Whoever loves meets God

The take-home message of today’s Scriptures is whoever loves meets God.

One of the Pharisees, a scholar of the law, tested Jesus by asking:  “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”     As in last week’s Gospel in asking Jesus:  “Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not,”  the Pharisees seek to engage Jesus in debate and to win the argument.  Good luck with that.

My nephew Justin who is a lawyer told me he was taught in law school that you never ask a question of a witness in court if you don’t know what the answer is.  It’s too dangerous otherwise.  This scholar of the law asking the question of Jesus was overmatched.  Nonetheless, while meant to test Jesus, the question is very legitimate.  Which commandment is the law is the greatest?

Jesus responded:  “You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and first commandment.  The second is like it:  You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

These two commandments are the currency of God’s kingdom, a currency completely different from last week’s Roman coin and completely different from the self-centered transactions that too often characterize our contemporary way of life.

Jesus’ answer was not a particular law, now even two particular laws.  His answered demanded a new lifestyle, a way of living that draws us so close to God that we become His presence for others.  The law tells us what we have done wrong.  Love tells who we can be.  While this linking of the two great commandments was not unique to Jesus, it does get at the heart of Jesus’ mission and ministry.

Jesus is not attempting to do away with the law and the prophets by reducing everything to the so-called new commandment.  This commandment becomes the lens through which everything is to be seen.  It is the interpretative key for understanding all of revelation. 

The love command is the guts of Catholic morality.  Church practices and rules are there to help us avoid everything that is opposed to the “love command.”  Sin in our lives is when we do not live up to our baptismal commitment, to our discipleship witness of loving God and our neighbor.  In the Gospel account, the Pharisees understanding of what truth is could be found only in a multitude of laws.  The Gospel affirms the witness of a God of love and a God of hope.  The joy of the Gospel is discovered when we share the merciful love of Jesus with one another.

Meaningful discipleship is not found in the mere observance of law.  Meaningful religion is lived out in a triangle of love – love for God, love for others, and love for self.  In that triangle of love is found the secret of a fulfilling life on earth and a foretaste of the life to come.

If you ask yourself, what does God want of us, what is God’s priority for us?  God’s priority for us is that we love our neighbor as ourself.   For Jesus, our neighbor is anyone and everyone, unconditionally, no exceptions.  To say again, for Jesus, our neighbor is anyone and everyone, unconditionally, no exceptions.

Our intimacy with the Lord will be based on the love and intimacy we have shared with all of God’s people.  The first Scripture reading from the book of Exodus concretizes Jesus’ teaching.  The alien, the orphan and the poor are our neighbors.  Immigrants whether documented or undocumented, saints or sinners, every member of LGBT, your family member whom it is most difficult for you to relate to is your neighbor to be loved and is the barometer of the depth of our love of God.

May we be transformed by God’s grace, who desires us to care for all among us who are in need, not just because particular laws govern us but because the love of God and neighbor burns in us.

We pray today that we might love God so deeply that we will have no choice but to bring God’s love to those around us.

This is not to say all of us are ready to be canonized because we have already mastered the commandment of love, but may it be the desire of our hearts to make love the first requirement of our discipleship of the Lord Jesus.

The poet Maya Angelou was once asked what her lifetime goals were.  She answered that she wanted to become a Christian.  Now Maya Angelou was already a Christian.    Her point was that Christianity is an ongoing process of becoming.    Everyday we take steps to become a Christian.

In all humility, may all of us identify with the lifetime goal of Maya Angelou and strive always to become more Christian, to live the first requirement of our discipleship of the Lord Jesus – our love of God and our love of one another.

With each Eucharist we celebrate, in the Penitential Rite we acknowledge the areas of our life in which Jesus is not yet Lord, the ways that we have not loved God and our neighbor.  Thankfully and gratefully we are the recipients of the merciful love of Jesus, and we commit ourselves to be people who love one another.

And so we pray, Lord, let love be the guiding principle of all I say and think.   For our life as a disciple of Jesus requires that we treat all –especially the most vulnerable – with dignity.  Yes we live in a culture and a society that prides itself in the law of individualism and in private property, but we also are given the command to whom more is given, more is to be shared. 

Again, the take home message of today’s Scriptures is whoever loves meets God.

Have a Blessed day.

