"I have decided to stick with love; hate is too great a burden to bear."

Pentecost  A   2020

Come Holy Spirit.  Fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.

Pentecost arrived for the disciples after fifty days of uncertainty.  True, Jesus had risen.  Overjoyed, they had seen him, listened to his words and even shared a meal with him.  Yet they had not overcome their doubts and fears.  They still met behind locked doors.

On the Day of Pentecost those locked doors were thrown open; the fear in the disciples was replaced with a Spirit-filled courage and enthusiasm.  They were now fearless proclaimers of the Word of God.

What had changed for the disciples?  They received the Holy Spirit.

The great truth of Pentecost – for the first disciples and for us as well – is that the Holy Spirit has the power to enlarge and expand the human heart if we allow the Spirit of Jesus to grow and enliven us from within.

In today’s first Scripture reading, we hear how the Holy Spirit was given to the followers of Jesus.   Listen again: “When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together.  And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were.  Then there appeared to them tongues of fire, which parted and came to rest on each of them.  And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim.”

For the first disciples, the Holy Spirit did not make things easier for them, he didn’t work spectacular miracles, he didn’t take away their difficulties and their opponents.  Rather, the Spirit brought into the lives of the disciples a harmony, that had been lacking, his own harmony, for he is harmony.

The great meaning of Pentecost is that it was time for God to be born again not in one body that was Jesus, but this time in a body of believers who would receive the breath of life from their Lord and pass it to others.

We see how the growth of the Church took place with the influence of the Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles.  The Book of Acts is the story of the incredible growth of the first Christian communities.  The Acts of the Apostles is kind of like a Gospel of the Holy Spirit.  In the first four books of the New Testament we learn the Good news of what God did through Jesus Christ in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  In the Book of Acts of the Apostles, we learn the Good News of what God did through the Holy Spirit.

The first and foremost attribute of the servant church is its daring openness to the Spirit.  It is our prayer that we the Church make room for the release of the Spirit in the life of the community and the courage to act when it does.  We are not to fall back into being the safe and self-absorbed church, but rather a place of miraculous hope and extravagant hospitality.

God chose a young virgin named Mary to bear God’s Son, and Jesus chose a bunch of Galilean fishermen to share in His ministry.   God chooses you and me to hear and witness to His message of hope and promise and love in this place and in our world this day.

We seek to experience Pentecost as the feast of locked doors.  Where are the locked doors in our lives?    For us, we are under extraordinary precaution to wear masks, to socially distance from one another.  We are potential threats to each other’s health.

But for me and for all of us, it is not a time to abandon trust in Jesus as the Lord and Savior of our lives.  It is not a time to abandon our commitment to be a Church of brothers and sisters who stand for one another.  It is not a time for us not to be fearless proclaimers of the Gospel.  But yes, out of love of love for one another, we need to socially distance, wear masks and respect each other’s health.   We so much want to go forth to evangelize and serve but recently serving the greater good has meant doing nothing.  This seems to go against our Gospel DNA.

So, where does that leave us?  We are led to prayer:  Come Holy Spirit.  Fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. 

Now more than ever, we invoke the Holy Spirit to wipe away the darkness of anxiety allowing us to be guided by the light of Christ and to trust in God’s promise of new life.

Our Gospel today takes place on Easter evening.  On that first evening they were gathered in a house with the doors locked, because they were afraid – afraid of being killed, just as Jesus had been killed three days before.  But Jesus was among them and He said: “Peace be with you.”  To this scared group of former followers, the Risen Christ begins by bringing the peace of God.

  Filled with inner peace  that only God can give, our hearts are like a deep sea, which remains peaceful, even when its surface is swept by waves.

The Holy Spirit does not bring only harmony within us but also among us.  He makes us Church, building different parts into one harmonious edifice.  We need the Spirit of unity to regenerate us as Church, as God’s People, and as a human family.

There is always a temptation to build “nests,” to cling to our little group, to the things and the people we like, to resist all contamination.  The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, brings together those who were distant, unites those far off, brings home those who were scattered.

For us the faith communities of St Joseph’s and Holy Spirit, as we reflect on how we are called to collaborate and be for one another, our locked door may be our fear of losing a bit of who we are.   And  we all need to acknowledge all that keeps us from trusting in the grace and the blessings of spirit-filled collaboration.

On this day of Pentecost, as we celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit of God in our lives, can we trust in each other and in the grace of God that St. Joseph’s and Holy Spirit can be sister parishes that love and serve and support one another?

As the first disciples on the Day of Pentecost were transformed from fearful disciples who wanted to live behind locked doors to become fearless proclaimers of the Word of God, can we the faith communities of Holy Spirit and St. Joseph’s on this Day of Pentecost welcome the opportunity of having a sister parish that will help us live according to our better angels?

As we are well aware during these last few days, across the country protesters took to the streets to express anger over the death of George Floyd, a black man after a Minneapolis police officer kept his knee pressed to his neck for more than eight minutes.  Peaceful protests have at times turned to violence.  Racial tensions have exploded with the claim that promises of freedom and justice have not been met.

