terrorizing the less scientifically curious friars by flopping around like a...well...like a drunken snake. For the sake of weak hearts and a calmer convent, the Prior forbids any future experiments with alcohol and snakes. We don't know what hypothesis Albert was testing empirically, but it was not done merely for the sake of curiositas. Albert – teacher of Aquinas and future doctor of the Church – was exercising the virtue of studiositas, the rightly ordered acquisition of truth with the whole of reality in view. Curiositas is an excess of the virtue of studiositas, leading one to attempt to acquire truth in a disorderly manner, or to grasp at only partial truth for the sake of another vice. Albert's drunken snake might appear at first to be a prank or a misguided attempt at acquiring scientific knowledge. However, we know that Albert believed that knowing something about creation is to know something about the Creator.

When we look for and find the first causes of the Real, we look for and find Wisdom. In a purely natural world, we might say that wisdom is knowledge plus experience. Wisdom is a long familiarity with what works. When we put God in the picture, we have to expand our definition. We have to look beyond what works and look for why what works works. This “why” is the core of knowing a thing scientifically, knowing its causes. And knowing the causes always leads us back to the First Cause, God. Sirach puts it beautifully: “Like a Mother [wisdom] will meet [the one practiced in the law], like a young bride she will embrace him, Nourish him with the bread of understanding, and give him the water of learning to drink.” When we want to come closer to God, we don't usually think of science as a viable method. But St. Albert did. By exploring – in an orderly fashion – created things, he found the ordered causes and effects of creation. Built into these created things is the divine purpose, a final cause, a telos. This telos is to give glory to God by being exactly what God made them to be. Nothing more or less. Be the perfect snake. Be the perfect rose. Be the perfect human person. Flourishing in one's final cause is the glory of God made manifest.

As unusual as it may sound, we can come to know and love God by knowing and loving His creation. Such knowledge and love will be imperfect, of course, but along with Scripture and our relationship with Christ through his Church, we can have all we need to realize our final cause. All that stands in our way is the disordered desire to be God w/o God – Pride. Pride fuels curiositas, leading us to think that we know what we cannot know. That our own efforts – unaided by grace – can coerce God into loving us more. Even as we work overtime to earn God's favor, we reject the very gifts He gives us to love Him by loving one another. It's a form of madness! To think that you or I can do something as a creature – as a made thing – to do something to make God love us. When we are only here to think that in the first place b/c He already loves us! St. Albert explored the created world and saw and heard and touched Divine Love and poked and prodded all the made things and found God in the perfectly ordered causes and effects of providence. He spent his life tracing causes/effects. Each cause is a psalm and every effect a prayer. He shows us how to be perfectly human by showing us how to be perfectly loved. Joy abounds where love is abundant.

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Votin' ain't prayin'

34^th Week OT (Th)

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

One utopia after another has fallen to pride, greed, and violence. Robespierre's France. Stalinist Russia. Maoist China. Pol Pot's Cambodia. Castro's Cuba. Hitler's Germany. The human impulse to establish the perfect society seems deeply embedded in our DNA. What these murderous regimes really are is nothing less than perversions of our supernatural desire for the Kingdom of God. But we are impatient. So, we reach for the Kingdom of God w/o God. And we get Kingdoms of Men w/o godly rule. Pope Benedict XVI warned us not to “immantentize the eschaton,” that is, don't try to bring the fulfillment of salvation history – heaven – into the present age. We are not capable, right now, of governing ourselves or others through the radical demands of sacrificial love. We can serve the poor, the hungry, the sick and injured, the hopeless and abandoned. But cannot eliminate poverty, hunger, and disease through merely human effort. Inevitably, these efforts create brutal regimes that systematically grind down human dignity and spit on the imago Dei. Jesus says that the Kingdom is among us. So, we wait for Christ's coming again and the fulfillment of the Kingdom.

That we cannot create a perfectly just human society is no excuse not to try. Nor is our inability to be perfectly just an excuse to be unjust while we wait for the Kingdom. For now, we turn to God's mercy and the power of forgiveness to be as just as we can be. When we show mercy and forgive, to the best of our ability, we edge closer and closer to the perfection of the Kingdom among us. But even then, we wait for Christ. And we are on guard against the many false Kings that pretend to the throne. During this last election cycle, the friars probably grew tired of my constant refrain: “Brothers, put no trust in princes...or princesses!” No politician can save us. No policy or procedure or committee can save us. Certainly no party or ideology can save us. If asked, “Do you believe that President X or Governor Y can save you?” 100% of us would say no. But do we behave as if that no were true? Watching reactions to the 2024 election results – both good and bad – makes me wonder. Politics isn't religion. Voting is not praying. Winning is not salvation. Nor is losing damnation.