If Caesar's image is on the he Roman coin, where do we find God's image?

This coming week, thousands of Halloween costumes will be bought and made across the United States in anticipation of the big night a week from Tuesday.  There will be ghosts and witches and pirates.  An enormous amount of time, talent and treasure will be expended to pretend for a few hours to be something on the outside that we are not in the inside.  In contrast to Halloween, Jesus is trying to show us how important it is to witness on the outside the mystery of the love of Christ that is within us.

In today’s Gospel, the Pharisees went off and plotted how they might entrap Jesus in speech.  Their strategy was to get Jesus to talk about taxes.  That usually is a no-win situation. Taxes are a timeless human issue.  So they said to Jesus:  “Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay tax to Caesar or not?”

In replying to those who were trying to trap him, Jesus said:  “Show me the coin that pays the census tax.”   Looking at the coin, Jesus then asks:  “whose image is this and whose inscription?’  They replied, “Caesar’s.”  It is lawful to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.  By answering, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.” Jesus narrows his response to the need to pay the census tax.  The payment of taxes helps fulfills the government’s responsibility to provide for the common good.  We need to be the servants not only of our personal interests but also of the societal needs.

The point of the story is to see how Jesus responds to this attempt to entrap him….Jesus turned the question about taxes into a much more important question:  How are we to relate to God?

The second half of Jesus response:  “Give to God what belongs to God.”  This is comprehensive statement and includes all areas of life.  There is one crucial question for us to reflect upon that is not asked in the Gospel conversation.  If Caesar’s image is on the coin, where do we find God’s image?  For we are to give to God that which bears the image of God.

We will find God’s image imprinted on all of creation, on each human being and each human work.  We are made in the image and likeness of God.

It is people, ourselves, who are in the image and likeness of God.  We belong to God.  When God is truly the center of our lives, there is no problem with giving others their due.  Conversely, giving others their due doesn’t necessarily compromise God as the center of our lives.

When we forget that we are made in God’s image, we can easily attach ourselves to Caesars of our lives – the stock market, your career, or the New York Yankees. We may want to grasp Caesar’s false coins as our security and our destiny.  But we need to ask ourselves, can anything but God be our security and our destiny?  The old adage holds true that nobody laments on their deathbeds that they didn’t make more money or spend more time at work.  Submitting only to Caesar and the pursuit of wealth will not satisfy us. 

Ultimately we belong to God and the service and love of God’s people is the source of meaning and happiness in our lives.   Moreover, all of God’s creation bears the image of God.   Our care for our environment, our stewardship of the earth is giving back to God what belongs to God.

Even though none of us enjoy paying taxes, in the big picture, giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s is not the demanding component of today’s Gospel.   Where we are challenged is:  Giving to God what is God’s.

We give back to God out of gratitude.   Our best response to the abundance of God’s is gratitude – to live with an attitude of gratitude.

We give back to God because we recognize that everything we have belongs to God in the first place.

As we celebrate our stewardship commitment Sunday this weekend, may we embrace a spirituality of stewardship.   A spirituality of stewardship is as all-embracing as the words of Jesus:  We are to give back to God what belongs to God. We are the stewards of the abundance of God’s love in our lives. 

Stewardship is recognizing that we are made in God’s image.  We belong to God.  All is a gift of God.  We are to always grateful for the blessings of our life, and we are to share our giftedness with one another.  In other words, give to God what belongs to God.

This Sunday we are asking you to reflect on our stewardship of time and talent.  In our stewardship of time, we invite Christ into our life.  We live a Christ-centered life.  We make time for prayer in the course of the day.  In the stewardship of time, we reflect on what form of prayer helps you to encounter the Lord in your life.  The action plan, what we write on our stewardship commitment card is our commitment to make time for prayer each day.  It doesn’t matter how long your commitment to prayer is each day; what does matter is that you live your life with an awareness of God’s unending love for you in prayer.

The stewardship of talents is your willingness to share your God-given talents and abilities.  The gifts we have been given, we are given to share.

We simply ask you to place your stewardship commitment card in the collection basket today.  If you did not bring your card today,  not to worry.  There are extras in the pew for you to fill out.  Even if not fully completed, filling out this signed commitment card and placing it in the collection basket is a beautiful first step in our journey of discipleship of the Lord Jesus.