May we invoke the wisdom and prayer of Martin Luther King Jr who said:  “ I have decided to stick with love.  Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

On this day of Pentecost, may we pray for healing and unity for our Church and our nation as we now come to the Table of the Lord in spiritual communion.  May we all commit ourselves to using our God-given giftedness in the service of one another.  To quote Martin Luther King again:  Life’s most urgent question is:  What are you doing for others?”

Have a Blessed Day.

What is the work (mission) God has given you to do today? How are you to make the Lord's name known?

Seventh Sunday of Easter A  2020

In today’s Gospel, we are entering upon very holy ground.  Throughout the Gospel of John, we see the compassionate heart of Jesus as He brings healing to sick people and food to the hungry.    In the Johannine Gospel, we find the love of God demonstrated and explained as nowhere else.  Then in John’s 17^th chapter, we are allowed to glimpse into Jesus’ very soul.

Perhaps we never get any closer to someone else than when we know about their prayer life.  As we eavesdrop on the prayer of Jesus in today’s Gospel, we are indeed entering holy ground.

The setting for this prayer of Jesus is the upper room on the eve of Jesus’s passion and death.  Jesus had just celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples and had washed their feet to give them an example of how they were to continue the mission of Jesus in the life of the Church.

Jesus’s impending death is not a disruption of God’s plan but part of God’s mysterious providence.  Jesus had accomplished His work, revealing the love of the Father for us.  Now it is the time to teach the meaning of that love by His willingness to lay down even His own life.  His dying is his greatest act of giving.

The Lord prayed for his disciples gathered around Him.  At the same time, he looked ahead to the community of disciples of all centuries.  In His prayer for disciples of all time, he saw us too, and he prayed for us.  He prayed that we be consecrated in truth.

“Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come.  Give glorify to your Son, so that your Son may glorify you…I have glorified you on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do…I have made your name known to those you have given me…They were yours and you gave them to me…Consecrate them in truth…I have made your name known to them so that the love with which you loved may be in them, and so that I may be in them.”

The prayer of Jesus to his heavenly Father was a prayer of gratitude that Jesus had finished the work that the Father had given Him to do.  He had made the Lord’s name known to His followers.

Jesus then prayed for us His disciples.  Jesus prayed that we would let God love us and live in us.  To do that, we need, first of all, to trust that God truly does love us.  As John says, we need to know and to believe in the love God has for us.  When we let the reality of God’s love for us sink deeply into who we are and what we believe, 

something dramatic happens.  We begin to love one another.  We become witnesses to God’s love by letting everyone else see what that love looks like when it is alive in a person’s life.   By being loved so deeply, we become lovers.  We become witnesses to the God whose love brings eternal life -- witnesses to the resurrection.

Jesus finished the work the Father had given Him to do.  What about us?  Do I have a sense of the work God has given me to do?  In other words, what is the purpose of my life.  As a parent, as a sibling, as a leader, as a parishioner, as a member of the community of the baptized, what is the work that God has given you to do.  We are very grounded in discipleship if we try to make the prayer of Jesus our own prayer.  This very evening, I invite you to reflect on the day and with a prayer of gratitude may we say in prayer that we have finished the work God has given us to do for this day.  If there is room for improvement, we ask for the Holy Spirit to be with us tomorrow.

Of course, it would be naïve to think that this is a simple process.  The first followers of Jesus knew all about the resistance to the extraordinary good news about God’s love that Jesus had brought to them.  They knew about the betrayal of Judas, about their own abandonment of Jesus, and about Jesus’ death on Calvary.  God created the world and everything in it good.  But in ways that are hard to understand, there is sometimes abandonment and betrayal of this goodness.  There is hostility and resistance in our world to the message of God’s love for us –  in the political warfare that takes place in the halls of our Congress, in the Church itself there can be hypocrisy and disillusionment, and in our personal and family relationships there can be too much brokenness.  We know all too well the demons we have within ourselves that keep us from witnessing to the forgiving love of God in all circumstances of life.

Jesus in His prayer to his heavenly Father prayed for us with the words:  This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.

What is so important for us as we seek eternal life with God is that eternal life is not just for the future:  it a gift partly given now in our faith.  To be in touch with Jesus is to be in touch with a rich and full eternal life.  Something is given which will last forever – the mysterious life of God.  We touch into that life in prayer.  We are enlightened by Jesus, the light of the world.

Being a witness to the resurrection is not just telling people what they can hope for after death.  Yes, such hope is so very important.   God will raise us from death to live with God forever. God’s love is stronger than death.   But being a witness to the resurrection begins in the here and the now.  Being a witness to the resurrection means letting people see in our lives what it looks like when we live in the God who is love.  It means making visible what happens when the God who is love lives in us.

