In asking him to sacrifice Isaac, God was asking the unthinkable from Abraham. He responds: "Here I am Lord," What is our response when the Lord asks the unthinkable from us?

 God did the unthinkable. 

The God who had led Abraham from his homeland, the God who had given Abraham the promise of a land and progeny beyond counting said, “Take your son Isaac, the one you love, and offer him up as a holocaust.”  In effect, God was saying, “You gave up everything based on my promise, and I gave you the son who would fulfill that promise.  Now, do you love me enough to give it all back?”  Unlike Job from whom God took everything away, God asked Abraham to give it back freely, to sacrifice everything he had hoped for and all he had received in willing obedience to God. 

Abraham’s trust in God enabled him to walk before the Lord in the land of the living.  The land of the living for Abraham as well for ourselves is always the concrete circumstances and situations we experience from day to day.  Initially God told Abraham:  “Leave your country, your family and your father’s house, for the land I will show you.  I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you.”  Indeed, Abraham was faithful to the call of God in his life.  He gave up his past.  In today’s account, Abraham was being asked to give up his future as well in sacrificing his only son Isaac.

Abraham’s response to all of this was:  “Here I am Lord.”

In our Lenten journey and in our life journey, can we say “Here I am Lord” when we face the challenges of life that call us to give up our past and perhaps our future as well.  What is God asking of you this Lent?

Has the Lord ever asked the unthinkable from you?  For the families of the horrific school killings in Parkland, Florida, they are confronted with the unthinkable in the death of their sons and daughters?

When you have the death of a family member, when you deal with illness in your life, when a significant relationship has gone south in your life, when you have faced your own addiction, whatever that be, you are confronted with a place you would rather not be.  Where is God for you at that moment

God never gives up on us?  Can we trust in this God who never gives up on us?   While the Scriptures challenge us to reflect on what God asks of us, the apostle Paul reminds what God abundantly shares with us.  God has given His Son, the Lord Jesus, to reveal His love for us and to save us from our sinfulness.

On this second Sunday of our Lenten journey, the Church invites to pray over  the Transfiguration Gospel account as well as the Isaac dilemma for Abraham.

In the Gospel account, Jesus led the apostles Peter, James, and John up a high mountain apart by themselves  He then was transfigured before them and his clothes became dazzling white…from the cloud came a voice, “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.”

In the experience of the Transfiguration, the apostles were given a glimpse of the risen Lord in his transfigured glory.  Then came the voice of God the Father, “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.”  In our own journey of faith, and we each have a unique journey.  My journey is not yours and your journey is unique to you, but the common denominator we all have is the words spoken by God the Father at the Transfiguration:  “Listen to him.”  Our journey begins and ends with Jesus.  We are to listen and to respond to His call in our lives. 

In the Transfiguration account, Peter wanted to stay up on the mountain.   He said to the Lord:  ‘Rabbi, it is good that we are here.  Let us make three tents.”  But the Lord had other plans for Peter, James, and John.  They were to come down the mountain and journey to Jerusalem where Jesus was to suffer and to die.  They were called to be the disciples of the crucified Christ as well as the risen Christ.

The Gospel invites us to reflect on how are we being called to see with new eyes?  What is clouding our view of the transfigured Christ?  How does the world look different through Jesus’s vision?  Does our identity and our purpose need to be transformed?   Most importantly, what is the cross in your life that identifies you as a disciple of the crucified Christ as well as a disciple of the Risen Christ?

Personally speaking every year, I face the same Lenten journey, walk the same way of the cross, and listen to the same readings more or less.  When I begin the season with ashes, I fully plan to make this the Lent where I pay attention to the conversion to which the Church and the Gospel calls me.  I don’t mean for time to slip away – yet days fly by.  And I have arrived at Easter without the transformation I intended to make.

Spiritually speaking, I need some speed bumps in my Lenten journey to slow me down and to make me more conscious of my need for conversion and more radically trusting in God as Abraham did.  Perhaps this describes your Lenten journey as well.  For sure we have our own plans for the Lenten season, but the question is how can the Lord catch our attention and invite us to  ‘Listen to Him’ and His plans for our Lenten journey?

Sometimes the spiritual speed bump given to us is not of our own choosing – when you are confronted with the unthinkable in your life.  Perhaps, just perhaps, the Lord is calling you to a deeper relationship with Him as was the case of Abraham, our father in faith.

We need to speak to the Lord in prayer and then to listen to the Lord in prayer.