Have a blessed day

Our worthiness doesn't matter to God. All that counts is our willingness to receive what we don't deserve.

In today’s gospel parable, the kingdom of God is compared to a wedding feast.

Today’s Gospel contains two of the parables of Jesus:  the parable of the wedding feast and the parable of the man without an appropriate wedding garment.

We like the first parable better.  In the first parable, the wedding banquet has been  prepared but those invited found excuses not to come. What began as a select guest list for this marriage  celebration becomes an indiscriminate one.  The invited guests had other priorities.  Those who ae not aware of their spiritual poverty, who do not hunger and thirst for a new world will never enter the Kingdom of God. Then the king gave a second set of instructions to:  “Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.”  The banquet message is one of hospitality and the universality of the reign of God.  All are welcome.

It is an invitation to keep the doors open to all in our communities.  The poor, the marginalized, those who feel rejected in the Church must find a place where they feel accepted, understood and valued.  No one is excluded from the Table of the Lord.

At each Eucharist we pray, “Lord I am not worthy.”  Our worthiness doesn’t matter to God.  All that counts is our willingness to receive what we don’t deserve.  It’s a surprising offer nobody should refuse.

The curtain could fall on this sweet and charming scene.  Instead, there is a second parable that seems to ruin everything.

The second parable seems a little more severe and harsh.  The king noticed a man who was not wearing a wedding robe:  “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?”  Then the king said to the attendants:  “Bind him hand and feet, and throw into the outer darkness.”  We squirm a bit when accountability is asked of us.

The gospel’s primary message as to an appropriate wedding garment refers to our hearts.  Conversion is not just an intellectual exercise, but a journey of the heart. The invited guests are invited not just to observe, but to participate.

A way of looking at the wedding garment is our commitment to stewardship – our willingness to make choices to make the gospel come alive in our family life and in our parish community.

Another way of looking at the wedding garment is to compare it to our baptismal  garment.  It is not enough to receive the sacrament of baptism but one must take responsibility for living out our baptismal commitments.

Yes, absolutely everyone is invited to the Table of the Lord.  But the spiritual life calls us to make a decision of stewardship in our discipleship of the Lord Jesus.  The one hour here at Church on Sunday morning is profoundly important in giving thanks to the Lord our God, but it is just the beginning of the spiritual journey.  The spirituality of stewardship invites us to gt our head around the notion that one hour a week is just the beginning of the path of discipleship.

Next weekend is Stewardship Commitment Sunday – stewardship of time and talent.  You received a parish mailing with a stewardship commitment of time and talent and are asked to place this commitment card in the collection basket Sunday.

What do we mean by a stewardship of time?  The simplest explanation is to take the time to invite Christ into your life?  This happens as we make time for prayer in the course of the day.  What form of prayer helps you to encounter the Lord in your life?  The Lord’s prayer, the rosary, Eucharistic adoration, quiet time in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, quiet in the leisure of your own home or perhaps simply living with an attitude of gratitude.   Most of all,  the celebration of the sacraments.  This celebration of the Eucharist Sunday after Sunday is the most important stewardship of time for us as Catholic Christians.

The stewardship of talents is your willingness to share your God-given talents and abilities.  All is a gift of God.  The gifts we have been given, we are given to share.

On the stewardship commitment cards, there are seven areas of ministry in the life of the parish with a leadership team associated with each area of ministry.  What would it take for you to commit to some area of ministry in our parish life?  What would it take to give back to the Lord a portion of the giftedness that has been given to you?

Filling out this commitment and placing in the collection basket next Sundays would be your way of giving it to the Lord a portion of the blessings that have been given to you?

Have a blessed day.

We don't own anything...Everything ultimately belongs to God.

Today's Scripture readings use the imagery of a vineyard to describe God’s love for us.  The prophet Isaiah in the first Scripture reading uses a love ballad to describe his friend’s song concerning his vineyard.  Then Isaiah says the house of Israel is God’s vineyard.

Gospel parable the vineyard is the reign of God that is to be found within us.  The vineyard of the Lord is to be found in our own hearts.  God goes to great lengths to prepare wondrous blessings for the vineyard.  We are nurtured by God’s Word, fed at God’s table, helped by the commandment of love.  All we need do is to let God tend us and bring us to produce good fruit.  We are invited in this celebration of the Eucharist to invite Christ into the vineyard of our own heart and to open our hearts and our minds to his loving presence. 