The Kingdom of God is among us. And you are a subject of the rightful King to the degree that you remain wholeheartedly committed in word and deed to the great work of bearing witness to His mercy. Your task – and mine – is to be agents of the King in subverting the rule of the worldly powers. Our subversion comes in the form of speaking the Truth. Diffusing Goodness. And celebrating Beauty. If you've never thought of yourself as a guerrilla fighter or a saboteur, well, perhaps it's time you start. What else could you be as follower of Christ?

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Why will you drink the Lord's cup?

29^th Sunday OT

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

The Sons of Thunder ask Jesus for a favor. He listens to their request and says, “You do not know what you are asking.” Hearing this quiet rebuke, do the Sons blush, shamefaced? Do they withdraw their impertinent request? Maybe they bristle and double-down by insisting that they deserve this honor. Or make the argument that – practically speaking – they are the best men for the job. Mark doesn't record their reaction, so we are left to speculate. Had they been paying attention to their Teacher, they would've never made the request. Just before this tense scene, Jesus laid out his future for the disciples: “...we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and hand him over to the Gentiles who will mock him, spit upon him, scourge him, and put him to death, but after three days he will rise.” Is this the future they want? If they follow him, this is the future they will get! So, Jesus rebukes their favor, saying, “You do not know what you are asking.
Can you drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” They answer, “We can.” I like to think that their voices trembled in fear...just a little.

It never hurts for us to remember that we have committed ourselves to a Way of Life that ends in sacrifice. If your faith amounts to a consoling story of Being Good and landing in Heaven, then actually living the faith in the world is going to be rough. If the cup you drink is filled with sentiment, fluffy angels, weeping statues, and avoiding being naughty, then the Cross is going to come as a big surprise. James and John have it in mind that sitting at the right and left of Jesus is about power, influence, and prestige. Few of us share this delusion. But we may have our own fantasies to dispel. Maybe we think that following Christ is a guarantee perfect health. Or a promise of material wealth. Or the perfect middle-class family lifestyle. Some seem to believe that their faith in Jesus is a ward against having to think rationally, or actually participate in the life of the world. For others all this is just a respectable place to be on a Sunday morning. Good for business and way to keep the neighbors from talking. I dare say that whatever the case, the Cross is going to come as a surprise for us all. Despite everything the Lord has said, despite our long history as a Church, it will be a Big Surprise.

At this point, you might be thinking, “Wow. Father didn't get his coffee this morning!” Not true. I did. It's just that this Gospel scene always brings to mind my motives for belief. Why am I doing this? “This” being “being a Catholic; serving as a Dominican friar and priest.” And then I start to think about the motives you might have for doing this. For being Catholic, for being here at St. Albert's for Mass, for following Christ in an increasingly insane world. For being a novice friar just starting religious life. There are as many motives as there are people to have them. No doubt we all have a story to tell about our faith. How we came to it. How we keep it. How we win and lose day-to-day. And then I remember James and John and their ridiculous request and Jesus' sad rebuke. Can you drink the cup I will drink? IOW, can you hang on the Cross I will hang on? We say we can. We wouldn't be here if we couldn't say we can. But can we? Not as long as our faith is little more than a family-imposed requirement, or a social nicety, or a middle-class American habit. No one eagerly goes to the Cross for those reasons. The only reason to hang with Christ on the Cross is b/c you have become Christ and that's just how it ends. For him, for you, for the Church.

On Wednesday this week I'll teach the novices that homilies are supposed to be exhortatory. Encouraging. Yes, they can be challenging. Should be challenging. But above all, they must be encouraging. Like a coach at half-time during a tied game. So, where's the exhortation? Whatever your motivations for being here, for being a follower of Christ, know that Christ is with you. And not only Christ but his Church as well. We do none this alone. Even if you see yourself as a lone sheep among the wolves, you are not alone. You are part of a Body. James and John wanted – foolishly – to be at the head of the body. Jesus put them in their rightful place. Serving. That's where Christ should find us when he comes again. Serving. Take your gifts – that which brings you joy – and put them at the service of the Body. That's how God perfects us. Through the gifts He's given us. Each gift, every gift works together to bring the whole Body closer and closer to perfection. When it comes time to go to the Cross, you will go with the millions who have gone before. And once there you will greet the millions who follow after. Hold fast to your faith, praying, “We can. We can drink this cup.”