A Lenten speed bump given to our parish is our Monday evenings of prayer in the Christlike spiritual renewal initiative in which we are invited to slow down and place ourselves in God’s presence trusting that all our days are in His hands.

St Paul in the second Scripture reading says:  “If God is for us, who can be against us?”  Paul ends this beautiful meditation with the words:  “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities…nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

 May our Lenten journey confirm us in our conviction of faith that there is nothing that will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Have a Blessed Day.

Even as we deal with the deadly and horrific school killings in Florida, we believe our God is bigger that any of our sins or the violence we live with. Let us firmly stand on the common ground of love.

We enter into another Lenten season.  We were marked with ashes this past Wednesday as Lent formally began. These ashes acknowledge that we all belong to the order of penitents.  We all confess that we are sinners, and we stand in need of the Lord’s healing forgiveness.  The light of Christ that is within us has been dimmed by the darkness of our sin.   We acknowledge this reality with these ashes.  We were given the mantra to:  Repent and believe in the Gospel.

The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan.  He was among the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.  

 Today’s Gospel tells us about the experience of Jesus in the desert.  The Gospel also indicates our road ahead, our path of discipleship.  To travel that road we have forty days of spiritual renewal – in honor of Jesus’ days in the desert. 

In the midst of a Rochester winter, it may be difficult to imagine Jesus’ experience of the desert.  There is no desert here.  In the biblical context, the desert is anywhere we experience solitude.  And in this solitude, two things can happen:  an encounter with God and an encounter with the Tempter.  This is what happened to Jesus in today’s Gospel.

In the desert, Jesus prayed to His Father and fasted for forty days and forty nights. Secondly, Jesus experienced what each one of us undergoes in temptations and sufferings.

It is the uncomfortable silence of the desert which opens a space for God to confront the divided state of our hearts.

Our divided hearts are symbolized by the ashes on our foreheads that have dimmed the light of Christ this is within us.  Yes, there are many ugly things about ourselves:

-         Our meanness and envy.

-         The hurts we have not forgiven.

-         The desire to take revenge.

-         The gossip, the pornography, the greed, the self-centeredness.

-          Our addiction to a culture of materialism and what I want.

Yes, there are demons; there is sinfulness in our lives that we seek to turn away from.  Yes, we encounter Satan in the desert of our inner wilderness.  But that is not the end of our Lenten journey.  The real purpose of our Lenten spiritual disciplines is that we are to encounter God in the desert of Lent.  May we focus our hearts on the self-giving love of Jesus.  May we allow ourselves to believe in His love.

Lent pours the grace of forgiveness into our world.  Even as we deal with the deadly and horrific school killings in Florida, as our safety is threatened by too much senseless violence, when even our precious young students are at risk during the school day, we need to know that God is bigger than any of our sins, wars, violence and hatred.  God wants His Kingdom to come now.  Lent is our time of saying ‘yes’ to a partnership with God in saving the world from the effects of evil and sin. Together let us firmly stand on the common ground of love and work together to remedy the social ills that plague our society.

Our aim in Lent should not be our aim to justify ourselves before God by our acts of penance, but rather through those acts develop a genuinely penitential heart.  Such a heart knows itself to depend entirely on the mercy of the Lord.

I call your attention to the simple sentence in today’s Gospel.  “He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.”

The wild beasts tell us that life is fragile.  The wild beasts symbolize the violence we see in the Florida school killings.  There is no escaping the fragileness of the wild beasts in society.  There are also demons within ourselves.  We have an animal side that focuses only on our own pleasure instead of service of others.

Thanks be to God we also have angels that minister to us, that are looking after us – renewing us.  The angels are the graces of our lives – human and divine.  We thank you Lord for all the people of our lives who are God’s messengers, God’s angels to us.  We give thanks for all the people who love us and reveal the face of God to us.

Most of us would not describe ourselves as being ascetical.  We enjoy our share of the joys of life.  Yet, the Lenten calls us to embrace an aspect of asceticism as part of our Lenten journey.  We need to find out what we believe and how strongly we believe.  We give up some good in this world as a way of saying and showing that we believe in a better world (even this side of the grave.)

In the last part of today’s Gospel, Jesus begins his public ministry and proclaimed that the Kingdom of God is at hand.  In terms of my own self, before I began my ministry as a priest, I had twelve years of seminary formation consisting of considerable time in the chapel and in the class room.  As I think of Jesus’ seminary formation, so to speak, before beginning his public ministry, Jesus spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness where he was tempted and struggled and where he encountered God with a joyful sense of obedience to his Father’s will.  May the seminary formation of each of us, so to speak, focus on our spiritual renewal that we are called to in embracing spiritual disciplines.     In so doing, may we encounter God more deeply in our lives.