Further, in this mystery of the Eucharistic celebration of inviting Christ into the vineyard of our hearts, the grace of Christ’s presence in the vineyard leads us to celebrate that we are made to love.  We become our best selves when we open ourselves to giving and receiving the love of others.   The vineyard of the Lord is to be found within us but this vineyard is connected to our brothers and sisters with Christ as our cornerstone.  This is the mystery of the Church of Jesus.  We are better together.  The whole Church is the vineyard of the Lord.

What can go wrong with this beautiful imagery of all of us together being the vineyard of the Lord?  From the Gospel parable, the tenants to whom the vineyard is entrusted got greedy and wanted everything for themselves.  Plain and simple, there is rebellion in the vineyard. 

There is rebellion in the vineyard of our own hearts when we get greedy and want everything for ourselves and are unwilling to share.  In the end, the greed of the tenants becomes their undoing for the king will have no part with them.

There is also rebellion in the vineyard of the Lord in our world as well.  Most recently, the ruthlessness and complete disregard for the dignity of life demonstrated by Stephen Paddock in his murderous rampage in Las Vegas.  We see rebellion when one nation is at war with another nation. 

Would that we would have the spiritual sightedness to believe that everything is on loan to us from God.  We are temporay tenants.  We don’t own anything, even though sometimes we act as if we own it all.  Everything ultimately belongs to God.

We must also look within and ask whether we at times are the tenant farmers who abuse the giftedness we have been given?  What is the produce that comes from the vineyard of your own heart, and do we give it back gratefully to God our landowner?  

Our lives are a vineyard that God entrusts to us.  Each of our lives, each of our vineyards, is richly blessed,  The voice of God’s Son calls out to us to share our talents, our riches, our giftedness with those around us and with those who have less.  May we be conscious that like the tenant farmers in the Gospel, we are tempted to be greedy and provide only for ourselves.  When we excuse ourselves from generous sharing and love of others, when we become more interested in security rather than a Gospel commitment to sharing, we fail to respond to the call of God In our lives.  The vineyard of our own heart is ripe for the harvest, and God calls out to each one of us:  “Come, share what you have and discover that the real treasure is not what you possess but in what you are willing to give away.”

Lord, we thank you for the privilege of being tenants of your vineyard.  We are called to be good stewards of all of God’s creation.  In his encyclical ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME, Pope Francis calls us to be good stewards of planet earth having much reverence and care and stewardship of the earthly resources that are given to us.

Bishop Matano is calling to share what we have with those in need throughout our diocese by supporting the CMA.

Our parish is embarking upon a new inititiative CHRISTLIFE in inviting to have a deeper relationship with Jesus.

Being tenants of the vineyard of the Lord, being good stewards of the giftedness that God has entrusted to us is a privilege, not a burden. My ministry as a priest and your ministry in your family and your work life and your ministry within the life of our parish is, please God, a privilege and not just an obligation.

What is the take home message of today’s Scriptures?  We are tenants of this earth,  stewards of what has been entrusted to our care.  We are stewards of the  church, entrusted with the awesome task of ministering to the needs of a broken and hurting world.

And, as the tenants of God’s earthly vineyard, we gather as the faith community of St Joseph’s Sunday after Sunday to celebrate Jesus’ victory over death, and to offer back to the owner of the vineyard a portion of what the land has yielded to us.

We offer up the sweat and the tears and the laughter of our own lives, and as we do that,  we receive back from God the body and blood of His Son who was crucified that we might be redeemed,  You  know what?    That’s a pretty good deal for us.  We are the recipients of God’s unending love for us.

Have a blessed day.

Mark Twain: When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. Bur when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

If you remember last week’s Gospel parable, it was rather shocking and seemingly unjust.  The landowner sent workers to work in his vineyard at different hours of the day.  The master then paid the workers who worked one hour the same pay as those who worked in the heat of the day all eight hours.  It wasn’t fair.  It is difficult, is it not, to give up the religion of merits and believe in the gratuitous love of God.