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Love God and do what comes supernaturally

28^th Week OT (W)

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

“Licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness...” Paul says that these are works of the flesh. Works that indulge our appetites in a disordered fashion. These works keep us from entering the gates of eternal life. Not only do they prevent us from finding eternal unity with God, they also poison our witness here on earth and give scandal to those we are sent to serve. If we devote ourselves to the works of the flesh privately while bearing witness to Christ publicly, we become “unseen graves.” We become hypocrites. Jesus charges the Pharisees and scribes with weighing down God's people with burdens they themselves refuse to carry. But why should it matter that the Pharisees and scribes fail to follow the rules they impose? If following their rules makes me holy, why should I care if anyone else follows them? Jesus' point is that the rules don't make anyone holy. They are superfluous burdens. And the evidence for this is that the rule-makers don't follow their own rules! What makes us holy is the love of God and our love for Him. So, love God and do what comes supernaturally.

Now, it's this kind of wishy-washy “just love God” talk that makes us cringe. Maybe we don't want to admit it out loud, but we like the rules. We want the boundaries of good/evil. Clear, crisp lines that mark off right and wrong. If we're being totally honest, we love these black and white rules – most especially when they are applied to those sinners over there. Can you see the hypocrisy starting to creep in? If we talk about holiness purely in terms of loving God, then how do we know that everyone else is loving God in the same way I am? One way is to say “doing X and not doing Y” means you love God. That's what the Pharisees do. Pay your tithe of mint and rue and that means you love God. Don't work on the Sabbath and that means you love God. What happens over time? Doing X and not doing Y is taken to be “loving God.” Nothing more, nothing less. Jesus says no. It is not only possible but quite easy to do X and not do Y and still fail to love. Love of God and neighbor must come first and then everything you do and say and think follows. What you do, say, and think is evidence of your love. Or your failure to love. And the truest test of love is mercy. How quickly do you forgive? How sincerely do you will the best for others? How deeply do you desire that Christ be fully known by all? How much at peace are you in the world?

The Pharisees and scribes are hypocrites b/c they invent and then impose useless measures of what it means to love God. They don't follow these rules b/c they know the rules are useless. Christ has freed us from the works of the flesh, including the impulse and temptation to play at being holy for the sake of appearances. He has freed us from the need to sniff around others, searching for sin. He has freed us to love. So, love and do what comes supernaturally!      

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Trust needs no evidence

28^th Week OT (M)

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

Jack comes home from work two or three times a week reeking of another woman's perfume. He “works late” frequently and seems to have lost interest in his marriage. The last straw is the way he hides his cell phone away so his wife doesn't see the texts he receives after hours. Seeing all these signs, Jill hires a PD to gather evidence of Jack's infidelity. After a month of following him around town, the PD reports to Jill that Jack is not having an affair. She sighs in relieve and says, “I knew he wasn't b/c I trust him completely!” This tells us that Jill does not understand the meaning of “trust.” If she “trusts” Jack after the investigation, it's b/c she has conclusive evidence. That's not trust; it's knowledge. She knows that Jack is not having an affair. If she had trusted him, she would have never hired the PD. Which comes first in the life of Christ: faith or evidence? Do we trust Christ and then understand the evidence in the light of faith? Or do we look for evidence and then decide whether or not to believe? The crowds want a sign. They want evidence that Jesus is who he says he is before they believe. Jesus says, “This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it, except the sign of Jonah.”

Of course, the sign of Jonah is Christ's three days in the tomb and his defeat of death in the resurrection. That's The Sign. The only evidence we need to believe. Believe that and the rest follows. Don't believe it and nothing else can or will follow. To say that faith comes first is not to say that only faith matters. God gave us reason to understand what we believe. But reason alone cannot get us to faith. Why? B/c reason alone never requires us to trust. What saves us is our participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ – our own partaking in the sign of Jonah that Jesus says is the only sign we need. So why do we clamor after additional signs? Locutions and apparitions? Why do we think we need something else to demonstrate the rightness of our faith? Well, why does Jill send a PD after Jack? She suspects that her trust is misplaced. She worries that she's been duped. She needs more. If you need more than the sign of Jonah to trust our Lord, you can certainly look for that more. Whatever it is. But know that that more is not really more. It's all you have. It's not faith or trust or belief. It's evidence. And that evidence quickly becomes your god. You become a follower of proof rather than a follower of Christ. And proof cannot save you. Paul says it plainly, “For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.”