May you have a blessed, joy-filled, and ascetical Lenten season.

The Church is a hospital for sinners, rather than a hotel for saints. We seek to come to a place where we can "kiss the leper" of our day.

“Unclean, unclean!”  From today’s first Scripture reading, the leper must cry out:  “Unclean, unclean.”  The leper not only lives with his disease, the leper must also live an isolated, separated life cut off from the community.

In contrast to living with this stigma and separation from society, the leper in the Gospel account came to Jesus, begging on his knees, saying, “If you wish, you can make me clean.”  Jesus responds, “I do wish.  Be made clean.”

Could there have been more perfect scriptures to prepare ourselves for our Lenten journey?  For each of us, if we honestly look at our inmost hearts and daily lives, must confess at least something, like the Gospel’s leper, that needs to be made clean.  And to each of us, may we hear the words of Jesus spoken to the Gospel leper, “I do will it.  Be made clean.”

Today’s Gospel prepares us for our Lenten journey of 40 days.  We begin this Wednesday with ashes marked on our foreheads.  The words spoken to us as we receive these ashes are:  “Repent and believe the Gospel.”  With these ashes, we acknowledge that we belong to the order of penitents.  We stand in need of the Lord’s healing forgiveness.  In our Lenten journey, we embrace the spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, and alms giving.  In turning from sin, we seek the conversion experience of placing God first in our lives.

But to prepare ourselves, we begin during this Lenten season by acknowledging our own leprosy that separates us from a fuller experience of God’s love in our lives.  In this Lenten season, may we celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation in a grace-filled way.  I like to think of this beautiful sacrament as whispering into the ears of our merciful and compassionate God the story of our life.  Then the words of Jesus are spoken to us:  “I do will it.  Be made clean.”

  

Our leprosy is the sinfulness of our lives that separates us from God’s love.  In our Lenten journey, indeed may we turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.

As we pray over this Gospel, we also need to reflect on our attitudes on the people in our lives whom we find undesirable – as lepers in the sense we don’t want anything to do with them.  We want to keep then separated from us.

We live in a world of suffering: suffering caused by diseases, suffering caused by the exclusion of people, suffering caused by greed and jealousy. But rather than just say that is ‘the lot of humanity’ we look towards Jesus as the one who brings healing, who welcomes people into his embrace, and who proclaims a new way of living. To belong to this community is to recognize the mystery of God’s forgiveness and healing made visible to us in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Mother Theresa said:  “The biggest disease is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the disease of being unwanted.”  Leprosy was the most dreaded of all diseases at that time because it separated people from their family and their community and thus constituted a “living death.”

We need first to do an inventory to see if there are folks who would feel unwelcome in our Church?  Who, if they walked in our door this minute, would feel the questioning stares of others?

We ask God humbly for the grace to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and to reach out to those whom society treats as lepers.

This weekend is the Diocese of Rochester Public Policy Weekend.  We invite you to take a moment after Mass to sign the petition we have available which calls on the U.S. Congress to pass the Dream Act.  This petition has the support of Bishop Matano and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.  We believe in the sacredness of the human person and in protecting the life and dignity of every human being.

The young people affected by the Dream Act, who were brought to the United States as children, are contributors to our economy, academic standouts in our universities, and leaders in our parishes.  The Dream Act will provide an opportunity for legal permanent residence with a pathway to citizenship for those who can fulfill specific legal conditions.

Please God we do not see these children as lepers, so to speak, that need to be separated from us in our society.  May we see these dreamers as our brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus.  They need and deserve our love and welcome.

To the extent that we are judgmental and prejudge others, whether they are immigrants whom we consider undesirables, whether their sexuality is different than ours, whether their way of looking at religion is different than ours, we are in need of Christ’s healing touch.  We need to be able to see Christ in others, to have Christ’s compassion for the powerless, the poor, the hurting in mind, body, and spirit.  We need to get to the place where we are able to “kiss the leper” of our day.

May we see ourselves as a Church that is a hospital for sinners, rather than a hotel for saints.  We all need healing.  That is what the ashes on our foreheads this Ash Wednesday signify. 

Today we remind ourselves that Jesus entered into this suffering world bringing healing and peace, and that he has called us to carry on this work of reconciling people to one another and to the Father. Put bluntly, if we want to gather here as sisters and brothers – and that is the condition of taking part in the Eucharist –then we have to be individuals who bring healing and forgiveness to all those we encounter.

Have a blessed day.