John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus prayed for His followers.  He prays that His Father consecrate them in truth.  The truth he refers to is the truth of God’s love.  To be consecrated in the truth means being consecrated or made holy in God’s love.    God’s love is like the air we breathe – all around us, giving us life, sustaining us.    When we do this, we may experience some of the resistance and hostility that Jesus experienced, but Jesus has promised that God’s Spirit will be with us and will never abandon us.  This will enable us to be witnesses to God’s love even in a sometimes-hostile world.  Let’s trust in that love as we come to the Table of the Lord in spiritual communion.

Have a Blessed Day.

All of us have a vocational story to discern.

Fourth Sunday of Easter A   2020

The fourth Sunday of the Easter Season is always Good Shepherd Sunday.  This is how Jesus identifies himself: “I am the Good Shepherd.”   As the Good Shepherd, Jesus comes to his sheep and is recognized by them.  The sheep recognize His voice as He calls them by name and they follow Him.

We seek to recognize the voice of Jesus as our Good Shepherd and to follow him.   Hearing and trusting and recognizing the voice of Jesus in our lives is our path of discipleship.  In our Catholic tradition, our vocation is our response to the call of God in our lives.  The root meeting of the word “vocation” goes back to the Latin word vocare which mean to call.  Responding to God’s call is our vocation.   This vocation we all have is never a solitary vocation; in some God-given way, we share in the mission of Jesus in leading others to become more aware of God’s love for them.

Good Shepherd Sunday is also the World Day of Prayer for vocations. In discerning one’s vocation as a disciple, my first message is that all of us have a vocational story to discern.  While I would like to consider how you discern God’s call in your life from the vantage point of three lenses, my hope is that you claim in one or more of these lenses your own vocational journey.

The first lens perhaps is the more familiar one when we pray for vocations.  We pray that young men will respond to the call of God in the vocation of an ordained priest.

I had the great privilege of serving in our diocese for ten years as the Director of Seminarians and for five years before that as the spiritual director and the rector of Becket Hall – our diocesan discernment house for candidates to the ordained priesthood.  It is very humbling to mentor young men in discerning whether God is calling them to serve in the Church as ordained priests.  This has been a treasured part of my ministry for many years.

May we as a faith community of Holy Spirit and St Joseph’s mentor, foster, pray, and encourage young men from our parishes to serve the Church as ordained priests.  This would be such a great blessing for our parish communities.  While I said young men, I should correct that.  God can call men of any age to consider the vocation to the ordained priest.  Praying for vocation needs to a consistent part of our prayer.

I also would invite us to look at this World Day of Prayer for vocations with a wider lens.  We are to pray that each and every one of us claim the vocation, the call we receive from God.  In our Baptism, God calls each of us to witness to His love in this world.  There are as many vocations in this parish as there are baptized parishioners.

The second vocational lens in ministry within the Church.  Our parish community is blessed with permanent deacons, vowed religious women, and lay ecclesial ministers.  These are valued and faith-filled ministers of the Gospel that breathe a Spirit-filled vibrancy to our parish ministries.  Following the example of these men and women, I would ask that you pray over God’s call in your life:  Is God calling you to make this kind of commitment in the service of the Church?  As we are grateful for our permanent deacons, our vowed religious men and women, and our lay ecclesial ministers, may they inspire others to serve in the ministry of the Church for generations to come.

In our parish life, we are grateful for parishioners who have responded to the call of God to be catechists, to be involved in youth ministry, to engage in liturgical ministry, music ministry, pastoral care, social outreach, and parish governance on our parish council, our finance council, and our stewardship council.  We are grateful for the young men and women who will soon celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation and then witness to their faith by the way they live their lives.

The same Eternal Word that became flesh in Jesus longs to become flesh in our lives—in our home, workplace, parish, global marketplace.  Indeed, there is no shortage of need for compassionate people who continue Jesus’ mission.

On this World Day of Prayer for Vocations, we pray that the church may be provided with the leaders needed to its work of spreading the Gospel.   

Our third vocational lens is probably what we are now doing -- be it as spouses, parents, teachers, doctors, civil servants, running a business, salespersons… or whatever.

On this World Day of Prayer for Vocations, each one of us should be asking ourselves today:

·        Is what I am spending my energies on every day my real vocation?

·        Is this what God wants me to be doing with my life?

·        How is what I am doing giving witness to my Christian faith?

·        What contribution am I offering to making this world a better place for people to live in?

·        To what extent am I a spreader of truth, of love, of justice, of freedom, of tolerance and acceptance…?

·         Is God calling me to greater service of my Church and my community?  Am I giving something through my life or am I just using society (and even the Church) to get what I want?

God is calling every single one of us to work for the Gospel.  For a small number it may be as a priest or religious – and that call can come at any time in one’s life. I asked you to pray for vocations to the ordained priesthood, but may your first prayer today be for the grace to discern your own vocational call. There are hundreds of other ways of serving the Church and helping to build up the Christian community.  Where is God calling me to make my own unique contribution based on the particular talents God has given me?

If every single one us were to answer that question sincerely and to act upon it, I am confident that our Church would have all the leadership it needs.  There would be a new Pentecost, a spiritual awakening that would be part of the life of the Church in the aftermath of Covid-19.  What do you think?

Have a Blessed Day.