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Don't be possessed

28^th Sunday OT

Fr. Philip Neri Powell OP

St. Albert the Great, Irving

What riches do you put between yourself and our Father’s love for you? Here's the scene: the rich young man asks Jesus how he might inherit eternal life. Jesus patiently recites the commandments given to Moses. The young man tells Jesus that he has observed the Law all his life. And then in an moment that deserves its own gospel, Jesus looks into the young man’s heart, loves him, and with this love sees the gaping hole in the young man’s soul—the lack, the longing that defines him. Jesus sees the young man’s enslavement to things. What the young man lacks but desires is true poverty. Freedom from stuff. Freedom from ownership. BUT he has many things. And most importantly, he is possessed by those many things.

So, knowing that the young man seeks eternal life and knowing that he desires to be free of these things, why doesn’t Jesus just free him from his possessions? Why not cast out the demons of avarice and liberate the young man from his bondage? Jesus does exactly that. Jesus tells him as precisely as he can: go, sell your stuff, give to the money to the poor, and follow me. His exorcism is complete. But you see, an exorcism is effective only on those willing to be freed from their demons. The young man desires to be free. But he doesn’t will it; he doesn’t act. And so he remains a slave to his possessions. Jesus offers him control over his greed, control over his stuff, and instead, at the words of exorcism, the young man’s face falls and he goes away sad to remain sad all his days.

Here’s what you must understand about desire. Desire is at once longing and lacking, hungering and not having. To desire love is to long for it and to admit that you don’t have it. Jesus looks into the heart of the young man and sees his brightest desire, his strongest lack, and he loves him for it. But we cannot be a slave to two masters. You cannot give your heart to two loves. We must be poor in spirit so that we can be rich in God’s gifts. We must be poor in spirit so that there is room for Christ, room for him to sit at our center and rule from the core of our being. This is what it means for us to prefer wisdom to scepter and throne; to prefer wisdom to health and beauty; to account silver and gold as sludge. In wisdom, all good things come together in her company.

This is the point in the homily when I am supposed to exhort you to give up your earthly attachments. Exhort you to surrender your chains: your inordinate love of cars and money and gadgets and sex and drugs and rock and roll…But you know all that, don’t you? You know as well as I do that none of that is permanent. None of that can substitute for the love of God and the grace of his mercy. None of that will bring you happiness. It is ash and smoke and shadow and will never – despite the promises of luxury and attention – will never make you happy. You know this. I don’t need to tell you that nothing created can do what only the Creator can – give you a permanent love and life everlasting.

But let me ask you again: what riches do you put between yourself and our Father’s love for you? What possesses you and holds you back? If Jesus looked into your eyes and said to you: “You are lacking one thing for eternal life.” What is that one thing? My guess is that not many of us are held back by expensive possessions. Not many are held back by lands and jewels and gold reserves! Not many of you are suffering under the weighty burden of Gucci, Prada, Christian Dior and Yves St. Laurent!

Let me ask a different set of questions. Let’s see how many hit home. Are you rich in a fear that God doesn’t love you enough? Are you unlovable? Are you so rich in sin that a righteous God couldn’t possibly forgive you? Are you so rich in self-sufficiency, self-reliance that you don’t need other people? So rich in a personal knowledge of God that you don’t need others to reveal the Father to you? Are you so rich in divine gifts that you don’t need the gifts of others to make it day to day? Or maybe you’ve stored up your wealth in good works and can survive without grace for a while? Maybe you don’t need Jesus to look you in the eye and love you because your grasp of the theological and moral constructs of the human experience of the Divine are enough. Are you burning through your life on the fuel of self-righteous certainty – the false assurance that you’ve got it right all on your own (objectively and absolutely) and that there is nothing else for you to learn and no one competent to teach you? Are you so wise? Are you angry that no one else notices your wisdom? Does your desire for piety and purity bring you closer to your brothers and sisters in Christ, or is this desire an excuse to keep them at a safe distance? Is your public holiness also a private holiness, or is it a pretense that hides a furious lack of charity?

Let me ask the hardest question: what do you fear? More often than not we are slaves to our fears not our loves and we can dodge public responsibility for our fears. We cannot dodge Christ: no creature is concealed from him, but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account.

Despite these gard questions, I’m not worried. Not even a little. Here’s what I know: we desire to know God, we long to be touched by His spirit, we want more than gold, silver, or cold hard cash to be in His presence and to know his healing grace. We are here b/c He loved us here and we got off the couch, off the computer, off the cell phone, and we made it here this morning for this reason and no other: we cannot be happy w/o Him and there is no better or messier or more graceful place to find Him than among His mongrel children at prayer. Bring your lack to Him and do what needs to be done to follow Him.

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