Today’s Gospel parable is a conversion story.  A man had two sons.  He came to the first and said: ‘Son out and work in the vineyard today.  He said in reply, ‘I will not go,’ but afterwards changed his mind and went.  Saying yes to God means giving one’s own thoughts and accepting His.  The Lord does not appreciate the powerful who sit on thrones but lowers himself to raise up the lowly.  He does not reward the righteous for their merits but makes himself companion of the weak and introduces the tax collectors and prostitutes first in the kingdom.  Only those who recognize themselves as last, sinners and in need of his help will experience the joy of being saved.

Where do we find ourselves in this Gospel parable?  The scribes and the Pharisees were ones who said yes to the kingdom of God as the religious elite.  Their Achilles’ heel was their illusion of being saved by their pious religious practices, and yet Jesus in this parable is being very direct and confronting with the religious leaders of his day by saying the tax collectors and prostitutes were going to enter the kingdom of God first.  The kingdom of God welcomes unexpected folks.

This parable challenges us as well:  what effect have our prayers and religious practices have had on our daily life?  Do they put an end to hatred, wars, and abuses?  While continuing to profess ourselves Christians, do we easily resign ourselves to a life of compromise?  Don’t we live with injustice, inequality and discrimination?

In today’s Gospel parable, the father told his two sons to work in the vineyard today.  As you pray over this gospel, into what vineyard is the Lord sending you today -- the vineyard of your family, of your neighborhood, of your parish, of saying yes to the call of stewardship in our parish faith formation programs, the vineyard of supporting the CMA?  Into what vineyard is the Lord sending you today?

We know from the second chapter of Mark’s gospel that Jesus came not to call the just but sinners.  This leaves with confusing premise.  Does this mean that only sinners are Christians? 

What are today’s versions of saying no to the will of God in our lives?  I can’t bother with religion. I’m too busy getting ahead in life.  I’m too busy having fun.  The Church has too many defects.  My sinfulness is saying no God in my life.  Perhaps we have all lived through the experience of receiving repeated messages that we should change our lives.  The messages come from different quarters --- a member of our family, a friend, our own bodies, and the failure of someone close to us.

Yes, we are all sinners. This is the truth of our lives.  Pope Francis calls us to this awareness in his daily homilies.   We are all like the son who initially said no to God’s plan in our life.  The parable is a conversion story.  Our conversion story is a more convinced “yes” passes through no. What does that mean?  That was the conversion of the son who initially said no to his father but later changed his mind and went to work in the vineyard. May we have the spiritual sightedness to see that the first to apologize is the bravest.  The first to forgive is the strongest.   And the first to forget is the happiest.

I have been struck by the words of Mark Twain who once said:  When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.  But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Just as Mark Twain had a conversion experience about the wisdom of his dad, so too we have a conversion experience about the meaning of our discipleship of the Lord Jesus.  Yes we are called to a life of stewardship.  Our actions make a difference in building the kingdom of God here on earth.  Yet, our salvation is not based on our merits but we are the recipients of the gratuitous love of God much more than we deserve.  Our best response to God’s love is gratitude.  And so we gather at Mass to give thanks to the Lord our God.

In the second Scripture reading, Paul begins his beautiful hymn to Christ by encouraging the Philippians to have the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose as did Jesus.  “Have in you the attitude that was also in Christ Jesus.  Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.  Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; he humbled himself, becoming obedient even to the point of death, even death on a cross?”

What does it mean for you to have the same attitude as Jesus Christ?  Are you in touch with your own conversion story?  God calls us who are sinners, who have said no to God’s call in our sinfulness but yet we somehow open ourselves to receive the merciful love of Jesus.  Yes, our conversion story is a more convinced yes passes through no.  We always stand in need of the generosity and forgiveness of God.  More than that, we need to experience conversion many times, and we are called each and every day to say yes to the plan of God in life.    

As we celebrate our Stewardship Sunday day in the stewardship of faith formation, I would suggest that how we use and share the blessings we have been given is a significant component of our conversion story.  Like the sons in the Gospel, are we saying yes or no to God’s way in our life?  Our whole parish needs to be invested in the faith formation of our youth from one generation to the next.  It can never be solely a staff responsibility. It is a parish responsibility.  Helping out a bit in faith formation and/or youth ministry is a must beautiful way of experiencing the conversion the Lord calls us to.   We are to share the blessings the Lord has abundantly given to us by the significant people of our lives who have touched us in our faith journey.

Have a blessed day.